Subject: Re: Trump's Truth
The proper way to understand his appeal isn't by studying normal voter behavior. It's by studying cults.

I think that's wrong. Or at best, it's woefully incomplete.

The proper way to understand his appeal is to recognize that most Republicans, and certainly most of Trump's base, dislikes Democrats. They abhor what they perceive to be Democratic policies, values, and priorities. They believe Democrats have corrupt motives and malicious intent. They believe that Democrats similarly hate their values, interests, culture and choices. They believe Democrats cannot be trusted with power, and that if they gain power they will use it corruptly and to accomplish bad ends.

They don't believe that these indictments are revealing anything about Trump. They believe these indictments reveal how awful Democrats are.

It's not a cult - it's just basic in-group vs. out-group. The Democrats (the out-group to Republicans) have taken an action that will hurt a prominent member of their in-group. So the in-group rallies around them. Plus, since the action is one that should carry a stigma, it increases enormously the salience of rallying around the in-group member as a demonstration of in-group loyalty - in the absence of the attack, people might have different reasons for supporting different members of the in-group, but in the fact of the attack only in-group loyalty can justify that support.

I think Democrats are fooling themselves if they believe that their own reactions would be significantly different. I know we'd like to believe that we would act differently - but I kind of doubt it. Had Whitewater managed to come up with indictable offenses, rather than a sex scandal, it's hard to see Democrats throwing Bill Clinton over the side, either. Had the Attorney General of Arkansas in 1998 been a Republican, and brought a perjury indictment against Bill Clinton, you would see most Democrats lambasting that as a politically motivated unjustified persecution as well.