Excellent! And 100% spot on!
— Molly
At Some Point Being Deceived
Becomes Choosing the Lie
Trump supporters: “Trump will make America great again!”
Then what, exactly, is “great” about what he is actually doing to America?
Are Trump supporters simply being deceived? Or do they genuinely support policies that deepen poverty, drive up the cost of living, inflate gas prices, enable scamflation and crony capitalism, funnel public money and government power toward Trump and his allies, send Americans to die in pointless wars, and allow a president to abuse his office for personal profit and political protection on a scale without precedent in American history?
Do they support a president who is systematically attacking elections, the courts, Congress, the free press, independent law enforcement, political opposition, and every institution capable of restraining his power?
And when the movement demands loyalty even through the Epstein scandal, protects Trump from meaningful scrutiny, attacks anyone demanding disclosure, and treats questions involving the sexual exploitation of children as just another partisan inconvenience, how much uglier does this have to get before people stop pretending this is about “making America great”?
The evidence is no longer hidden. It is happening in public. Trump tells people what he intends to do, does it in front of them, and then relies on propaganda, grievance, conspiracy theories, and tribal loyalty to convince his followers that the reality they can see with their own eyes is somehow fake.
At some point, “they were deceived” stops being a complete explanation.
Trump supporters fell for protofascist politics. Period. They were sold a mythology of national decline, internal enemies, betrayal, humiliation, and national restoration through one supposedly indispensable strongman. That is one of the oldest political scams in the fascist playbook.
And now the movement has advanced beyond rhetoric. Trump is concentrating power, demanding personal loyalty from government institutions, attacking independent centers of authority, using the state against political enemies, attempting to control elections, threatening the press, defying legal restraints, rewarding loyalists, and treating the presidency as an instrument of personal wealth, revenge, and permanent political power.
Trump looks less like a normal American president with every passing day and more like the kind of leader Americans were once taught to recognize as a warning.
The Mussolini comparison is no longer rhetorical excess. The Stalin comparison speaks to something equally disturbing: Trump’s totalitarian instinct and his obsession with enemies, personal loyalty, historical revision, institutional submission, and the idea that the leader himself should stand above every independent source of truth, law, or authority.
Calling Trumpism merely “authoritarian” at this point is becoming intellectually empty. Authoritarianism describes some of the methods, but the ambition is totalitarian.
Trump loves screaming “communist” and “socialist” at his enemies, even though true communism has never actually happened anywhere on this planet, Stalinism was totalitarianism rather than communism, and Hitler was no socialist. Yet Trump behaves more like those totalitarian dictators than any of the people he accuses.
The ugliest question is no longer whether Trump supporters were fooled at the beginning. It is how much evidence they can see, how much corruption they can excuse, how much cruelty they can normalize, and how many democratic restraints they can watch him destroy before continued support becomes something more than mere deception.
The playbook is old, and although the scapegoats change, the lie stays the same: manufacture an internal enemy, convince people that only one strongman can save them, and then demand more power in the name of national survival.
At some point, being deceived becomes choosing the lie. And when people knowingly defend the scapegoating, excuse the corruption, surrender democratic restraints, and demand more power for the strongman anyway, history has a name for the politics they are participating in:
Fascism.
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