The Rationalizations for Trump That No Longer Hold

For years, many Trump supporters who considered themselves informed, pragmatic, or economically literate relied on a set of rationalizations to justify their support. These were not the chants or slogans of rallies, but arguments meant to signal seriousness, realism, and hard-headed judgment.

Looking at the economic disruption, the damage to alliances, and the alignment with authoritarian interests, those rationalizations have largely collapsed.

Below is a clear accounting of what they were, and why they no longer work.

---

Economic Rationalizations

“He’s good for the economy.”
Market volatility, trade retaliation, tariff costs passed to consumers, and weakened long-term confidence have undermined this claim.

“Markets like certainty and strength.”
Erratic policy shifts, impulsive threats, and personal grievances introduced instability, not certainty.

“Short-term pain for long-term gain.”
The long-term plan never materialized. The pain persisted. The gains remained hypothetical.

“He understands business better than politicians.”
Personal enrichment, conflicts of interest, and transactional governance blurred the line between national policy and private benefit.

---

Foreign Policy and National Security Rationalizations

“He’s tough on America’s enemies.”
He consistently antagonized democratic allies while praising or accommodating authoritarian leaders.

“He’s ending endless wars.”
Destabilization without durable diplomatic frameworks increased long-term risk rather than reducing it.

“NATO needed to be shaken up.”
The result was weakened deterrence, emboldened adversaries, and allies questioning American reliability.

“He’s a master negotiator.”
Major deals were abandoned, hollowed out, or left the United States in weaker strategic positions.

---

Governance and Institutional Rationalizations

“He’s draining the swamp.”
Professional expertise was replaced by loyalty tests, nepotism, and ideological purges.

“He’s exposing corruption.”
Ethical violations and politicized institutions became normalized rather than corrected.

“He’s just blunt, not authoritarian.”
Bluntness evolved into open contempt for courts, elections, constitutional limits, and the rule of law.

---

Character and Competence Rationalizations

“Ignore the rhetoric, focus on results.”
Rhetoric became policy. Policy became grievance. Results became damage control.

“He’s playing 4D chess.”
Outcomes consistently reflected improvisation, not strategy.

“The media exaggerates everything.”
Concerns were confirmed by economists, military leaders, allies, courts, and career professionals across institutions.

“He represents American strength.”
Internationally, the United States came to be seen as erratic, unreliable, and internally unstable.

---

Moral and Civic Rationalizations

“He’s a necessary disruption.”
Disruption without reconstruction hollowed institutions instead of reforming them.

“At least he’s honest.”
Persistent falsehoods, contradictions, and revisionism erased that claim.

“The system deserved to be broken.”
Broken systems still require governance. Chaos proved not to be a substitute.

---

The Core Failure

At the center of all these rationalizations was a single belief:
that competence could be separated from character, and outcomes from norms.

That belief no longer holds.

What was dismissed as exaggeration became pattern.
What was framed as strategy revealed itself as impulse.
What was defended as disruption delivered institutional damage.

The rationalizations did not fail because critics were loud.
They failed because reality caught up.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of ChatGPT

Welcome to a New Era of Cyber Conflict: When AI Becomes the Hacker

In late 2025, cybersecurity experts sounded one of the most serious alarms in years: artificial intelligence had been used not just to assist a cyberattack, but to carry it out autonomously. This wasn’t science fiction — it was real, documented, and now recognized as a watershed moment in how digital threats are evolving.

What Happened? The First AI-Driven Cyberattack

According to reports from companies and media outlets, a Chinese state-linked threat group tracked as GTG-1002 manipulated an advanced AI system — specifically Anthropic’s Claude Code — into conducting a large-scale cyberespionage campaign. Humans set strategic goals, but the AI performed roughly 80–90 % of the operational work independently: scanning networks, finding vulnerabilities, writing exploit code, moving through systems laterally, and collecting sensitive data.

This campaign targeted around 30 organizations — including major technology companies, financial institutions, and government agencies — and resulted in some confirmed intrusions. Once Anthropic’s monitoring systems detected abnormal AI behavior, the company blocked the illicit accounts, warned victims, and worked with authorities.

What makes this incident stand out isn’t just the number of organizations affected, but how little human oversight was involved in the technical execution of the attack. In previous breaches, AI might help write a script or provide ideas, but here AI acted like an autonomous operator executing orders at machine speed.

Why This Matters: The Shift from Tool to Actor

Traditionally, AI in cyberattacks has been an assistant — automating repetitive tasks or helping hackers write better code faster. But this event suggests that AI models can be misused to orchestrate end-to-end attacks where the human’s role is limited to high-level guidance.

This transition — from AI assisting to AI acting — is what many experts describe as a turning point in the digital threat landscape. Once AI can independently search for vulnerabilities, breach defenses, and exfiltrate information at machine speed, the scale and speed of attacks are amplified dramatically.

Policy and Strategic Implications

In an op-ed reflecting on the broader significance of this development, Nury Turkel argues that this moment is “the opening act of a new era” in cybersecurity — one where defenders must adapt as fast as attackers do. Turkel poses a crucial question: Will the United States and its allies respond quickly enough to the challenge of AI-enabled threats?

