'Terror into votes': Expert examines Trump and MAGAworld’s 'deep investment in promoting fear'

07 May 2024

Last month, Republican nominee Donald Trump told a Pennsylvania rally crown that if President Joe Biden wins the November election, "our country is going to be destroyed."

This declaration was one of many the ex-president has made to successfully stoke fear among his faithful MAGA supporters.

In a Tuesday, May 7 op-ed published by The Atlantic, staff writer Peter Wehner emphasizes the fact that "Trump and his supporters have a deep investment in promoting fear," submitting that, for many of the former president's fans, "fear is not so much the cause of their support for the former president as a justification for it."

"They use fear to rationalize their backing for Trump," he continues. "They have a burning need to promote catastrophism, even if it requires cognitive distortion, spreading falsehoods, and peddling conspiracy theories."

Wehner notes that, "Biden has been president for nearly three and a half years, and America has hardly entered a new Dark Age. In some important respects, in fact, the nation, based on empirical evidence, is doing better during the Biden years than it did during the Trump years."

The Atlantic writer tackles the question of why the "politics of fear" has become the norm among the MAGA hopefuls supporters. "What’s driving their ongoing, deepening fealty to Trump?" he asks.

Wehner writes:

Human beings have a natural tendency to organize around tribal affiliations. Some are drawn to what the Danish political scientist Michael Bang Petersen calls the 'need for chaos,' and wish to 'burn down' the entire political order in the hopes of gaining status in the process. (My colleague Derek Thompson wrote about Petersen and his work earlier this year.) And social scientists such as Jonathan Haidt point out that mutual outrage bonds people together. Sharing anger can be very pleasurable, and the internet makes doing this orders of magnitude easier.

For several decades now, the Republican base has been unusually susceptible to these predispositions. Grievances had been building, with Republicans feeling as though they were being dishonored and disrespected by elite culture. Those feelings were stoked by figures such as Newt Gingrich and Pat Buchanan, who decivilized politics and turned it into a blood sport. And then came Trump, the most skilled and successful demagogue in American history.

He adds the fact that "it’s nearly inconceivable to imagine that if any other former president did what Trump has done, Republicans would maintain their devotion to him." Former President "Richard Nixon committed only a fraction of Trump’s misdeeds," Wehner notes, "and the GOP broke with him over the revelation of the 'smoking gun' tapes. It was not his liberal critics, but the collapse of support within the Republican Party, that persuaded Nixon to resign."

Wehner emphasizes, "Other politicians have been fearmongers, but none has been as relentless and effective as Trump. He has an unparalleled ability to promote feelings of terror among his base, with the goal of translating that terror into votes."

Wehner's full op-ed is available at this link (subscription required).

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