I have asked how people that I at one time considered rational could fall for the BS of Donny and his vanity presidency….

While “normalization” of deviance may be the most powerful, and insidious, manner of steering a nation off his cliff, Trump has also utilized more obvious and familiar strategies in his battles against thought. Borrowing a familiar political playbook from our earlier ominous history, Trump has relentlessly vilified an “out group” as scapegoats for all the evils of the world while cultivating a separate supportive clique of “in-crowd” humans who imagine themselves both special and put-upon.

He also repeatedly exploits fear with lies, including made-up stories about pet-eating Haitian immigrants, and a “burning” Portland, Oregon (with Republicans using protest photos from South America). “Things are terrible here. We won’t have a country left,” he has said in his campaigns. Kahneman and research partner Amos Tversky found that people experience the emotional pain of a loss about twice as strongly as the pleasure of a gain. Trump’s repeated apocalyptic warnings, as well as dwelling on specific gruesome crimes, speak to the primitive brain far more effectively than facts revealing that crime is decreasing and the nation is safer, Kahneman noted.

https://newrepublic.com/article/201224/trump-psychology-collaborator-trap-fascism

I saw this article and just had to work it into rotation here on IST.

The first and second Trump administrations have provoked markedly different critical reactions. The shock of 2016 and its aftermath saw a wave of liberal anxiety about the fate of objective knowledge, not only in the US but also in Britain, where the Brexit referendum that year had been won by a campaign that misrepresented key facts and figures. A rich lexicon soon arose to describe this epistemic breakdown. Oxford Dictionaries declared “post-truth” their 2016 word of the year; Merriam-Webster’s was “surreal”. The scourge of “fake news”, pumped out by online bots and Russian troll farms, suggested that the authority of professional journalism had been fatally damaged by the rise of social media. And when presidential counsellor Kellyanne Conway coined the phrase “alternative facts” a few days after Trump’s inauguration in early 2017, the mendacity of the incoming administration appeared to be all but official.

The truth panic had the unwelcome side-effect of emboldening those it sought to oppose. “Fake” was one of Trump’s favourite slap-downs, especially to news outlets that reported unwelcome facts about him and his associates. A booming Maga media further amplified the president’s lies and denials. The tools of liberal expertise appeared powerless to hold such brazen duplicity to account. A touchstone of the moment was the German-born writer and philosopher Hannah Arendt, who observed in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism that “the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction … no longer exists.

In 2025, the denunciations have a different flavour. To many of us, the central problem is that we live not so much in a time of lies as one of stupidity. This diagnosis has credibility across the political spectrum. In January, the centrist columnist David Brooks wrote a column for the New York Times titled “The Six Principles of Stupidity”. The new administration, he wrote, was “behaving in a way that ignores the question: What would happen next?”

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/oct/02/critique-pure-stupidity-understanding-donald-trump-2

How much more will the people accept before they start down a road to replacement?

Is there a ‘fix’ for such stupidity?

Only one answer comes to my mind….”Can’t Fix Stupid”

I Read, I Write, You Know

“Lego ergo scribo”