Headline: New York Times, 8/12/2024
Some Trump fans certainly understand that they constitute a numerical minority in this country. But others are cloistered enough to believe Trump when he insists that he is overwhelmingly beloved, as he did at his Mar-a-Lago news conference last week, when he claimed that the MAGA movement encompasses 75 percent of Americans. I doubt many people registered this lie, jammed as it was amid so many others. But some of his die-hard fans heard it and took heart. “You know if he's saying that, he has the data to back it up,” said a post from a popular account on Truth Social. “Meaning this election is gonna be too big to rig.”
As that post suggests, the conviction that Trump is uniquely popular makes it easier to justify the falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen. It also validates the belief that Trump will lose in November only if it’s stolen again. The ebullient throngs at Harris’s events — as well as her climbing poll numbers — threaten the worldview that sustains election denialism, and so they must be dismissed. For many MAGA adherents on social media, it's an article of faith that enthusiasm for Harris has been manufactured as part of a psyop against Trump. Whether or not Trump buys into this self-soothing fantasy, he is encouraging his followers to get swept up in it.
Apr-Jun 2024
Jan-Mar 2024
No comments:
Post a Comment