I believe that I first became aware of the existence of Donald Trump when he appeared on the cover of People Magazine for the June 9, 1990 issue. This cover story focused on his financial troubles at the time, highlighting the significant debt he was dealing with, which was a major setback for his business ventures and personal life​.

Or maybe it was later. Who knows.

I do remember that when I did become aware of him, he struck me as the poster child for the “Ugly American,” someone who is brash, loud, self-absorbed, culturally ignorant, and has poor taste. Truthfully, I never thought about him much, and I’m glad to say that I’ve never seen a single episode of “The Apprentice” (just like I’ve never seen a single episode of any Kardashian show). Occasionally I took note of him — such as when he took out his full page ad against the Central Park Five or when he went all in on the Birther controversy — but mostly I ignored him.

I did laugh, I must admit, when Seth Meyers said that he thought Trump would not be running as a Democrat or a Republican but “as a joke” while hosting the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

It turns out the joke was on us.

When Trump actually became the President of the United States, I was flabbergasted. He turned out to be a worse President than even most of us had predicted. Honestly, I never thought he would last four years, because he is such a lazy fuck. I thought the work would kill him.

Almost immediately I (and others) recognized that the election of Trump was a giant FU to the rest of us, those of us who aren’t aggrieved by immigrants  or diversity or women having equal pay or gays  being allowed to marry. It was a giant FU to all of us.

I would have thought that four years of this guy would have been enough for conservatives and evangelicals to appease some of their grievances, but it clearly hasn’t been. They appear to be just as aggrieved as they ever were.

The first poll results are starting to roll in after Trump’s conviction in 34 counts in a Manhattan courtroom, and as expected, there are just about as many American voters who think that Trump was convicted in a political show trial as there are people who believe that he was legitimately convicted in a court of law.

There are some indications that among independents and voters at the margins, this might dent Trump a little bit. The proposed debate on June 27 could be critical for both candidates, especially if Trump comes forth with his usual word salad. Biden and his advisors will have to prepare very carefully for whatever kind of nonsense and blatant lies that Trump is likely to peddle. (Trump does have the salesman’s ability to change the subject, which can be tricky.)

But here is the point: about six months or so into the current election season, half of this country still thinks that this unhinged lunatic is their preferred candidate for President of the United States.

I have never been so disappointed in my country in my life.

Like many of you, I have thought a lot about what this half of America likes about this guy. I mean his entire platform, his entire program, is about vengeance. There isn’t even a pretense now that he wants to make life better for ordinary Americans.

This cohort seems mostly to love his giant “fuck you” to political correctness. They seem to be a grievance filled cohort of whiners and complainers, a “basket of deplorables,” if you will. 

But what filled them with so many grievances? Well, the answer is Fox News and right wing talk radio. We’re talking Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson and Rush Limbaugh and many others, with Rupert Murdoch and his family funding much of the disinformation. Since the 1987 demise of the fairness doctrine, these sources have been filling the airwaves with rage, telling us all (or especially white, rural men) who is to blame for our problems, and whom we should be angry at, and whom we should hate.

Simple as that.

To demonstrate this phenomenon, author and filmmaker Jen Senko documented the transformation of her own father from a moderate pro-union liberal into a rage-filled conservative, in The Brainwashing of my Dad, after falling under the spell of Rush Limbaugh.

As early as 2004, the journalist Thomas Frank documented the transformation of politics in his native Kansas by addressing the question of why so many of the citizens there voted against their own interest. In What’s the Matter with Kansas Frank noted that the discussion there has shifted from basic economic and populist issues to discussions of the hot button issues of abortion and gay marriage.

Back in 2015, the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild “embedded” herself with Tea Party supporters in Lake Charles, Louisiana to find the answer to a similar question: why is there little support for environmental regulation in an area that has been devastated by petrochemical pollution? In Strangers in their Own Land Hochschild found that many of these people believe that women, immigrants, and racial minorities have been “cutting in line” at the expense of rural white folk, and especially men, and that is more important to them than environmental regulation.

