Trump trained his MAGA base ‘to view reality as the crisis and violence as the solution’: report
Donald Trump has brainwashed his "Make America Great Again" base into rejecting reality and endorsing political violence, according to a new analysis published by The Washington Post.
Trump has continued to push his "Big Lie" of election fraud that incited the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
"Likewise, the crooked and highly partisan Unselect Committee of political hacks looking into the January 6th protest of the Election should spend their time studying the Election Fraud of 2020, also known as the Crime of Century," Trump said in a statement released Saturday.
Later that day, Trump tried to allege there was "massive election fraud," but awkwardly used a double negative that suggested he thinks he is "either very stupid or very corrupt."
READ MORE: Trump has raised an army of 21 million ‘committed insurrectionists’ — and they crave bloodshed
"Trump’s assertions about the election are some mix of self-care and delusion. He wants to believe he didn’t lose the election he lost, casting his behavior over the past 12 months with the sort of pathos that was obvious to outside observers in his speech at Mar-a-Lago. But he seems also to have convinced himself that maybe something did go wrong somewhere, which allows him to believe that his reaction isn’t solely about his ego. A former White House staffer told CNN last month that Trump at first knew Biden had won but then readily allowed himself to be convinced otherwise," Philip Bump wrote for The Post.
Bump noted a new bombshell report on how Trump raised an army of 21 million "committed insurrectionists."
"In a lengthy article for the Atlantic, Barton Gellman outlines how Trump’s delusion has swelled to encompass much of his party. Gellman staked out an important position on Trump’s willingness to subvert the election when he wrote an article for that magazine shortly before the 2020 contest in which he outlined a number of the paths Trump eventually explored for trying to wrench a victory from his loss. Now, he writes that Trump and his allies are both unchastened from the aftermath of the election and preparing to do better next time," Bump reported.
"At no point in time has Trump expressed any serious concern about the risk of right-wing political violence centered on the 2020 election. Even on Jan. 6, he patted the rioters on the head as he encouraged them to go home in one of his last social media posts before Twitter and Facebook decided that the risk he might foment more violence outweighed the value of extending him a platform. The riot on Jan. 6 was always inextricably downstream from Trump’s rhetoric and calls to action. Trump roused the rabble and then cheered the result," he explained. "The point is not that this all happened. It’s that it is happening. That, 11 months after the riot, Trump is saying the same things to the same people and getting a warm response. That he’s there at Mar-a-Lago making the same increasingly ludicrous claims to the same people in the same bubble even as he mulls a 2024 run and makes moves to continue to reshape the GOP. That’s the point."
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Bump noted Trump's absurd delusion that the insurrection actually took place on election day, when voters chose Joe Biden.
"It’s self-serving nonsense, in the way that so much of what Trump says is. But it’s also an encouragement, yet again, to view reality as the crisis and violence as the solution," he wrote.
Read the full analysis.