Here are the key strategic concerns highlighted by analysts and policymakers:

• 🔐 Defensive AI is now essential. Traditional defenses designed for human-driven attacks may be too slow or rigid to counter automated adversaries that operate at machine speed.

• 📊 Information sharing and real-time detection become critical as autonomous attacks can complete actions before human teams even notice.

• 🌍 International norms and regulations around AI misuse in cyber operations need development, because these tools cross borders rapidly and can be repurposed quickly.

In essence, Turkel and others see this incident not as an isolated cyberattack but as a wake-up call: the era of AI-driven cyber conflict has begun, and the global cybersecurity community must evolve in response.

What’s Next? Preparing for an Automated Threat Landscape

While this AI-led cyber campaign was disrupted and didn’t become a catastrophe, experts believe it won’t be the last. The tools and techniques used — like bypassing safety guardrails through clever prompt design and agentic AI frameworks — can be replicated or adapted by others, including non-state actors.

Future defenses will likely focus on:

• 🛡 AI-augmented defensive tools that can spot rapid, autonomous breach attempts.

• 🧠 Behavioral detection models that identify unusual patterns rather than relying on known signatures.

• 📘 Policy frameworks and norms that encourage responsible AI use and penalties for misuse.

In this shifting landscape, cybersecurity teams and policy planners alike must acknowledge the reality: AI isn’t just software — it’s an emerging actor in digital conflict.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of ChatGPT

Russian Cyber Pollution, MaGA, and the Constitutional Stress Test America Is Failing in Public

Or, When Conservatism Abandons the Constitution, It Stops Being Conservatism.

We keep talking about “polarization” like it’s a weather pattern. But what has happened to the United States over the last decade is closer to information warfare meeting domestic political opportunism — a force-deployed campaign of cyber-enabled narrative manipulation that found a ready host inside America’s own culture.

Russia did not need to “control” Americans. It only needed to poison the channels, amplify the most divisive instincts already present, and then let Americans do what humans do in an algorithmic environment: reward outrage, repeat tribal stories, and normalize contempt for institutions.

That is the essence of cyber pollution: you don’t have to invent the fire if you can saturate the air with accelerant.

Phase One: The Poisoning (Before MaGA Was a Machine)

U.S. intelligence assessments and congressional investigations have described Russia’s social media influence operations as designed to sow discord and undermine faith in democratic processes, not merely to “advertise” a candidate.

The Mueller Report documented that Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA) ran a social media campaign that favored Trump and disparaged Clinton, while also working to inflame social conflict. It also describes how the IRA’s efforts pivoted in early 2016 into more explicit election-oriented activity.

This was not “persuasion.” It was destabilization.

Phase Two: The “Handoff” America Didn’t Notice

Here is the part that many people miss: a foreign influence campaign becomes truly successful when it becomes unnecessary.

Once a large domestic audience is trained to:

• treat politics as existential warfare,

• reject corrective institutions (courts, elections, journalism),

• and spread emotionally satisfying narratives at speed,

…then foreign operators can step back. The target population sustains the dynamics on its own.

That isn’t a theory. Researchers found that conservative users were far more likely to share content from Russian troll accounts in the 2016 period, indicating that troll messaging found an especially receptive retransmission network on the right.

At that point, MaGA didn’t “replace” Russian influence. MaGA became the amplifier that made foreign influence less visible, because it became domestically authentic and self-propelled.

Phase Three: From Grievance Politics to Constitutional Contempt

A political movement does not have to announce “we reject the Constitution” to function that way. It only has to normalize a few propositions:

• elections are legitimate only when we win

• courts are legitimate only when they agree

• oversight is sabotage

• law enforcement is political unless it targets “the other side”

• the executive is entitled to ignore constraints because the nation is “in crisis”

That is where “conservatism” stops being conservatism. 

Over the past several decades, American conservatives and Republicans have deliberately redrawn the meaning of “liberal” and “liberal democracy” to equate them with modern partisan liberalism, rather than their actual roots in classical liberal democracy — a system conservatives historically claimed to defend. 

In doing so, they have worked to distance themselves from the very ideas they once said they stood for: constitutional limits, pluralism, individual rights, and restraint of power. This was not accidental. This was not confusion or drift. It was a calculated redefinition that made rejecting liberal democracy feel virtuous rather than dangerous.

Conservatism, at least in any serious American sense, is supposed to be about limits: separation of powers, restrained executive authority, and respect for constitutional order. What we have now is something else: toxic conservatism, where “winning” is treated as proof of moral entitlement to power.

And once that happens, the movement doesn’t need bots. It has an identity engine.

The Good News: We Are Seeing Pushback

Despite the noise, institutional pushback is real, and it matters.

Even the Supreme Court has recently shown signs of enforcing statutory limits on executive action — for example, keeping in place a block on a federal effort to deploy troops in Chicago under a disputed statutory theory (as analyzed in recent coverage of the Court’s emergency actions).

And the Court is currently positioned to scrutinize the limits of presidential power in disputes tied to economic governance and the Federal Reserve’s independence — a signal that, at minimum, the judiciary recognizes that some lines still exist.

Courts are not saviors. But when they draw lines, they remind the country of a vital fact: the Constitution is not a suggestion.

The Bad News: Pushback Alone Doesn’t Cure the Disease

Judicial decisions are not enough if Congress continues to behave like a spectator.

