Donald Trump's "hall of mirrors" rewired his most fervent supporters' brains, and a former White House official fears they're already looking for someone else to carry out their worst impulses.
The Republican base has been fed a steady diet of lies and conspiracy theories by Trump, his GOP allies and right-wing media, which has triggered an intense emotional reaction that psychologist Daniel Goleman calls an "amygdala hijack," but there are signs the MAGA world needs an even stronger dose to feed their addiction to rage and resentment, wrote conservative Peter Wehner for The Atlantic.
Trump rewired his supporters’ brains — and now they’re looking for someone even worseyoutu.be
"To better understand what's happening in the GOP, think of a person with addiction who over time develops a tolerance; as a result, they need more potent and more frequent doses of the drug to get their desired high," wrote Wehner, who served in three Republican administrations. "And sometimes even that isn't enough. They might turn to a more potent drug, which offers a more intense experience and a longer-lasting high, but at the price of considerably more danger."
Trump smashed political norms in the six years since riding down his golden escalator, but Wehner sees signs that he's becoming "something of an establishment figure" after his own supporters booed his suggestion that they get vaccinated, and right-wing conspiracy monger Alex Jones called him a "dumbass" afterward on his radio program.
"These incidents are just a few of the straws in the turbulent wind, signs that something ominous is happening to the Republican Party," Wehner wrote. "The GOP base may be identifying less and less with Trump personally — that was inevitable after he left the presidency — but it is not identifying any less with the conspiracist and antidemocratic impulses that defined him over the past five years."That leaves the door open to even more outrageous "cranks and kooks," and the right-wing MAGA movement is hungry for even more potent stuff.
"When you cross into territory devoid of moral axioms or epistemic standards ... things can get very ugly, very quickly," Wehner wrote. "Even Trump — whose derangement now includes turning a violent Capitol Hill rioter who was shot and killed by a police officer into a martyr, falsely accusing the police officer of murder, and issuing yet another barely concealed incitement to violence — can begin to look like a mainstream figure within the party. At some point in the future, the same may be said of Marjorie Taylor Greene."
