New Conspiracy Accusation Bounces Off The MAGA Cult

MAGA followers have to be able to shield themselves from all unpleasant anti-Trump information so well that they serve as an exemplary model of ‘information dissonance’  -  a phrase I totally invented that describes the clash between reality-as-reported and the mental world constructed by (say) a cult. 

In the past, an accusation of criminal wrong-doing against Trump appeared to have no effect among Trump voters, generating few signs that they were swayed by the prospects of having a felon as president.  In fact, during the Spring hush-money case, the proportion of Republicans who said it was OK to have a felon as president rose from 17% to 58%.

Instead of having criminality throw a shadow across Trump’s future, his voters embraced the shadow.

Interestingly, before any criminal trial is held, half of all voters already think he is guilty.

But few information arrows from the outside world have had as much potential penetrating power as Jack Smith’s new zinger, accusing Trump of illegal manipulations to maintain power, including the infamous Capitol Building assault.

Smith has just released a factual ‘proffer’ alleging that Trump resorted to crimes to stay in office.  A proffer is a document that offers evidence in support of an argument.  Trump’s legal team has until November 7^th (after the election) to respond and submit to federal prosecutors. 

Before jumping into Smith’s charges and how MAGA will carry on like nothing happened, it would  be good to clear the air about one central assumption:  How close did Trump really come to preventing the peaceful transfer of power on January 6^th?  Many have said that America was saved by a whisker. 

I doubt that the threat was ever that severe. 

There was a shock at the sacrilege, of course, and rightly so. 

But like so many of Trump’s actions, the storming of the Capitol did not seem to have an exit plan.  He did not think it through, like so many of his business deals.  He never had the power to ‘close the deal’, in the same ill-fated manner that made him one of the worst businessmen who ever squandered his father’s fortune.

He wanted to overturn the election, and went through a conniption fit of a hundred hurried plans to do so.  Most were pointless – mere explosions of rage.  So what if he captured Pence?  There was nothing Pence could do to officially keep Trump in power.  And if Trump did succeed in owning one building for a few hours, so what?  It did not give him control of the government.  The feds have the other 99.999% of America.  The military was not on his side.  The police did not back him. The legislature did not back him.  There were no mobs of people rioting in the streets in favor of the MAGA clowns, like the ones who ensured that Yeltsin could overthrow the Soviet government by attacking the House of Soviets building in 1993.

Of course, his foamy effort to overthrow the constitution should nevertheless disqualify him from running for office forever.  He should be in jail…as Jack Smith is arguing.

But the danger from Trump comes not from his attack on the Capitol Building, bad though that was, but in the ongoing cult of people who believe what he says.

The MAGA gang makes up 15% of the American public, and 33% of the Republican Party. 

Trump of course claims that the MAGA base is 75% of the country. 

The highest MAGA number I could find from an actual poll was 24%.  Its highest negative ratings – from its enemies of course - come from groups that make up the Democratic base: the higher educated, younger people, people of color, particularly Black people, and those who define themselves as liberals. 

So MAGA is not huge, and is trapped in a shrinking demographic bubble.  Nevertheless, cleverly handled, it could theoretically take over government.  The highest popular vote the Nazis got before Hitler seized power was 37% (in 1932).

But MAGA are actually not like the Nazis – at least, not as far as extreme violence goes.  The Nazis were backed by an army of WW1 veterans organized into Friekorps divisions.  MAGA has neither the appetite for violence nor the discipline to make that grade.

Just to stress that point: MAGA types are not more willing to engage in violence themselves, despite endorsing violence.  ‘Sure, good idea – let my neighbor Bob grab his gun’. 

In fact, I overstepped there: they do not want to threaten people with a gun even when they think violence is justified (for someone else).

Interestingly, a MAGA profile does not mean an isolationist.  Most MAGA voters think the US should take the lead on international affairs.  Trump is almost on his own when he tried to dismiss America’s role in foreign affairs.  But he does not know that, because he does no research.

The philosophy that unites MAGA people is a distrust in democracy, and this is their danger.  They would rather be ruled by a dictator.  Vance is their coming King, and he is backed by billionaire Peter Thiel, who once wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”  The fact is that freedom is incompatible with billionaires, which is why it is so dangerous to Thiel and his puppet.

There is a danger that I am being too dismissive.  Am I trying to hint that perhaps MAGA is a media monster, made up to sell news?

Yes, I do believe that.  But it is still serious enough to want to ask ourselves:  how could even 15% of Americans isolate themselves so completely that they believe what Donald Trump says?