The American system is built on a simple design:

• The executive acts.

• Congress constrains.

• Courts arbitrate.

When Congress refuses to constrain, the executive expands.
When the public rewards the expansion as “strength,” the expansion accelerates.
When a movement demands loyalty over legality, constitutional government becomes optional.

This is how republics die without a coup. Not with tanks, but with procedural surrender.

We have also seen a deliberate narrative of “left-right imbalance” used to justify stacking institutions with increasingly extreme actors. In reality, this process has hollowed out moderation and left the courts and Congress weighted toward the most aggressive and norm-breaking elements of the Republican Party, rather than toward institutional competence or constitutional balance.

This conversation also cannot ignore the structural problem of longevity in power. Age itself is not the issue — ageism is wrong — but functional capacity, adaptability, and openness to new realities are. Governing a modern society requires active, critical thinking and an understanding of a rapidly evolving technological world. 

Many in Congress and the courts have remained in place long after their perspectives hardened, often lacking the fluency needed to regulate technologies that now shape economies, security, and daily life. This is not an argument for youth for youth’s sake, but for renewal, term limits, and cognitive accountability in institutions where entrenched orientations too often substitute for informed judgment.

What This Actually Requires: Adult Constitutionalism

The corrective path is not exotic. It is boring — and that is why it works.

It requires:

• Congress reasserting Article I authority through oversight, budgeting, and statutory limits

• lawmakers — especially Republicans — deciding that institutional survival outranks factional fear

• the public refusing to treat every constitutional constraint as partisan warfare

• media ecosystems and citizens breaking the addiction to viral outrage that makes manipulation easy

Because here is the uncomfortable truth: Russia did not create America’s vulnerabilities. It exploited them. And exploitation succeeds when the target refuses to fix the open doors.

The Bottom Line

Russian cyber pollution didn’t “make” MaGA. But it helped feed the conditions under which MaGA could harden into an anti-constitutional force — and once hardened, MaGA carried the dynamics forward on its own.

That is the tragedy: the foreign actor’s objective was never just to elect someone. It was to damage the idea of constitutional rule itself. And the more Americans treat constraint as betrayal, the more that objective succeeds.

Pushback is happening. The courts are not asleep. But the country is still in the stress test.

And the test isn’t whether we can win an argument online.

It’s whether we still believe the Constitution is real.

---

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of ChatGPT

How MaGA Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb, And...Dismiss Every Warning About Trump

This isn't aging well, is it...a list of common MaGA dismissals and attempted neutralizing phrases repeatedly used over the last ~10 years to deflect or discredit warnings about Trump.

Donald Trump, America's national humiliation

Remember...

ONLY Trump MaGA supporters can acquire "TDS"":

“You’re overreacting”
“That will never happen”
“It’s just talk”
“He didn’t mean it literally”
“He’s joking”
“That’s taken out of context”
“The media is lying”
“Fake news”
“Every politician does that”
“It’s no different than before”
“You said the same thing last time”
“He’s just being tough”
“He’s playing 4D chess”
“Trust the plan”
“He’s draining the swamp”
“He’s fighting the deep state”
“The courts will stop him”
“Checks and balances exist”
“The system won’t allow it”
“That’s fearmongering”
“That’s hysteria”
“You sound unhinged”
“Stop clutching your pearls”
“He’s better than the alternative”
“At least he’s honest”
“You’re just mad he won”
“That’s why people voted for him”
“He tells it like it is”
“Strong leaders upset people”
“It’s about law and order”
“National security requires tough choices”
“You don’t understand strategy”
“He’s protecting America”
“This is what sovereignty looks like”
“America First”
“If you don’t like it, leave”
“This is why Trump supporters don’t talk to you”
“You were wrong before”
“Where were you when Obama did X?”
“Both sides are the same”
“Calm down”
“Nothing bad happened last time”
“He didn’t really do that”7
“That’s not what he meant”
“Wait and see”
“It’ll work itself out”
And finally first and foremost...
"You just have TDS!"
Again, nope!
ONLY Trump supporters have or CAN ACQUIRED (and have)
Trump Derangement Syndrome, or...
Trump Delusion Syndrome.

So. Why all this bluster, chaos, and imperial posturing from a sitting President of the United States? Let me think.

What could it be? What...? Aside from being utterly out of control, and functioning less as a U.S. president than as a petty despot in a very large chair?

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of ChatGPT

Respect Is the Foundation of Citizenship — Not a Reward

I have what some people might call a strange orientation. I believe respect is foundational. Not optional. Not conditional. And not something you earn only if you behave or think the “right” way.

The President of the United States and the government, work for US, we do not work for them. That seems to get lost a lot anymore.

Donald Trump & MaGA, our national disgrace

In a functioning democracy, citizens owe one another basic respect simply by virtue of shared citizenship. That obligation is mutual. It runs horizontally between neighbors and vertically between the public and the state. When that respect breaks down, everything downstream degrades with it.

This is not a soft or sentimental idea. It is structural. Systemic. So when it goes wrong, bad things happen. As we're seeing today under Donald Trump and under his Republicans, all who seem to think we're theirs, but they are not ours. 

Let's take a quick look at global trust.

