Sarah Longwell, a political consultant at the conservative publication The Bulwark, examined why millions of Donald Trump’s supporters continued backing him after he attempted to overturn his defeat in the 2020 presidential election. Her work addresses how voters responded to Trump’s repeated reversals on issues including war and affordability, as well as his conduct surrounding January 6, 2021.

Longwell first described the alternate right-wing media ecosystem that developed over roughly two decades before Trump became president. That ecosystem was built in part on the presumption that the mainstream media is pervasively biased toward liberals. She then used focus groups to examine how that information environment influenced Trump voters. The focus-group material offers qualitative accounts from the participants she interviewed; it does not by itself measure the views of all Trump voters.

“At first, Trump voters—even ones who’d supported him twice—were genuinely shaken,” Longwell wrote. “I did a couple of focus groups six days after January 6, 2021, in the aftermath of Trump supporters violently storming the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, which Trump told them had been rigged.”

One group consisted of women who had voted for Trump in both 2016 and 2020. The other included women who had voted for Trump in 2016 but switched to Joe Biden. In the first group, Jamie from Pennsylvania said she was “appalled” and “shocked” by the attack.

“I realized, but yet I didn’t, if that makes any sense, that there are people out there that could do that,” Jamie said, according to Longwell.

Other participants were similarly critical. Audra from Arizona said, “I think the reason he should be impeached is really just so that he can’t run ever again.” Trump was impeached the following day.

Tina from Pennsylvania, who had moved from Trump to Biden, said: “The windows were being cracked, people were being killed, I don’t understand how this happened like this. And if he’s behind it, they really should impeach him, get rid of it and that’s it.”

“For a brief moment, reality was undeniable, and people’s opinions of Trump became soft and changeable,” Longwell wrote.

She said that this changed rapidly as what she called the “Republican Triangle of Doom” took effect: “the toxic and symbiotic relationship between Republican voters, elected officials, and the right-wing infotainment media.”

“The voters who were horrified got bombarded with whitewashing spin almost instantly,” Longwell wrote. She described conservative influencers and former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) as among those who, in her account, distorted the facts surrounding Trump’s insurrection in ways that validated the existing biases of his supporters.

“Now, some Trump voters understood what happened and never came back,” Longwell wrote. “But the majority of them had spent four years defending Trump—online, at the dinner table, at work. They’d lost friendships over him. So when right-wing media offered them an alternative explanation, they took it. And then their opinions started to harden. Like cement.”

Six months later, Longwell said, the views expressed in her focus groups had shifted sharply. “I did focus groups in July, and Republicans had flipped completely from where they’d been on January 12,” she wrote.

Annette, a 2020 Trump voter from Arizona, said the events had been “100 percent orchestrated from Antifa.” Robert, a two-time Trump voter from Alaska, said, “It’s been shown that they purposely let those people in the building.” He added that January 6 was “all set up by the Democrat Party to make those people look bad.”

Longwell concluded that voters can be particularly susceptible to the first persuasive account they encounter when they lack trusted sources to help them interpret events.

“Without trusted messengers to help them make sense of what’s happening, voters are vulnerable to whoever gets there first with a compelling story,” she wrote. “In our communications environment, public opinion can harden in days or even hours. If you don’t know where or how to talk to people, then you are going to miss every one of those persuasion opportunities.”

In an August interview with AlterNet, Dr. Steven Hassan, a cult expert and author of Combating Cult Mind Control and The Cult of Trump, offered a similar explanation. Hassan argued that Trump supporters rely on a biased information ecosystem that reinforces what he characterized as cult-like support for the president.

“I talk about cults being spread across the entire continuum,” Hassan told AlterNet. “There are a lot of cultish groups, but they give informed consent and encourage people to follow their conscience—they don’t tell people what they can and can’t read, et cetera—all the way to authoritarianism. And I see the people following Trump as largely being mind-controlled through information: through their social media posts, whether on Facebook, Telegram or WhatsApp, or through Fox News.”

Hassan said that voting against one’s perceived self-interest is closely connected to the information sources people use and the communities with which they identify. He cited Joe Rogan as an example, saying that people who strongly follow Rogan may adopt many of his views and could consequently move away from Trump if Rogan turns against him.

“What I’m trying to convey is that we’re living in an age of digital manipulation that’s never been seen before, with people’s personal data being used to silo information—to drive them further left if they’re already progressive-leaning, or further right if they’re already Republican or conservative-leaning,” Hassan said. “And it’s quite strategic in its use of algorithms.”

Hassan added that the issue was not simply an individual’s personality or disposition, but also “the social and information environment people are being subjected to.”

In August, Hassan also discussed what he described as the specific plastic-surgery trend known as “Mar-a-Lago face,” which he said some Trump supporters adopted as a sign of loyalty to the movement. In comments cited by AlterNet, Hassan said his work sought to explain how undue influence operates across a continuum of groups, from ethical, close-knit organizations that permit members to think, question and leave without fear or harassment to authoritarian systems.

“... [W]e were talking about how so many MAGA people are getting plastic surgery, and they all look alike,” Hassan said. He added that if someone is “in a mind control cult, you want to look the right way to fit in [with] that idyllic image of Christian white nationalists.”

The original AlterNet article is available at https://www.alternet.org/trump-maga-lies-sarah-longwell/.