About a month before the 2016 presidential election, a picture circulated on the internet of a middle-aged female Trump supporter grinning wryly and wearing a handmade shirt giving Trump permission to grab her (in the pursuit of decency, I won’t say where).This shirt illuminates a very real phenomenon: for a subset of Trump supporters, there appears to be almost nothing he could do or say that would cause them to reconsider.
This fact flummoxes many, but it can be explained by a deeply ingrained aspect of human nature: cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance occurs when you receive new information that forces you to question your existing beliefs or actions. To effectively function, people need to maintain a sense of internal consistency, and holding two contradictory thoughts is mentally uncomfortable (it’s a headache!). In response, we try to alleviate this distress, most often by changing our beliefs or by ignoring information that contradicts them.
The Power of Not Feeling Like an Idiot
Imagine having voted Republican your whole life because you believe in the free market and in small government. In 2016, you faced a choice between Hillary Clinton, the embodiment of the Democratic party you’ve consistently voted against for decades, and Donald Trump.
Voting Clinton is a non-starter, especially given her careless mishandling of classified information, so even though you don’t like much of what Trump says, you are able to talk yourself into the idea that he will stand for conservative principles when he is in office, and—barring that—will at least nominate conservative supreme court justices.
Thus, you vote for him, and he wins. At this point, you have some conflicting information roaming around in your head:
- I voted for Trump, and I am not an idiot.
- Media reports allege Trump mishandled classified information.
- Trump claims he has the right to do so.
Together, these create cognitive dissonance, which leads to an (often unconscious) process of changing one of the beliefs. “I am not an idiot,” for most people, is a highly entrenched belief. Most don’t resolve dissonance by removing the “not” from “I’m not an idiot”; thus, we can’t eliminate #1 (concluding that you are an idiot would create an entirely other class of psychological distress).
If you decide to believe the media, that makes Trump a liar, by extension making you an idiot for being fooled by a liar. The only belief consistent with a positive self-image is that Trump is right and the media is wrong or overreacting. Indeed, 78% of Republicans and 38% of independents trust Trump more than they trust the media. This is a staggering statistic when you think about the thousands of people that make up the “news media.”
Let’s dispel once and for all with the fiction that Donald Trump doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing.
Trump masterfully manipulates this aspect of human nature, giving even begrudging supporters plentiful ammunition to reduce their own dissonance by regularly attacking critics’ credibility and releasing “alternative facts” to counter the negative coverage. (He is so effective at it that I’d sleep better at night as a New England Patriots fan if he would just deny the #fakenews linking him to the Patriots. Until that happens, I guess I’ll just have to experience cognitive dissonance every time I root for them).
People have a strong desire to remain consistent to commitments they have made, especially when those commitments are formal (such as a vote) or public (such as a blog post).
Thus, if you maintained support for Trump as the initial leaks of his incompetence seeped out, you are likely to maintain this support even among a steady stream of daily stories alleging malfeasance between him and Russia.
It’s important to note that this is not just a Republican phenomenon. Democrats too, are likely to believe even far-flung conspiracy theories about Trump without evidence, especially when those theories confirm their belief that Trump won the presidency illegitimately. This is human nature.
An Escalating Commitment
A famous parable describes how frogs placed in gradually heated water don’t perceive the danger, remaining still until they become frog stew. A disturbing number of frog-hating scientists have conducted studies on this alleged phenomenon. Results are inconclusive (I’m on team frogs try to escape) but the underlying lesson holds: people become desensitized to risks when the risks creep up gradually.
The effects of cognitive dissonance on Trump supporters, too, creep up slowly. Ignoring media reports that cast the decision to vote for Trump in a bad light steadily builds one’s commitment to the idea that Trump is right and “the media” is wrong.
Having Trump as president carries many great risks, but perhaps the most dangerous is his strategic use of lying to introduce shades of grey into issues that are black and white. Whether Trump colluded with the Russians (or whether Obama was born in Africa, for that matter) can be objectively proven as true or false, but Trump’s constant attacks on the media’s credibility creates space for people to pick and choose what “facts” they want to believe.
How to Make America Great AgainTM
As a realist (and a 5-year “swamp” resident), I’d never hold my breath for Congress to fix this problem, so the best I can hope for is Trump inadvertently succeeding in his promise of draining the swamp (i.e. Congress) in 2018 by being so unpopular that all those who’ve stood by him are voted out.
In the meantime, I propose a complete and total shutdown of the Trump Presidency (including all public appearances, executive orders, appointments, and tweets), until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.
Barring that, it’s hard to know how we can break a cycle of cognitive dissonance so widespread it’s causing people to disagree over basic facts.
Believing Trump is racist, evokes Hitler, and is guilty of sexual assault makes it difficult for many to hide their disdain for Trump supporters, let alone empathize with them. This disdain is reflexive, but is it a productive reflex?
That was rhetorical; the answer is no.
Empathy for Trump supporters is exactly what we need. Everyone makes mistakes—and making mistakes doesn’t make you an idiot!
Intersections 
Wonderful!! You are the best.
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