Important for Trump’s continued popularity, polls show that MAGA members get their trusted news from four sources: conservative media, clergy, family members…and Donald Trump himself. 

Smith’s proffer is 165 pages long.  His brief can be viewed here: Government’s Motion for Immunity Determinations. 

In a nutshell, Smith has 77 potential witnesses who can vouch for new details in the conspiracy case…including what Trump was looking at on his phone during the rioting.  There are two clips of Trump admitting that he lost the 2020 election. Smith makes the case that an increasingly desperate Trump, knowing that his claims were false, promoted false claims about voting machine fraud and conspiracies of suppression.  His attitude can be glimpsed in what he allegedly told wife Melania and daughter Ivanka, “It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell.”

Never mind democracy – it’s all about the “enemy”, and Trump is always the victim. This has been classic Trump since he was a boy (see the coming Monday article).

Smith said that "With private co-conspirators, the defendant launched a series of increasingly desperate plans to overturn the legitimate election results in seven states that he had lost — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. 

"His efforts included lying to state officials in order to induce them to ignore true vote counts; manufacturing fraudulent electoral votes in the targeted states; attempting to enlist Vice President Michael R. Pence, in his role as President of the Senate, to obstruct Congress’s certification of the election by using the defendant’s fraudulent electoral votes; and when all else had failed, on January 6, 2021, directing an angry crowd of supporters to the United States Capitol to obstruct the congressional certification." 

Smith claims that the "throughline of these efforts was deceit," stating Trump and co-conspirators engaged in a conspiracy to interfere with the federal government function by which the nation collects and counts election results, which is set forth in the Constitution and the Electoral Count Act; a conspiracy to obstruct the official proceeding in which Congress certifies the legitimate results of the presidential election; and a conspiracy against the rights of millions of Americans to vote and have their votes counted." 

The relevance to the 2024 election of course is that Trump is using his current presidential run as an insulator against the charges that Smith has just laid. 

If he gets back into power he has said that he will prosecute his political enemies, pardon the January 6 defendants, charge media that criticized him, deport millions of immigrants, encourage police to have a lawless day once a year to control the streets, withdraw from NATO, allow Ukraine to collapse, override the Constitution, and continue a war of suppression against women.

How has the jarring news of Smith’s attack impacted the MAGA world?

Trump’s MAGA cult is a strange beast.  While most Trump voters believe “MAGA” means “stronger borders” and a “better economy,” they also define it in a variety of other ways, including that it simply means “Donald Trump.” 

In this, America is uniquely susceptible.

A writer in pioneer America said that America is the most isolated country in the world.  Europeans travelled widely, were multilingual and understood other cultures.  America’s physical isolation caused cultural isolation that increased in direct proportion to the distance from the shores.  Today for example Arizona is the epicenter for Trump’s false claims of a stolen election.

The path to understanding MAGA is to follow the information flow that Trump himself uses in informing ‘his nation’ about his views.

The first path to the base is direct messaging through his media channel, Truth Social.  Its content and audience are overwhelmingly conservative and made up of the MAGA base.  It has been accused of a lot of hate speech and extremism on the platform due to their lax approach to content moderation. Trump has 7 million followers.  He posted an enraged message stream along these lines:  “Deranged Jack Smith, the hand picked Prosecutor of the Harris-Biden DOJ, and Washington, D.C. based Radical Left Democrats, are HELL BENT on continuing to Weaponize the Justice Department in an attempt to cling to power.”

Once his personal message has been sent to MAGA through Truth Social, he turns next to the channels controlled by his billionaire friends, like John Muse.  Muse owns Nexstar Media Group, based in Texas.  It is the largest local television broadcasting group, comprised of top network affiliates, with 200 owned or partner stations reaching 220 million people. It makes political contributions, giving six times more funding to Republican causes including PACs like the Trump Victory Committee, Team Ryan and McConnell for Majority Leader Committee.

We must mention Trump’s buddy Elon Musk, who has turned the former Twitter-now-X channel into a loudspeaker for Trump.  He says that if Trump is not elected, it will be the end of democracy.  He also likes Putin and actively tried to help him snuff out a democracy in Ukraine, so you have to wonder where he gets is drugs.

All this time the Trump MAGA media is attacking the “fake news” media outlets, like CNN, which are said to be part of a larger deep state plot of the federal government to upend the will of the people.

