MAGA Has Trump Devotion Syndrome
Our conservative friends and loved ones misapply the pejorative Trump Derangement Syndrome at our nation's peril.
MAGA uses the phrase Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) to reject evidence of Trump’s moral and political failings—asserting that the president’s critics are too blinded by hate to assess him fairly. It’s a rhetorical trick so powerful that Fox propagandists make sure to highlight it for their audiences, as Harris Faulkner did this week when she interviewed a psychotherapist about the TDS he was seeing in his practice.
But to believe that TDS exists, and is an irrational response, you have to be ignorant of a lot of factual information—like that Trump is the most corrupt president ever, or that he is regularly violating the Constitution, or that he is a violent sexual predator, or that he is extrajudicially murdering people in the Carribean.
Right wing media is a Trump protection racket. It keeps its audiences in the dark on Trump’s failings and works overtime to generate good will towards him.
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In reality, MAGA identifies with Trump so much that they are unable to assess him fairly. They suffer from a mass Trump Devotion Syndrome that interacts with their partisan identities in a way that walls them off from factual evidence about the world. And I’ve got the research to prove it.
TDS Causes MAGA to Reject Facts, Embrace Lies
Research shows us how MAGA’s political identity is targeted by the media they consume, making them more likely to reject factual reporting and favor (and spread) fake news. They identify strongly with Trump. As a result of their partisan MAGA identity they gain community with others, a sense of control over an unpredictable world, and a lens through which to comprehend unsettling events. All Americans have these psychological needs for comprehension, community, and control—what politics and communication scholar Dannagal Goldthwaite Young calls the Three C’s.1
These needs are consistently hyper-targeted within one subset of our information eco-system, MAGA media.
MAGA media keeps its audience in a constant state of political conflict, creating a sense of existential threats to their “team” in a way that doesn’t occur in corporate media or non-profit public interest journalism.
…researchers say people most likely to spread misinformation are Republicans, i.e., conservatives, but mainly only under certain conditions. “They only do it when provoked,” says Pechmann. “That’s where they differ. Both liberals and conservatives have a baseline tendency to do this, but we see these big spikes only among the Republicans when they’re in a situation that feels like there is political conflict. When they’re in a competitive situation, Republicans want to win—almost at any cost.”2
By reinforcing and heightening a sense of threat, news media can drive audiences further into an echo chamber. This occurs within the conservative media ecosystem moreso than anywhere else, meaning MAGA is more likely than the rest of us to seek out like-minded content when their political identity is made to stand out for them.3
Studies show that MAGA partisans rely more heavily on cognitive shortcuts like emotions and intuition, which increases the potential for conservative media to reinforce beliefs.4 And they are more responsive than non-MAGA folks to the statements of political elites, like the pundits and politicians they see on Fox News and hear on right wing radio.5
When MAGA sees factual reporting on Trump’s lies and corruption, they instantly write it off because of something called hostile media effect, a cognitive error that occurs when hyper-partisan viewers perceive objective political facts as biased against their team.6
So if they happen to tune into Chris Hayes on MSNBC using factual reporting to outline Trump’s corruption, they reject the facts because they aren’t coming from their team. They see the facts themselves as biased against them.
Study after study shows that conservatives are more susceptible to these phenomenon and therefore more likely to spread fake news and avoid evidence that disagrees with them.7 It becomes a vicious cycle. As MAGA becomes harder to please they want their favorite pundits and meme factories on Twitter and Truth Social to provide content that reinforces their beliefs even more.8
As outrage media continues to give MAGA a sense that their entire way of life is under threat, their views become more extreme.9
To be clear, these phenomena affect everyone suffering under the US media ecosystem. Our media system has become so fragmented that hyper-partisans of all stripes can seek out niche, affirming sources.
Among those who are highly attentive to politics, being able to select like-minded news media is associated with greater partisan-ideological alignment, such that highly politically engaged Democrats are more liberal as their media options increase, and highly engaged Republicans are more conservative.10
But scholars consistently find the effects more pronounced amongst right-leaning partisans. That’s a huge problem when the Democratic party is still interested in democracy and voting rights and the MAGA Republican party is violating the Constitution and lying about elections to pass hundreds of voter suppression laws in states across the country.
But there’s hope. A study showed that when Fox viewers tuned into CNN for a month they knew more facts about politics and their views became less extreme. If we can break MAGA’s devotion to information sources that generate TDS, we might be able to stop them from thinking everyone else is so deranged.
So let’s get MAGA some healthier media diets. We all deserve to be arguing over the issues of the day and the solutions to our problems from a shared reality, not one purposely created to outright manipulate the population.
Check out my lists on Bluesky to find tons of pro-democracy, fact-based newsrooms and experts. And don’t keep them to yourself. Share with a MAGA loved one so we can get our nation back to arguing about politics based on reality, not the propaganda that’s meant to divide us.
Here’s a video version of this post that you can spread on social media (Instagram and YouTube, too):
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