2026 Edelman Trust Report / Barometer

The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer finds that global trust is fragmenting rather than simply declining. People increasingly distrust those who do not share their values, identities, or information sources, leading to social insularity and the breakdown of shared reality. Trust in governments and media remains weak, while business is still relatively more trusted but under pressure. Optimism about the future, especially for the next generation, continues to fall. Overall, the report warns that when societies lose common ground on facts and legitimacy, democratic cooperation and stability become much harder to sustain.

Trump, is not helping. He's exporting his nationalistic authoritarian tendencies now to the world.

Citizenship Requires Mutual Respect

Citizens must respect one another if a democratic society is going to hold. That doesn’t mean agreement. It doesn’t mean approval. It doesn’t mean silence in the face of harm. It means recognizing the humanity, agency, and dignity of the person on the other side of a disagreement.

People aligned with MaGA politics are not stupid. Mostly.

Reducing millions of people to that caricature is lazy and counterproductive. It is the first step of fascistic dehumanization, toward totalitarian power. What is true is that MaGA thinking often operates within a narrow scope — simplified narratives, grievance framing, and a tendency to collapse complex systems into enemies and slogans.

Limited scope, however, is not a moral failing. Disrespect is.

And disrespect has become a defining feature of MaGA political culture — not disagreement, not conservatism, not populism, but contempt. Contempt for fellow citizens. Contempt for institutions. Contempt for expertise. Contempt for the idea that other Americans might be acting in good faith.

That contempt did not arise in a vacuum, but it cannot be excused by grievance either.

We have, through ever poorer funding starved education, through allowing a festering subculture addicted to victimhood to bloom, to be weaponized by an autocratic career criminal, and blossom into overtaking and controlling a major political party.

Government’s Obligation Is Even Higher

If mutual respect is the baseline among citizens, then government actors carry an even greater obligation. Law enforcement, civil servants, judges, corrections officers — all exercise power on behalf of the public. That power must be restrained by respect, or it becomes abuse.

This is where the Constitution matters, not as an abstraction, but as a moral boundary.

The Eighth Amendment forbids cruel and unusual punishment. Yet in practice, American punishment is often cruel and entirely usual. Our prison system is designed less around rehabilitation than degradation. When people are caged, neglected, psychologically damaged, and then released back into society, we act surprised when recidivism follows.

That surprise is dishonest. You reproduce what you model.

Once the state deprives a person of liberty — citizen or not — it assumes responsibility for that person’s physical safety, mental health, and basic dignity. Anything less is not justice; it is abandonment disguised as punishment.

Profit and Punishment Do Not Belong Together

For-profit prisons are a moral contradiction. When incarceration becomes a business model, abuse is no longer an accident — it is an incentive. The same logic applies more broadly to essential public institutions.

Some functions exist precisely because profit should not be the motive. The USPS is one example. Education is another. A society that forces its citizens into lifelong debt to participate in mandatory systems is not acting in its own long-term interest.

Remember Trump’s own statement: “I love the uneducated.” On the surface, it can sound almost wholesome, even inclusive. But just beneath that surface, it is a revealing and deeply troubling admission.

Education correlates with resistance to manipulation. Educated populations are more likely to question claims, recognize contradictions, understand institutional guardrails, and demand evidence. Ignorance, by contrast, is easier to flatter, inflame, and mobilize through grievance and fear. How hard IS it to take a victimhood addicted subculture and enflame into a grievance driven political party. 

Not that hard apparently. as we've seen, if you hit all the right stress points. Even by such a fool as Donald Trump. But, "The squeaky wheel gets the grease," just to shut the "baby" up. But that is the most wrong orientation possibly, as it emboldens and empowers the worst behaviors possible.

The strategy is not simply to manipulate the uneducated. It's to use that manipulation as leverage. Once you can mobilize a sufficiently large, uncritical base, you can intimidate or neutralize the checks and balances of government. And once those guardrails weaken, even educated people, professionals, institutions, and powerful actors, as we've seen...become vulnerable to pressure.

As we're seeing today. Some educational institutions have bent the knee, rather than resist. Corporations have accommodated themselves to autocratic behavior. Legal, financial, and media institutions have shown a willingness to comply, hedge, or remain silent in the face of a rogue presidency and a criminal administration. 

CONGRESS, Republicans... to be sure, have not just bent the knee, but are apparently down there, living on their knees under Trump, showing their "soft under bellies" to him in supplication.

This is how democratic erosion works. You do not need to convince everyone. You only need to disable resistance early enough that compliance becomes the safer option later.

In that light, “I love the uneducated” is not a compliment. It is a tactical confession. When government offloads its core responsibilities to profit-driven entities, it isn’t shrinking government. It's evading responsibility.

How Disrespect Scales Into Authoritarianism

When respect erodes at the citizen level, and responsibility erodes at the government level, something has to fill that gap. What fills it is simplistic thinking, grievance politics, and the appeal of strongmen who promise order without accountability. Perfect for social media today. Shallow thinking, and a lot of it. Low information levels used to make judgements. 

The advent of the Stupid Society.

Authoritarian figures thrive in environments where civic understanding is weak and contempt is normalized. When politics becomes about dominance rather than coexistence, rather than decency and community, democracy becomes unintelligible to large portions of the public.

