The High Price of Devotion to Donald Trump

On Easter Sunday, the president posted something monstrous. His supporters said nothing. They never do anymore. And that silence has a cost.

On Easter Sunday morning, as Christians across America and around the world celebrated the Resurrection, the President of the United States posted this on social media:

“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH. Praise be to Allah.”

Read it again. Let it sink in.

A sitting American president, on the holiest day of the Christian year, gloating in advance over the destruction of civilian infrastructure in a country we are at war with—a war he started—mocking the faith of the people about to die, and doing all of it in the language of a drunk at 2 a.m. in a bar.

And from the Republican Party of the United States—from its senators, its congressmen, its governors, its evangelical supporters, the people who spent eight years screaming that Barack Obama wasn’t sufficiently reverent or dignified for the office of the presidency—silence. Total, familiar, practiced silence.

That silence is what this column is about. Not Trump. We know exactly who Donald Trump is. He tells us every day. This is about the price many of his supporters have paid for their devotion, and the trap they cannot escape.

The choice

From the moment Donald Trump came down that escalator in June 2015, he imposed a choice on every American. Not a political choice. A moral one. Because what Trump brought into our politics, with his ferocious demagogic energy and talent, was cruelty.

Cruelty toward immigrants. Cruelty toward opponents. Cruelty toward the weak, the foreign, the different. Trump has made the dehumanization of other people the beating heart of his political appeal.

In those early years, a person could perhaps still draw the distinction. I don’t like the way he talks, but I love what he stands for. People said it all the time. Many even believed it. They told themselves they could take the policies and leave the poison.

But here is what Trump understood—what he has always understood—about the bargain he was offering: you couldn’t really make that move. It turns out that when it comes to the Trump political enterprise, you can’t buy the ticket and complain about the ride. Because the cruelty wasn’t incidental to what he was selling. The cruelty was the product.

There’s a glee in Trump’s cruelty. You can see it. He loves to lash and lance and trash his political opponents—“like nobody has ever seen before,” as he’d say. Research in political psychology has documented what most of us already sensed: “partisan schadenfreude”—the pleasure taken in the suffering of your political opponents—has become a core feature of Trumpism. Scholars have found that a substantial fraction of the American public will vote for a candidate precisely because he promises to harm the other side.

“Owning the libs” isn’t a guilty pleasure. It’s the whole point. It’s what the base is buying.

And here’s the thing about taking your first hit of Trump’s hard stuff: it asks for a second.

Hannah Arendt, writing about the psychology of complicity in authoritarian regimes, identified what she called the “lesser evil” trap—the way that regimes condition ordinary people into complicity by implementing horrors incrementally, so that each new outrage is only slightly worse than the last, and each new compromise feels marginally defensible. She showed, with merciless precision, how those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that it was evil they chose in the first place. You defend yourself to yourself by saying you don’t really go along with the worst of it. You defend yourself to others by saying you don’t really pay attention to what he says.

And then one day you’re sitting in church on Easter Sunday and your president is posting “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards” in anticipation of bombing a country’s power grid, and you say nothing, because you have been saying nothing, in graduated increments, for ten years, and the path back has disappeared.

The real “TDS”

This is a fundamental feature of human moral psychology, well-documented and ancient. But Trump exploits it with a genuine genius for this kind of politics. He knew, from the beginning, that once you’d cheered a little cruelty, laughed at a little racism, you’d defend it. And once you’d defended it, you’d need more of it—because he has shaped the MAGA movement to understand that the cruelty is also the proof that their side is winning, and that winning is the whole point of a tribal politics in which the other side has been cast as your existential enemy.

The frisson of his viciousness becomes a drug. And like any drug, tolerance builds. Yesterday’s outrage is today’s baseline.

It’s a politics as old as human nature. Dante understood it. He constructed his Inferno carefully, thoughtfully, reserving the deepest circles of Hell not for the violent but for the treacherous—those who betrayed their own conscience, their own obligations, their own capacity for moral judgment. The murderer, Dante thought, at least acted. The traitor chose, deliberately and repeatedly, not to. Senator after senator, pastor after pastor, official after official—people who know exactly who Trump is, because he tells them every day—have made that choice, repeated it, and compounded it, until the choice is no longer really a choice at all. It is just who they are now.

There is a term MAGA has invented to dismiss critics, throwing it at anyone who opens their eyes, sees what is in front of us every day, and calls it by its proper name. I hear it all the time: Trump Derangement Syndrome. The implication is that those of us who find this presidency an ongoing catastrophe for American decency have lost our minds.

I’d suggest the diagnosis runs the other way. The real TDS syndrome is Trump Devotion Syndrome: the state of a person who has taken so much of the drug that the Easter Sunday post epitomizes—the profanity, the gloating, the mock-piety, the advance celebration of civilian death—that it doesn’t seem anything other than normal to them. They read it and feel nothing, or maybe feel a small dark thrill, or type out three words of praise and moves on with their day.

That silence isn’t neutrality. It never was.

The price of devotion to Donald Trump is your moral self. People have been paying it, installment by installment, for a decade now. On Easter Sunday morning, you could see exactly what they have bought, and exactly what it cost.

—Terry