More recently, the historian Kristen Kobes du Mez wrote the book “Jesus and John Wayne,” in which she argues that there is a long history of militant patriarchy in the evangelical movement, demonstrated in part by the conservative Christian love affair with John Wayne, a man who was married three times and divorced twice, and who had several high-profile affairs. This infatuation has been transferred to Donald Trump, a man who embodies all of the seven deadly sins.

The belief system that today’s Christian evangelicals pursue is definitely not the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount — compassion for the marginalized, healing of the sick, confrontation of religious hypocrisy — but much more like the God of the Old Testament — vengeful, jealous, authoritarian, frequently abusive.

One would think that once the mechanisms of propaganda have been exposed — and they were exposed a long time ago — that people would stop adopting clearly false beliefs. Once the machinery of The Wizard of Oz was exposed, the spell was broken. You would think the same would be true with Trump.

But there is no deception like self-deception.

Consider all the cognitive gymnastics that Trump supporters have had to engage in to keep supporting this guy while also claiming they believe in Jesus Christ.

• First, they had to ignore all of the morally supercilious things they had to say about Bill Clinton, a man who — despite his obvious moral failings — has not gotten divorced, has only had one child with one woman, and is not a congenital liar.
• Second, they had to ignore that Trump embodies essentially all of the seven deadly sins.
• Then they had to ignore that Trump is not a Christian and doesn’t know anything about the Bible and can’t  quote a single Bible verse.
• Then they had to ignore Trump’s “grab them by the pussy” Access Hollywood tape.
• Then they had to ignore all of Trump’s obvious race-baiting and his equalizing both sides in the Charlottesville episode.
• Then they had to ignore Trump’s obvious collusion with the Russians during the 2016 election, and his glorification of “strongmen” like Putin and Kim Jong Il.
• Then they had to ignore Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic, and the literally hundreds of thousands of lives that Trump was willing to sacrifice for his own ego.
• Then they had to ignore Trump’s attempt to bribe Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into investigating Hunter Biden, which led to Trump’s first impeachment.
• Then they had to ignore the January 6th insurrection, and Trump’s blatant attempts to stay in power.
• Then they had to ignore the 63½ court losses for Trump in trying to overturn the election.
• Then they had to ignore the legal verdicts against Trump, including the two defamation cases with E. Jean Carroll, the gigantic fraud verdict prosecuted by the Attorney General of New York, and the criminal conviction of the Trump organization, also in New York.
• Now, they have to ignore the criminal conviction on 34 counts, all related to Trump’s attempt to engage in election interference by burying the story of both Stormy Daniels and Karen MacDougall right before the 2016 election.
• Now, they have to ignore the further indictments in D.C. (insurrection), Florida (mishandling of classified documents) and Georgia (election interference). 
• And, they have to ignore that Trump’s reason for wanting to be re-elected is only to engage in a revenge tour (and nothing to do with improving the lives of American citizens), and that he has essentially announced that he wants to be the dictator of the United States.

To demonstrate how absurd Trump’s fabrications are, just the other day Trump claimed that he had never said “lock her up” about Hillary Clinton, even though there are literally hundreds of video clips of him saying exactly that in the public domain.

To justify their support for Trump, evangelicals have had to reach for absurd comparisons, such as comparing Trump with King Cyrus of the Persians, whose defeat of the Babylonians had the unintended consequence of allowing some of the Isrealites to return to their homeland. 

And all of this so that they can “own the libs.”

At some point, the infatuation with Trump will break. At that point, our country may also be broken, or if we’re lucky, it will still be intact. In any case, Republicans are likely to discover that — having abandoned every belief system that they claimed to cherish — that whatever moral authority that they once had has completely evaporated.

And I’m sorry, but Trump’s supporters will never be rehabilitated in my eyes. As one well-known meme goes, it’s no longer about his character, it is now all about our character.