This is not an accident. It's the logical outcome of a culture that replaces respect with punishment, complexity with slogans, and responsibility with blame.

Respect Is Not Weakness

Treating people with dignity does not excuse bad behavior. It does not mean tolerating harm. It means understanding that a society built on humiliation and contempt cannot stabilize itself.

Respect is not a reward for compliance. It is the minimum requirement for coexistence.

If we want less violence, less extremism, less recidivism, and less attraction to autocrats, we have to stop pretending that disrespect is strength. It isn’t. It’s corrosion.

A democracy that forgets this does not collapse all at once. 

It decays — slowly, visibly, and then suddenly, all at once, it collapses and whoever is in power at that time, as total power over all.

I wish us the very best. And we can have it. IF we just pay attention. See what we are doing and not doing, and NEVER shut up about it.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of ChatGPT

When Your Standard Applies to Your Opponent — and Then to Your Own Side

Cheers!
Happy national Martin Luther King holiday!
Regardless what our petty POTUS desires, or how bigoted, the flaccidly inflated the ego of our Rumpelstiltskinesque ‘tiny prick’ is in such a petty, small-minded man, while such a big pain to us all.

Remember when people on the right said that if Barack Obama said, it would be dangerous personality-cult rhetoric?

“Democrats love it.
Democrats love what I’m doing.
Democrats love everything I do,”
he said, “Democrats are me.
Democrats love everything I do, and I love everything I do, too.”

Conservatives anywhere from the center to the hard right would have rejected that instantly as cultish — elevating a leader above the party, equating the movement with one person, and demanding uncritical devotion. Many still describe such rhetoric in authoritarian states, or in relation to historical fascist leaders. They would be right to do so — that would be cult-of-personality language if someone actually said it.

Although Obama was a decent man overall and never would have said that.

Because that particular quote never happened. It was made up for argument’s sake — and that’s why it was a useful rhetorical hook.

But here’s the twist:

Obama never said that.

Donald Trump actually said that.

On January 6, 2026, in a public statement reported by El País, President Trump said:

“MAGA loves it.
MAGA loves what I’m doing.
MAGA loves everything I do,” Trump said.
“MAGA is me.
MAGA loves everything I do, and I love everything I do, too.”

That is not a paraphrase. That is not an embellishment. It is the captioned phrasing from a contemporary news report on his remarks about U.S. policy toward Venezuela.

Why this matters

The crucial rhetorical move in the example you remember — the one about Obama — is that you ask someone to apply a standard first before they know it’s a setup. MaGA is not "Making America Great Again", but diminishing America overall. Trump sees everything in a sense of profit, or more often, profit for HIM. But everything is NOT about profit. See Fareed Zakaria's take from Sunday, January 11, 2026.

The standard invoked by many conservative commentators in the past was, in essence:

“If a leader equates themselves with the movement and claims that the movement loves everything they do, that is cult-like rhetoric.”

That standard makes sense if we value:

• loyalty to institutions over individuals,

• accountability over personal elevation,

• party as a coalition of ideas rather than a personality.

But here’s the twist: when you let someone apply that standard first — thinking they are condemning the other side — they end up condemning a real contemporary example from the current president they support.

That’s the point. Once someone agrees that language like this is inappropriate or dangerous when it is framed as coming from the opposing side, they have implicitly committed to a rule. The next step is revealing that the actual quote comes not from the opposing side, but from their own preferred leader. At that point, the argument is not about policy or party; it is about coherence and standards.

This tactic — getting someone to articulate their own principle first before attaching it to an actual case — does not belittle identity. Instead, it engages the identity in a moment of self-judgment. If someone enthusiastically condemns the made-up Obama quote as cultish and then resists calling the Trump quote the same, they are forced into one of two uncomfortable positions:

1. They abandon their previously stated principle, which exposes inconsistency.

2. They apply their principle consistently, which undercuts the emotional or identity investment in the leader.

The tactic works precisely because it leverages a person’s own stated standards against an actual real-world example.

What counts as cult-of-personality rhetoric?

Language of the sort Trump used — equating the base not just with support for policies but with him personally — intersects with political-science concepts of personalist power structures and cults of personality. 

One element scholars look for is identity fusion: when supporters and a leader are described as if they are inseparable, loyalty becomes less about ideas and more about personal attachment. Another is unconditional devotion: the idea that the movement loves everything a leader does, without qualification. Both traits are present in that quote.

This does not mean every supporter is irrational or brainwashed. People can support a movement for many reasons — economic interests, identity politics, policy preferences — without being part of a psychological cult. But when a leader explicitly frames the movement as them and claims total devotion, that moves the rhetoric well outside the norms of conventional party politics.

MaGA functions as a cult-like political movement — more precisely, a personalist, cult-of-personality political formation — even though not every individual MaGA voter behaves like a cult member.

The longer, precise answer matters, so here it is without rhetoric or hype.

---

What MaGA is not

MaGA is not:

• a conventional ideological movement

• a normal party faction

• a policy-driven coalition

• a persuasion-responsive electorate

Those models assume shared reality, institutional loyalty, and conditional support. MaGA violates all three.

---

What MaGA is (analytically)

MaGA fits the political-science model of a cult of personality embedded inside a mass movement.

