Good comment I read this morning:
"Of course he does. Trump is not merely an unconventional politician; he presides over a constituency that has fused its sense of self to his fortunes. They are not defending a campaign or a platform; they are defending the mirror in which they believe they see themselves. This is why every revelation that ought to disgrace him instead becomes an opportunity for them to rearrange their moral furniture. Evidence does not provoke reconsideration; it invites reinterpretation. They do not break with him when confronted with the indefensible; they simply drag their standards down to meet him.So the nation waits, again and again, for the mythical “bombshell” that will supposedly end the enchantment. It never arrives. The people who long ago gave their judgment over to a leader do not return it when the stakes rise. They double down. They sanctify. They make excuses they would never tolerate from their own children.And now we find ourselves in the bleak territory where even the boundaries of decency must be redrawn to protect him. Megyn Kelly, once held up as the sensible face of conservative media, felt compelled to soothe the public with the grisly assurance that Epstein “preferred” fifteen-year-olds, as if the comparison with eight-year-olds were a meaningful form of moral accounting. This is not commentary. This is the corrosion that begins once a movement decides that the leader must always be innocent and that the world must rearrange itself accordingly.There is no mystery here. Cults behave this way because they must. Trump does not attract supporters so much as he absorbs them, and once absorbed, they will defend anything, not because the act is defensible, but because they cannot imagine themselves apart from the man who committed it."
"Of course he does. Trump is not merely an unconventional politician; he presides over a constituency that has fused its sense of self to his fortunes. They are not defending a campaign or a platform; they are defending the mirror in which they believe they see themselves. This is why every revelation that ought to disgrace him instead becomes an opportunity for them to rearrange their moral furniture. Evidence does not provoke reconsideration; it invites reinterpretation. They do not break with him when confronted with the indefensible; they simply drag their standards down to meet him.So the nation waits, again and again, for the mythical “bombshell” that will supposedly end the enchantment. It never arrives. The people who long ago gave their judgment over to a leader do not return it when the stakes rise. They double down. They sanctify. They make excuses they would never tolerate from their own children.And now we find ourselves in the bleak territory where even the boundaries of decency must be redrawn to protect him. Megyn Kelly, once held up as the sensible face of conservative media, felt compelled to soothe the public with the grisly assurance that Epstein “preferred” fifteen-year-olds, as if the comparison with eight-year-olds were a meaningful form of moral accounting. This is not commentary. This is the corrosion that begins once a movement decides that the leader must always be innocent and that the world must rearrange itself accordingly.There is no mystery here. Cults behave this way because they must. Trump does not attract supporters so much as he absorbs them, and once absorbed, they will defend anything, not because the act is defensible, but because they cannot imagine themselves apart from the man who committed it."
