How Donald Trump Mobilizes His Supporters
Some may believe that Donald Trump’s recent attacks on , , , the across parties, devoted , and even indicate a desperate candidate. This would be incorrect, as this strategy of spreading conspiracy theories is a long-standing tactic. His goal has always been to appear invincible, never acknowledging mistakes and demonizing perceived threats. There is a method to Donald Trump’s dangerous pattern of false accusations, a pattern predicted in Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer, which highlighted the effectiveness of division in fueling mass movements throughout history.
At a campaign rally in Pennsylvania this weekend commemorating his survival from a July assassination attempt there, Donald Trump, , , and others repeated false claims that Democrats were responsible for that attack. At the same time, Trump and his allies made false accusations about the Biden/Harris Administration’s lack of response to victims of last week’s . This is despite the strong praise for FEMA and the Biden/Harris Administration’s swift response to disaster victims coming from top Republican leaders, including Governors, Senators, and mayors from the affected states of , North Carolina, and .
Trump used another strategy of demonizing innocent parties during the presidential debate, falsely claiming that illegal Haitian immigrants are stealing neighbors’ pets to kill and eat them. Despite denials from the mayor and of Springfield, Ohio, as well as denials from , and even the of that state; Trump has continued to insist that his embrace of a now-debunked internet hoax was justified, and that all town residents and officials who disagree with him are wrong. This mirrored his well-publicized accusation of immigrants “,” a far cry from the “our nation is a nation of immigrants…our strength comes from our immigrant heritage and our capacity to welcome those from other lands.”
During a New Hampshire political rally in 2015, an attendee shouted an anti-Muslim slur. I told Trump immediately afterwards on a phone call that by not correcting her, he missed a “McCain Moment” reminding him how Senator John McCain corrected a misguided defamatory Muslim slur directed towards his campaign rival Senator Barack Obama. “Jeff, I don’t care,” he told me. “It’s working, and I can’t say it was a mistake for me to churn things up. Plus, I don’t know how the crowd would react to me.” In 2016, when he falsely attacked the Ford Motor Company for transferring jobs to Mexico, he gave me the same excuse: it’s working.
Throughout his adult life, Trump has preferred to double down on falsehoods rather than admitting to a mistake—whether his assertions during his first campaign that Muslims in Jersey City were cheering the Sept. 11, 2001, attack; or his false vilification of “,” calling for the execution of innocent Black teenagers for a crime proved to be committed by someone else. As one of the loudest voices of the “birther” movement, Trump’s constant lies in peddling conspiracy theories over Barack Obama’s citizenship helped keep him in the headlines even after most on the issue.
Writing in 1951, Hoffer explained how demagogues trigger mass movements of fear and anger by convincing their followers that their lives have been ruined by “others.” The demagogues convince their followers that they can only reclaim their rightful standard of living through bonding together against those “others,” surrendering their individual moral judgment to evaluate the truth to the mobs in a process he called “self-renunciation.” Hoffer explained that such mass movements disparage the present, worship a romanticized image of the past, and project a vague glorification of the future.
Yale historian Timothy Snyder’s new book explains how institutions of government can protect human rights while his 2017 book explains how demagogues succeed in eroding those pillars of society to be replaced by a tyrant. In a classic 1964 Harper’s essay, historian Richard Hofstadter warned of the recurrent pattern of apocalyptic and absolutistic frameworks denigrating neighbors and societal institutions with hostility as the in American politics.
In Hoffer’s words “The radical and the reactionary loathe the present.” Hoffer insists that such movements require the fabrication of villains even more than they need a god. Two years later, Yale’s mass communication researcher Carl Hovland’s studies showed how the constant repetition of unfounded accusations become as the truth in what he labeled the Seventy years ago, the true believer’s susceptibility to the sleeper effect warned us of the power of Trump’s methods and messages today.