Why Trumps "Truths" Always Win

What does a society do when everyone has their own version of TRUTH? 

At any given time and with any leaning of personal understanding, a person can find data to support their belief. If you believe the world is flat; you can find information on the internet to support your belief. Believe aliens built the pyramids, there is information on the internet to support that belief. NOTHING is off limits on the internet to being a truth no matter how farfetched. Everyone seems to believe their own PROOF of truth and there are large numbers of people believing the opposite of the another and ready to argue their RIGHTNESS with their proof.

Having a scientific background, I have relied on provable facts for my beliefs (except when it comes to my religion). Humans need a stable frame of reference. Religion fills this need. In effect, humans crave answers to questions that no other source of knowledge has an answer to, which only religion may seem to answer. Religion attracts followers because it satisfies all of the 16 basic desires that humans share: acceptance, curiosity, eating, family, honor, idealism, independence, order, physical activity, power, romance, saving, social contact, status, tranquility, and vengeance.

In high school, I can remember being taught about the Scientific Method for knowing if something was a fact.

The scientific method is a systematic way of conducting experiments or studies so that you can explore the world around you and answer questions using reason and evidence. The scientific method is the process of objectively establishing facts through testing and experimentation. The basic process involves making an observation, forming a hypothesis, making a prediction, conducting an experiment and finally analyzing the results. What your DATA shows from this method to be considered a fact, the conclusion of a research project has to be able to be replicated by OTHERS to make it a valid premise. Facts must be able to be proven.

In science, a scientific fact has to have the exact same outcome using the same information every time, no matter who is doing it.  EXAMPLE: to make Kool-Aid you will need to mix water, sugar, and Kool-Aid. Each and every time you follow this, no matter who does it, you will end up with Kool-Aid. The flavor can vary but it will always be Kool-Aid. Change or add another ingredient, then the outcome will be different and no longer TRUE Kool-Aid.

After learning the Scientific Method at a young age, it became my standard for evaluating TRUTH. I applied this chain of thought when formulating my beliefs on many things in life. Even in relationships it helped me when my self-esteem was bruised.

Say I dated a man who was handsome and charismatic. But he did not interact with me well and was dancing on the line of being emotionally abusive. When the relationship, which I wanted ended, I would reflect on whether his interactions with others, past and present resembled his interaction with me. My hypothesis that he probably treated others, not just me badly, usually could be seen and the next relationship he would enter would more than likely be the same unless he changed or added something to the ingredients that made him up. I could believe this as true if I could find information about his relationships showing the same factors. Then I knew it was HIM and not ME as the cause for the bad relationship. Just calling him a dog or bad person would not be quite factual. But gathering information from several of his relationships (family, friends, co-workers, ex-girlfriends), demonstrated his relationship style which was not what I wanted in a relationship. His past actions proved his present actions and more than likely predict his future actions. 

So why don't people apply the Scientific Method, in theory, to politics or life in general? 

Many of the decisions we make as individuals and as a society depend on accurate information: however, our psychological bias and predisposition make us vulnerable to falsehoods. As a result, misinformation is more likely to be believed, remembered, and later recalled even after we learn that it was false. Here is where 2 Peter 2:12-14 resonates, "But these people blaspheme in matters they do not understand. They are like unreasoning animals, creatures of instinct, born only to be caught and destroyed, and like animals they too will perish. They will be paid back with harm for the harm they have done. Their idea of pleasure is to carouse in broad daylight. They are blots and blemishes, reveling in their pleasures while they feast on you. With eyes full of adultery, they never stop sinning; they seduce the UNSTABLE; they are experts in greed - an accursed brood!" 

Take the relationship example. If I desperately wanted to be in a relationship, I would have ignored RED FLAGS, Family and friends, no matter what they said about my love interest, would not be able to get me to believe I was in a bad relationship. My brain would be WANTING him. My brain would be predisposed to listen to his lies and rationales for how he treated me even if it was causing me pain. My brain and predisposition would be overriding truth. Even if others were calling me crazy for staying with the man I desired, my brain would reject facts or what was clearly the truth. Even after the relationship ended, I would probably only remember what I considered the good times and his positive characteristics.

MAGA has everyone wondering how they can support Donald Trump for president. People have no problem calling MAGA a bunch of crazies who refuse to see the facts about Trump. And they are facts. Trump has a long list of nefarious dealings in the finance world, with women, and during his presidency. His character is equivalent to a school yard bully and a mafia boss man. There are FACTS testifying to his less than stellar character. These facts are readily available to be checked and scrutinized.

The Washington Post‘s Fact Checker team has finished its final catalog of the extent of the former president’s efforts to mislead and misinform us. According to its tally, Trump made more than 30,000 “false or misleading” claims during his presidency. Half of those lies were told during his last year in office, according to the Post‘s database.

Trump's take on Covid. “Just stay calm. It will go away.” - President Donald Trump, March 10, 2020. Dozens of times since the start of the outbreak that has killed 1.7 million people around the world, Trump publicly downplayed the severity of the novel coronavirus, suggesting it would go away on its own, while comparing Covid-19, the disease it caused, to the seasonal flu. “It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear. And from our shores, we — you know, it could get worse before it gets better. It could maybe go away. We’ll see what happens. Nobody really knows,” Trump said Feb. 28, with dozens of cases but no known fatalities in the U.S.