Then Trump immediately went on Nexstar, the largest TV station operator in the US reaching almost 40% of American households.  He did a multi-minute rant on its NewsNation cable network.  He described Kamala Harris as “more incompetent than Biden,” and claimed Smith’s accusations are “nothing new.”

His news is then picked up and augmented uncritically by a select portion of the religious community.  About one-quarter of Americans identify as evangelical, and two-thirds of that group are supportive of Trump.

MAGA evangelicals live in a binary world: black-or-white, yes-or-no.  The most intransigent MAGA folk are probably those who conflate Trump with God.

Trump’s message goes out through independent charismatic Christians, who deliver not only the immediate news but share plans to sustain the effort beyond Election Day if that's what it takes for him to win the presidency.  In other words, back another insurrection.

One Believer said that "We're going to flood election poll stations across the country with spirit-filled believers."

They believe that Trump has been chosen by God to be a “wrecking ball to political correctness”.

More than 80% of the evangelicals supported Trump in the 2020 election. 

He still lost.

Evangelicals are a rapidly shrinking group and their leadership’s rigidity on issues is one of the main reasons why.

After the billionaires and the religious right, Trump’s message goes out through sympathetic channels like Fox News.

As soon as Trump’s message was firm, campaign spokesman Steven Cheung told Fox News Digital that the release of the "falsehood-ridden, unconstitutional J6 brief immediately following Tim Walz’s disastrous debate performance is another obvious attempt by the Harris-Biden regime to undermine American Democracy and interfere in this election." 

But with this new charge by Jack Smith, even Fox News is faltering.  They are bailing on Trump – to a degree.  They have not taken Smith’s side, but they are at least occasionally reporting the facts straight across.  What they tried to do was muddle Smith’s accusations with a pronouncement that it was done to over-ride the “victory” of Vance over Walz in the recent VP candidate debate. 

Fox also tried to imply that Smith’s timing was political: to upset Trump’s bandwagon just before the vote.  They neglected to mention that Smith wanted to have the case heard long ago, but got delayed by Trump’s Supreme Court ruling that prohibited judgements against ‘political’ presidential actions.  On that matter, Smith has a response:  “When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office. Although the defendant was the incumbent president during the charged conspiracies, his scheme was a fundamentally private one.”

Trump’s tweets on Jan 6^th argued Smith, were “not a message sent to address a matter of public concern and ease unrest; it was the message of an angry candidate upon the realization that he would lose power”.

MAGA has sub-groups that reinforce the central isolation from the real world, and engage in fantasy conspiracy theories.  These reach beyond information control to affect behavior and emotional control.  Trump’s rallies used to be ecstatic events, where people cheer and laugh as their various enemies were insulted. These days, his rallies are no longer drawing the crowds they once were. 

But for the core MAGA crowd, they do not know what they do not know, and they are self-isolating to keep it that way.

As an aside, we have to mourn the passing of the local newspapers and news outlets.  Flooded over by online empires, the thousands of ‘Daily HomeTown’ papers have vanished.  They were often biased as well, but they had to abide by local news that often pushed back.

This is another situation where Trump has been lucky in his moment in history.  None of the media tilt was due to his planning or his effort.

There are probably additional approached to breaking into the MAGA echo chamber, but one thing seems imperative to me.

We have to ensure that the MAGA information loop is broken.

This cannot be left to the private sector. This is something the ‘government of the people’ needs to effect for the benefit of everyone.  Private information circles can no longer be allowed to self-generate.  It’s about a bigger issue than profits; some find this hard to believe, but economics is not the principle pathway to improved societies.

Saying that MAGA has to be left alone because ‘Freedom’ would be threatened, says nothing:  do we not all deserve freedom from riots at our government buildings? 

Each media channel needs to be adjudicated and allowed to operate on condition that the news it offers is true and fair.

Otherwise, the echo chambers of hate and self-selection are going to be very crowded, as our society splinters into radically pure elements of ‘opposium’ (made that word up…). 

We need to create an automatic re-set button.  The media has evolved beyond the forum in Rome, where views could be debated.  It is now a set of tribal councils around isolated and independent fire circles. 

We need a way to force them to see a common truth; admit to a common cause.

Because inspiring mutual hate in a society of gun-carriers is about the most dangerous thing we could do.  So let’s stop.

We need to be pro-active.  Trump will be stopped in November.  But Kamala’s job will not be done until she has burned out the channels that can teach unopposed hatred.

This is an incredibly important moment in American history.

Let’s stop being isolationists.

Freedom means the right for society to ensure that unbiased information is presented to all groups.

Let’s make MAGA a joke, and not an example.