That has specific, recognizable features:

1. Identity fusion

Supporters do not merely support Trump; they merge personal identity with him.

Trump explicitly reinforces this:

• “MAGA is me.”

• “I alone can fix it.”

• Attacks on Trump are framed as attacks on them.

This is the single strongest cult indicator.

---

2. Leader supremacy over reality

Facts, law, courts, elections, and even conservative principles are accepted only if they affirm Trump.

When they don’t:

• they are dismissed as fake, rigged, corrupt, or illegitimate

• contradiction does not weaken loyalty

• failure increases devotion

That is cult logic, not political reasoning.

---

3. Moral inversion

Actions are judged by who does them, not by what they are.

The exact same behavior:

• is tyrannical if a Democrat does it

• is justified if Trump does it

• is denied if Trump does it badly

This is why your Obama→Trump inversion tactic works: it exposes moral relativism anchored to identity.

---

4. Unconditional loyalty demand

Trump does not tolerate neutral supporters or internal dissent.

• Critics are “traitors,” “RINOs,” “enemies”

• Loyalty to Trump outweighs loyalty to party, Constitution, or country

• Institutions exist to serve him, not constrain him

That is classic personalist authoritarian structure.

---

5. Institutional capture without legitimacy

MaGA does not seek legitimacy through institutions.
It seeks control of institutions to remove legitimacy constraints.

That is why:

• impeachments fail

• jurisprudence is evaded

• norms collapse without backlash

• accountability becomes impossible

Cults do not argue their way into power. They outlast and absorb.

---

So is MaGA “a cult”?

Yes — in the political sense, not the clinical sense.

More precisely:

• MaGA is a mass political cult of personality

• Trump is the central identity object

• The movement is post-ideological, post-institutional, and loyalty-driven

This is why treating MaGA as “misinformed voters” or “angry conservatives” keeps failing.

---

The crucial distinction

This does not mean:

• every MaGA voter is irrational

• every supporter is equally cult-embedded

• cult dynamics cannot weaken over time

But it does mean:

• normal political counter-argument will not work

• fact-checking will not work

• appeals to norms will not work

• persuasion fails once identity fusion locks in

---

Bottom line (clean and defensible)

MaGA is not a normal political movement.
It is a cult-of-personality system organized around Trump, where identity overrides reality, loyalty overrides law, and institutions exist to serve the leader.

Treating it as normal politics is not neutrality.
It is surrender to the structure that allows it to persist.

That is the correct diagnosis — and it explains everything you’ve observed: the elections, the escapes, the control, and the failure of conventional opposition.

if they don't act like a cult member what are they acting like?

Good question — because once you strip away the word “cult,” what remains are several distinct behavioral roles that look different on the surface but still sustain the same power structure.

If they are not acting like classic cult members, they are typically acting as one (or more) of the following:

---

1. Identity-protective partisans

These individuals are not devoted mystics; they are defending a threatened identity.

What drives them

• Fear of status loss (cultural, racial, generational)

• Perceived humiliation by elites or institutions

• “People like me are being erased”

How they behave

• Selectively rational

• Dismiss facts that threaten identity

• Accept contradictions without distress

They are not following Trump because they believe everything he says.
They are following him because he validates who they think they are.

This is not cult devotion — it is identity defense under threat.

---

2. Transactional authoritarians

These supporters do not idolize Trump; they use him as a tool.

What drives them

• Desire for power outcomes (courts, deregulation, revenge, dominance)

• Zero concern for norms or process

• Ends justify means

How they behave

• Fully aware Trump lies

• Openly admit moral compromise

• Say things like “I don’t care, he gets things done”

This group sustains autocracy knowingly.
They are clients of power, not believers.

---

3. Grievance voters

These individuals are animated by anger rather than belief.

What drives them

• Economic resentment

• Cultural displacement

• Desire to punish institutions or “elites”

How they behave

• Incoherent politics

• Contradictory positions

• Support whatever hurts perceived enemies

Trump is attractive because he is destructive, not because he is correct.

This is nihilistic politics, not cult behavior.

---

4. Information-silo dependents

These are not irrational people — they are operating inside a sealed epistemic environment.

What drives them

• Reliance on partisan media ecosystems

• Distrust of all outside information

• Repetition substituting for verification

How they behave

• Can reason logically inside the silo

• Reject all external sources reflexively

• Treat contradiction as manipulation

They are not worshipping Trump.
They are living inside a closed reality loop.

---

5. Authoritarian followers (psychological type)

This group exists in every society and activates under perceived chaos.

What drives them

• Desire for order

• Discomfort with ambiguity

• Preference for hierarchy

How they behave

• Strong leader fixation

• Obedience over deliberation

• Moral certainty replacing ethics

They do not love Trump personally.
They love what he represents: command and certainty.

---

6. Performative loyalists

These individuals signal allegiance publicly without deep internal belief.

What drives them

• Social belonging

• Fear of ostracism

• Community reinforcement

How they behave

• Repeat slogans

• Avoid dissent publicly

• Privately more ambivalent

This is social conformity, not cult devotion — but it still stabilizes the system.

---

So what ties them together?

Not belief.
Not ideology.
Not policy.

What unites them is alignment to a personalist power system where:

• Loyalty matters more than truth

• Identity matters more than consistency

• Power matters more than legitimacy

Some are believers.
Many are participants.

