Opinion | Trump Is an Open Book for Closed Minds

The mystery of 2024: How is it possible that Donald Trump has a reasonable chance of winning the presidency despite all that voters now know about him? Why hasn’t a decisive majority risen to deny a second term to a man in line to be judged the worst president in American history?

The litany of Trump’s liabilities is well known to the American electorate. His mendacity, duplicity, depravity, hypocrisy and venality are irrevocably imprinted on the psyches of American voters.

Trump has made it clear that in a second term he would undermine the administration of justice, empower America’s adversaries, endanger the nation’s allies and exacerbate the nation’s racial and cultural rifts.

John Podhoretz, in a 2017 Commentary article, “Explaining Trump’s Charlottesville Behavior,” offered one piece of the puzzle, addressing the question, “Whose early support for Trump itself played a key role in leading others to take him seriously and help propel him into the nomination?”

Podhoretz’s prescient answer: a conspiracy-oriented constituency with little regard for truth:

If there’s one thing politicians can feel in their marrow, even a non-pol pol like Trump, it’s who is in their base and what it is that binds the base to them. Only in this case, I’m not talking about a base as it’s commonly understood — the wellspring of a politician’s mass support. I’m talking about a nucleus — the very heart of a base, the root of the root of support. Trump found himself with 14 percent support in a month. Those early supporters had been primed to rally to him for a long time.”

I’m talking about Alex Jones and Infowars, the conspiracy-theory radio show/website on which Trump has appeared for years; the radio show has two million listeners a week, and Jones was said in 2011 to have a larger online presence than Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck.

I’m talking about the WWE, which televises wrestling and which, in 2014, could claim a weekly audience of 15 million and on whose programs Trump intermittently served as a kind of special guest villain in the manner of a villain on the 1960s “Batman” show.

I’m talking about American Media, the company that owns The National Enquirer, The Star, The Sun and The Weekly World News, run by Trump’s close friend David Pecker; the combined weekly circulation of its publications is well in excess of two million.

Trump, from the start, was operating in a universe separate from the traditional politics of the Republican and Democratic Parties; he was operating in a world rooted in his 25 years in pro wrestling, in which people put up good money to watch fake fights they know in their hearts were fixed.

The pervasive denial of truth has, in turn, been crucial to Trump’s continued viability.

In “Popular Reactions to Donald Trump’s Indictments and Trials and Their Implications for the 2024 Election,” Gary C. Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, argued that this denial — “motivated ignorance reinforced by right-wing pundits and social media entrepreneurs” — helps explain “the tenacious loyalty of Trump’s MAGA followers.”

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