David Pakman

while explaining away anything that doesn't make sense.

He gets the good outcomes and the bad outcomes end up being blamed on somebody else.

Could be Joe Biden, could be Barack Obama, could be someone else within his administration that stymied him or turned against him or was low IQ.

This is none of this is new.

Like it's new in the sense of seeing it in an American president.

But this is classic authoritarian dynamics.

The leader is the most powerful and all knowing person.

But at the same time, they're not really responsible because all these terrible people are getting in his way strong enough to deserve all of our loyalty.

But if anything goes wrong, we don't blame.

No, it must have been someone else's fault.

This is how you end up with people getting sucked into these authoritarian movements and then continuing to support them.

as they experience their stuff getting more expensive, as they experience economic instability, as they experience promises like no more stupid wars broken and creating an economic situation that is terrible for them.

So these are not people that evaluate at the level of personal impact.

If they did, they would go, I'm done with Trump.

They are thinking through Trump ism.

And this applies to other authoritarians at the level of identity.

loyalty and let me find explanations that protect the dear leader and also protect my judgment because I don't want to feel stupid.

I don't want to feel like I was duped.

Once you have that system in place and Trump has had it in place since before he won in 2016, I would argue it is really difficult to break that.

It's tough to break out of it.