Outside the Beltway

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1. charontwo says:
   Friday, 6 February 2026 at 06:37

   Two forums today?

   “Why/how they love him”

   If the record is this explicit, then the more interesting question is not what Donald Trump has said, but why so many people are able to hear it without recoil. The answer lies less in ignorance than in accommodation. Trump’s language does not arrive in a moral vacuum. It lands in a psychological environment already conditioned to reinterpret transgression as authenticity and entitlement as strength.

   Trump’s political persona has always been organized around grievance. He presents himself as constrained by rules that protect the unworthy, mocked by institutions that no longer deserve authority, and persecuted by elites whose power he claims to resent even as he exercises his own. Research on ressentiment shows that when political identity is shaped by perceived humiliation, moral norms lose their stabilizing function. Behavior that would ordinarily invite condemnation becomes intelligible as retaliation. Offense is no longer a warning sign but a confirmation that the speaker is refusing submission (Kelly, 2019).

   Within this framework, reactions of disgust are not shared; they are inverted. Expressions of moral revulsion toward Trump’s behavior are treated as evidence of fragility, hostility, or cultural alienation. Authoritarian followership research has long documented this tendency. Followers who are dispositionally inclined toward submission interpret criticism of a leader as an attack on group cohesion rather than an appeal to conscience. Emotional dissent is recoded as betrayal, and restraint becomes indistinguishable from weakness (Dean & Altemeyer, 2020).

   …

   Collective narcissism intensifies this resistance to moral accounting. Groups that view themselves as uniquely virtuous yet insufficiently recognized respond to criticism with defensiveness and aggression rather than reflection. Research on collective narcissism shows that admitting wrongdoing by a central figure threatens the group’s self-concept, making denial and normalization psychologically adaptive. In such contexts, protecting the leader becomes inseparable from protecting the group’s sense of moral superiority (Golec de Zavala, 2024).

   Over time, repetition performs its quiet work. What once provoked discomfort becomes familiar, then defensible, and eventually unremarkable. The repeated need to excuse behavior retrains emotional response, dulling moral sensitivity in favor of loyalty. Trump’s language does not corrode support because support has ceased to rest on ethical evaluation. It rests instead on shared grievance, hierarchical belief, and the emotional rewards of belonging to a group that defines itself against those who object.

   Under these conditions, Trump’s remarks do not survive despite their content. They survive because they function as signals, reinforcing the very dispositions that bind his supporters to him. The absence of outrage is not a failure of hearing. It is the result of a system that has learned, deliberately and collectively, how not to flinch.

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