Donald Trump’s base is falling apart along with him
Perhaps the biggest thing – or maybe the only thing – that the former guy has in common with virtually every last one of his supporters – particularly the ones who will never abandon him no matter what, is the perception of victimhood. They’re angry, confused losers who won’t look objectively about why they’ve fallen short in life, because it’s a lot easier to blame all of the people that they’ve never really cared for in the first place – many of them the same people that Donald Trump has always despised. To be fair, Donald Trump also sees them all as easy marks, which is why he’s never run to the rescue of any of the domestic terrorists that committed crimes on his behalf.
As we’ve seen the worst perpetrators of Jan 6 get sentenced for their idiotic decision to commit crimes in the former guy’s name, without Trump even attempting to offer legal services to any of them, we’ve also seen them think twice before trying an organized protest on Trump’s behalf again – even the crowds at Trump’s indictments have been kept to a minimum since then. On Wednesday, a man with a long history of making online threats of violence dared FBI agents to stop him from assassinating the president during a visit to Utah. To make a long story short, they did, walking in on an active shooter incident and eliminating the suspect.
Donald Trump has been inciting threats to an even worse degree since January 6, but the numbers of people willing to commit actual violence in his name was always fairly low to begin with. This was always an idiotic and desperate line of attack but this particular episode and its reverberations throughout the right-wing community is liable to make it less likely that he can count on violently armed supporters to run to his rescue – they don’t want to meet the same fate.
James Sullivan is the assistant editor of Brain World Magazine and an advocate of science-based policy making