Former Republicans can't stop laughing at Trump supporters waking up to reality

President Donald Trump has so far not improved Americans’ economic quality of life nor prevailed in his war against Iran — and a former Republican says he cannot stop laughing at the 39 percent of America that still supports him.

“There is a particular pleasure, once rare and rich, now increasingly common, in watching people who spent a decade telling you that Donald Trump’s 47-dimensional string theory quantum chess game in politics and diplomacy was wildly beyond the understanding of the libtard c--- mainstream media shills,” wrote The Lincoln Project's Rick Wilson on Thursday for his Substack column Against All Enemies. The Lincoln Project is a coalition of Republicans who oppose Trump’s administration. “For 11 endless years, the central tenet of their faith was that Trump always wins, never mind the record, the reality, or the endless collisions with the hideous realities of his flaming incompetence, intellectual vacuity, and absolute ignorance of the world.”

Wilson then argued that, because Trump is a narcissist, no amount of praise has ever been enough for him. Yet he has also failed to deliver on his key economic and foreign policy goals, which places his supporters in the so-called MAGA movement in an increasingly tough spot.

“The Iran deal seems to have broken that spell across MAGA, and they’re very, very, very angry with … of all people … Donald Trump,” Wilson explained. “This week the United States and Iran initiated the now-infamous memorandum of understanding to end the war Donald Trump started in February, the one branded ‘Operation Epic Fury’ by a man with no sense of irony whatsoever. (One friend who spent a lot of time executing big operations in the last couple wars said it should have been called ‘Operation Erectile Flaccidity.’)”

He concluded, “It was, and will remain throughout history, an absolute capitulation on the part of the United States. Setting aside the utter strategic calamity of this war and this deal for the United States, the MAGA wailing and lamentations over this utter trainwreck are hilarious.”

Speaking with the conservative website The Bulwark in March, former MAGA influencer Ashley St. Clair — perhaps best known for having a child with Trump supporter and world’s richest man Elon Musk — described her Trump era as being “in a cult.”

"It is a cult,” St. Clair declared. “And what you have to understand is that in any abusive relationship, your access to other people is cut off. You're isolated. Your access to information is cut off. Your access to people who might have rational perspectives on what you're involved in — that's cut off too.”

She continued, “These people are told it's all fake news. The only things you can trust are Twitter and Truth Social. And for better or worse, they actually believe that. They believe that established outlets are lying to them, that nothing those outlets publish can be true."

Perhaps the most notable belief in the Trump cult ecosystem is the claim that he actually won the 2020 presidential election. Trump has a long history of claiming that if he does not get what he wants, he was cheated out of it: He did this when his reality TV show “The Apprentice” was not nominated for any Emmys, after Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) defeated him in the 2016 Iowa Republican caucuses, throughout the 2016 presidential election when it seemed like he would lose to Democrat Hillary Clinton, after the 2016 contest when he won the electoral vote but lost the popular vote and in advance of his 2020 face-off with then-former Vice President Joe Biden.

Less than a week before Election Day 2020, former Yale University professor and psychiatrist Dr. Bandy X. Lee warned this journalist for Salon that a narcissist like Trump would not be able to psychologically cope with being defeated.

“When there is an all-encompassing loss, such as the loss of an election, it can trigger a rampage of destruction and reign of terror in revenge against an entire nation that has failed him,” Lee explained. “It is far easier for the pathological narcissist to consider destroying oneself and the world, especially its ‘laughing eyes,’ than to retreat into becoming a ‘loser’ and a ‘sucker’ — which to someone suffering from this condition will feel like psychic death.”

Ronald Collins, a former law professor at George Washington Law School and currently the editor of the weekly online blog First Amendment News, compared Trump’s ability to create a cult-like following among his supporters to a different despot.

"Given Donald Trump’s unhinged temperament and his blistering and often unfounded attacks on any who are not subservient to his views, I do sense a dangerous [Soviet dictator Joseph] Stalin-like streak in the man," Collins told Salon at the time.

In response to scholarly criticism of Trump as authoritarian and creating a cult, Trump press secretary Karoline Leavitt accused this journalist of being insensitive to a recent assassination attempt against the then-Republican nominee.

"It's been less [than] 72 hours since the second assassination attempt on President Trump's life and the media is already back to comparing President Trump to Hitler,” Leavitt told this journalist. “It's disgusting. This is why Americans have zero trust in the liberal mainstream media."