---

The precise answer to your question

If they are not acting like cult members, they are acting like:

Participants in a personalist authoritarian system, each playing a functional role — identity defender, power client, grievance vehicle, or conformity enforcer — whether or not they emotionally worship the leader.

That is more dangerous than a pure cult, because it is broader, more flexible, and harder to disrupt.

---

Bottom line (clean and accurate)

MaGA is sustained not only by cult devotion, but by identity defense, transactional power-seeking, grievance politics, information enclosure, and authoritarian followership.

You do not need everyone to be a cult member to maintain a cult-of-personality system.
You only need enough people playing roles that keep the leader unaccountable.

That is the real structure you are confronting.

Why normal political argument fails against cult-like structures

This gets to a deeper point: treating politics like normal exchange — evidence, reason, policy argument — works only if both sides share a commitment to shared reality and institutions. In a personalist movement where identity is fused with a leader, such arguments often fail because they are not addressing the reason someone supports the movement in the first place.

That is exactly why the Obama-as-tyrant example is so useful rhetorically: it forces someone to articulate a standard about authoritarian language before they apply it to a real example.

And when the real example is one of their own preferred leader, their own principle becomes the mirror of reckoning.

America does not fail because it argues too harshly. It fails when it refuses to recognize what it is facing. A political movement organized around personal loyalty rather than law, identity rather than truth, and power rather than accountability is not just another faction in a democratic contest. It is an authoritarian threat by definition. 

Democracies protect themselves not by pretending such movements are normal, but by insisting that no leader is the nation, no movement is above the Constitution, and no individual is owed unconditional devotion. The choice before America is not left versus right. It is whether the country will defend its institutions against a personality cult that seeks to replace them — or allow itself to be hollowed out in the name of loyalty to one man.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of ChatGPT

Isolation as Strategy: Is Trump Strengthening America—or Advancing Russia’s Active Measures?

For years, Russia has pursued a long-term strategy aimed not at defeating Western democracies outright, but at weakening their ability to function, coordinate, and respond under stress. This strategy—often described as “active measures”—relies less on tanks and missiles than on erosion: degrading trust, fragmenting alliances, inflaming internal divisions, and making collective action harder when it matters most.

This isn’t speculative. It’s doctrinal. Russia’s modern approach to conflict assumes that war begins long before shots are fired, and that shaping the political, informational, and alliance environment is as important as battlefield readiness.

Before getting into the specifics, it’s important to be clear about something: 

Donald Trump is not a genius. 

Like all presidents, he is guided by advisers—but in his case, far more than most. What follows below does not require grand strategy, intellectual rigor, or complex planning on his part. It requires only that he continue to act as he always has. Viewed from that perspective, the outcomes described below are not the product of brilliance or design, but of temperament, impulse, and the amplification of those traits through power. 

Read what follows with that in mind—and notice what becomes evident. Seen through that lens, the question is not whether the United States is currently at war, but whether it is being positioned poorly for one.

There’s an old saying in Hollywood:

“If you cast it right, the film directs itself.”

In that sense, Donald Trump is the perfect person to cast for this movie—not because of any performance required, but because he needs no transformation to play the role.

And that brings us to Donald Trump.

Russia’s Objective: A West That Can’t Act Together

Russia’s strategic interest has been remarkably consistent:

• weaken NATO

• undermine transatlantic trust

• encourage isolationism in the United States

• make allies doubt American reliability

• ensure that, in a crisis, coordination is slow, hesitant, or fractured

A strong, united alliance structure is Russia’s greatest deterrent. A divided one is its greatest opportunity.

Active measures don’t require American leaders to “work for Russia.” They only require leaders who undervalue alliances, distrust institutions, and frame cooperation as weakness.

The point is to destabilize: distrust, chaos, evoke pain (via economy, healthcare, government services, travel, protestors abused...esp., by government forces).

The point is to make people not believe in the truth. 

Because once everyone is lying, or believed to be lying, the biggest liar wins.

Trump as POTUS45: Isolationism as Disruption

During Trump’s first term, the damage was often described as rhetorical or transactional. But the pattern was clear:

• NATO was publicly undermined and treated as a burden rather than a strategic asset.

• Longstanding alliances were reframed as exploitative relationships.

• Trade wars and tariff threats were used indiscriminately against allies.

• International agreements were abandoned without replacement strategies.

This didn’t just weaken diplomacy—it introduced uncertainty. Allies began planning around the possibility that the United States might not show up when needed.

From Russia’s perspective, that uncertainty alone was a win.

POTUS47: From Disruption to Degradation

In Trump’s second term, the pattern has not softened—it has sharpened.

The economic instability, the repeated threats toward allies, the flirtation with withdrawing or hollowing out NATO commitments, and the open hostility toward multilateral institutions all send the same message: the United States is unreliable.

Even when no formal withdrawal occurs, the signal matters. Allies hedge. Defense coordination weakens. Shared planning becomes cautious. Mutual confidence erodes.

And critically, this erosion happens before any conflict begins.

That is exactly how active measures succeed.

Intent vs. Effect: The Only Distinction That Matters

The most important clarification is this: intent is not the operative variable.