“VOTER FRAUD IS NOT A CONSPIRACY THEORY; IT IS A FACT!!!” — President Donald Trump, Dec. 24, 2020. When Trump lost the general election, he blamed voter fraud and sent his lawyers to court to try and reverse the results. In a free-wheeling news conference that lacked even a shred of evidence, his attorney, Rudy Giuliani, alleged everything from a “centralized” fraud scheme to election interference by foreign communists. Just a handful of fraud cases have been uncovered in key states: in Pennsylvania, three Republicans have been charged with illegally voting.

“This Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story,” Trump said May 11, 2018. From Day One, Trump has disputed what the U.S. intelligence community has concluded as a fact: Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. election with the goal of boosting his bid while working to tear down his Democratic opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

“Republicans will always protect people with pre-existing conditions,” Trump said Oct. 20, 2018. Trump argued for years Republicans were defenders of people with pre-existing conditions, all the while his administration and several red states sued to overturn the Affordable Care Act, the Obama-era health care law that guaranteed those protections, without proposing a plan with comparable protections.

Some mental health professionals have publicly stated their view that Trump's behavior aligns with the criteria for narcissistic personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, and paranoid personality disorder, according to the DSM-5.

Trump’s manifest grandiosity and disregard for facts, beginning with failure to accept clear evidence about the size of the crowd attending his inauguration, has put mental health professionals in the spotlight from Day One of his presidency.

Psychologists and commentators from all ideological camps early converged on a label of narcissistic personality disorder as the condition that “explains” Trump’s behavior. Among those making this assertion are more than 70,000 mental health professionals who signed a petition warning of Trump's potential dangerousness, despite longstanding professional injunctions against "diagnosing" public figures whom experts have not personally examined. President Donald Trump | Psychology Today

In the eyes of his supporters, Trump possesses extraordinary powers that are wielded for good and against evil. Who cares if he is flawed? So, what if he lacks certain distinctively human qualities? What does it matter that he is rude.

In a 2019 Fox News poll, 1 in 4 Americans reported that they believed “God wanted Donald Trump to become president.” Even in the first months of his administration, evangelical leaders began to see a higher purpose in the Trump presidency. In a public forum in 2017, the Christian televangelist James Robison told Trump: “You are, in fact, an answer to prayer. … I think you have been designed and gifted by God.” Jonathan Cahn, a charismatic New Jersey preacher and the author of best-selling prophetic books, likens Trump to Jehu, the Old Testament king who led ancient Israel away from idolatry. Cahn argues that Trump, like Jehu, is a “flawed vessel” who is being used by God for purposes that go well beyond Trump’s own comprehension.

As I stated earlier, when it comes to my religious beliefs, I'm willing to forego the Scientific Method as a guideline for proof and that's where Trump has found his "in" with millions of people. Through religion.

Donald Trump professes no religious faith. He knows almost nothing about Christianity or any other religion for that matter. He virtually never attends church. He has dedicated his professional life to amassing material wealth and burnishing his fame, bereft of any charitable instincts or sense of the transcendent. Demarcated by three marriages, his personal life reads like a sordid soap opera, filled with sexual scandal and multiple affairs. Nobody has ever mistaken Donald Trump for a choirboy or a righteous man of God.

Yet the man who is arguably the least religious president in American history continues to command supreme support from white evangelical Christians, 84% of whom voted for Trump in the 2020 election. They are his most devoted followers. To the delight of evangelicals, Trump appointed conservative judges who support religious freedom and oppose abortion, and he welcomed evangelical leaders to the table as president, paying them respect and soliciting their views. Trump also shares their worldview — up to a point. He agrees that we live in a fallen world, a dangerous and sinful world full of vicious people. “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God,” evangelicals believe, quoting Romans 3:23. Trump gave expression to the same sentiment in a People magazine interview back in 1981: “Man is the most vicious of all animals, and life is a series of battles, ending in victory or defeat.” The Mass Psychology of Trumpism - New Lines Magazine

There you have it, partially. The brain wants what it wants, and truth can be suspended in the realm of religion and faith. To lump Trump supporters into one category such as CRAZY is too simple. There is so much more at play. But it's true, we gravitate to the familiar and reject what is unfamiliar. If this statement is true, then we should apply the Scientific Method to determine if Trump supporters are LIKE Trump. Is he FAMILIAR to them in his behavior? 

Data suggests our drive to select like-minded others may be far stronger than previously assumed. “We’re arguing that selecting similar others as relationship partners is extremely common — so common and so widespread on so many dimensions that it could be described as a psychological default,” according to Angela Bahns, assistant professor of psychology at Wellesley College. Researchers say the quest for similarity in friends could result in a lack of exposure to other ideas, values, and perspectives. Bahns noted the drive toward similarity presents the drawback of “limited exposure to different ideas and beliefs” along with rewards like “stability of identity, value systems, and ideology.” Her research shows not only do ‘birds of a feather flock together’ but goes one step further to show that ‘birds of a feather find each other before flocking. Study finds our desire for 'like-minded others' is hard-wired | KU News.

When it comes to what one believes as TRUTH several variables come into play. Mathew 6:21, "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." What a person treasures, they will accept facts which support it. Who WE are determine what we believe and what we accept as truth. 

We believe there is no one comparable to the audacious Donald Trump. WRONG. Facts support those who support his antics are like minded, like character, like morals, like minded, like hearted. 

This is not a fact many want to face. I ask you to apply the "Scientific Method" to this idea and see if the evidence will support my statement. If nothing else, it is good practice in objectively looking at facts about Donald Trump and his supporters. Like magnets, opposites repel each other.