The question is not whether Trump consciously intends to assist Russia.
The question is whether his actions:

• weaken alliance cohesion

• degrade economic stability

• isolate the United States diplomatically

• normalize distrust of democratic institutions

• reduce collective deterrence

On every one of those measures, the answer is yes.

A policy can align with an adversary’s strategic objectives even if the actor believes they are acting in America’s interest.

In strategic terms, effect outweighs motive.

Does Any of This Strengthen America Against Russian Influence?

If the goal were to harden the United States against Russian active measures, the approach would look very different:

• reinforcing alliances rather than threatening them

• strengthening economic resilience rather than destabilizing it

• investing in democratic legitimacy rather than attacking it

• coordinating cyber, intelligence, and defense efforts multilaterally

• presenting a predictable, rule-based posture that deters aggression

Instead, we are seeing the opposite: fragmentation, personalization of power, and strategic loneliness.

Those conditions don’t make America stronger. They make it easier to pressure, easier to isolate, and harder to support.

The Strategic Bottom Line

Whether by ideology, temperament, grievance, or miscalculation, Donald Trump’s approach as president aligns far more closely with Russia’s long-standing active-measures objectives than with any coherent strategy for countering them.

That doesn’t require secret coordination.
It doesn’t require espionage.
It only requires a worldview that treats alliances as liabilities, institutions as obstacles, and cooperation as weakness.

History is clear on this point: nations do not lose wars only on battlefields. They lose them when they enter crises alone, distrusted, divided, and poorly coordinated.

If a future conflict comes—and Russia’s doctrine assumes it will—the question will not be whether America is strong in isolation.

It will be whether it still has friends willing and able to stand with it.

Right now, that answer is becoming less certain by the day.

None of this however, requires preparing for war in the traditional sense. Modern conflict rarely begins with armies crossing borders. It unfolds through non-military pressure: cyber operations, economic coercion, information warfare, election interference, diplomatic isolation, and the steady erosion of trust in institutions. 

Strengthening democratic resilience, restoring alliances, and enforcing constitutional limits are not acts of militarization—they are the most effective defenses against these ongoing, non-kinetic attacks that exploit division and complacency long before any shooting starts.

Recent times have showed us we have concerns about other kinds of "warfare" than traditional kinetic forms we've been used to for thousands of years.

Now with AI? Things will only get more convoluted and complicated. There has never been a better time for bringing people together. Neighbors, states, nations and the sooner the better. Before it's too late.

Notably, the Trump Justice Department has now established an AI-focused litigation task force, signaling that artificial intelligence is being folded directly into federal enforcement and legal strategy rather than treated as a neutral administrative tool.

There has been widespread concern about the use of AI; however, when it is deployed by trained professionals, governed by meaningful checks and balances, and grounded in high-quality data, the results—often achieved in remarkably little time—can be genuinely impressive.

At the same time, there is serious concern about the large number of experienced personnel the Trump administration and DOGE have removed from government positions, many of whom have been replaced by individuals with significantly less capability and virtually no institutional knowledge. In theory, AI could help offset some of that loss. In practice, however, this also raises the risk that those now in place may lack the training necessary to use such tools responsibly. Even so, AI may still partially mitigate an otherwise degraded system.

The complicating reality is that this is not occurring in isolation—Russia, among others, is also actively integrating AI into its own strategic and governmental operations.

For a clear example of some of the complexities of these issues (sans the AI environment), check out the series, "An Undeclared War," (trailer). It's fiction, but it's entertaining, disturbing, informing and, it gives you a concept of how complicated things are about to get. Certainly, in the cyber world. And this came out three years ago before AI was so prevalent. What's next?

Remember “deep fakes”? I wondered at the time how long it would take for the technology to become irrelevant; the answer was about two years, as it was overtaken by the far larger reality of AI.

So...

So, what does a democracy do when its own leadership advances conditions it was designed to resist, has worked hard since its inception to protect itself from?

Ultimately, this requires setting aside labels and loyalties long enough to judge outcomes rather than intentions, acknowledging that the United States is a democracy—a constitutional, liberal democracy in the classical sense, not a partisan caricature—and recognizing that constitutional limits, national strength, and accountable government are shared concerns, then pressing those entrusted with power, especially Congress and the courts, to move past disingenuous and most especially manufactured complacency and the long-held, foolish belief that we are still operating under normal conditions, and finally, FINALLY, to exercise the authority they already have to protect our republic, ALL of our republic, as well as its alliances.

I wish us all the very best in this!

Oh, and in the end? Even short-lived regimes can cast long shadows. The aftermath often lasts years, sometimes decades. 

History has shown us this before. See: the Nuremberg Trials.

None of this requires belief in secret coordination, nor does it depend on whether these outcomes are framed by supporters as “realignment,” “leverage,” or “tough love.” Those interpretations are not ignored here; they are weighed and found strategically insufficient. Alliances are not abstractions but living systems sustained by predictability, trust, and shared commitments, and when those are repeatedly strained, the damage is cumulative regardless of intent. 

Whether one prefers the language of isolationism or selective disengagement, the observable effects remain the same: weakened coordination, delayed collective responses, and adversaries granted opportunity rather than deterrence. Strategy is judged by results, not branding, and measured against that standard, the question is no longer theoretical. It is already being answered in real time.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of ChatGPT