Mona Charen Article

 Here is a good  article, Trumpism Triumphant - The Bulwark, by Mona Charen.  Charen is a conservative columnist who has long been warning about the delusions of those who jumped on the Trump train.  The whole thing is worth reading.  Here are some excerpts:

"There’s a theory that people have rallied to Trump and alternative news sources because they feel disrespected by the mainstream, liberal-leaning press. They bristle at the condescension of liberals who, they believe, despise country music, guns, and Cracker Barrel. There is some truth in this, but my experience with conservatives makes me skeptical of that as a complete explanation. Sure, the urban/rural divide is real—and not limited to the United States—but resentment of elites has always been with us. From suspicion of the First Bank of the United States among the Jeffersonians to the populist movement of the 1890s, “coastal elites” have always been despised by some. But it didn’t drive people into abject lunacy in the past, or at least, not on the scale we see today."

"The resentment motive can’t account for our volume of crazy. A theme that unified these conspiracy-minded people was a sense of superiority—not inferiority. They felt that they had access to the hidden truth that the deluded masses didn’t understand."

"...After decades of this diet, and with an enormous turbo-charge from Trump, the conspiracists are in the driver’s seat of the Republican party. ....This is profoundly worrying, because, let’s face it, they’ve suspended their critical faculties. Trump spent months saying mail-in ballots were ripe for fraud. He openly declared that he would not accept the legitimacy of any election he lost. He pressured friendly state legislatures, like Pennsylvania’s, not to count mail ballots until election day so that he could weave a story of victory if he did well with in-person voting on Election night, knowing that the count for mail ballots would take longer"

"...there are the polls showing that shocking numbers of rank-and-file Republicans are buying this big lie. A YouGov/Economist poll found that 73 percent of Republicans had little or no confidence that the election was conducted fairly. A Morning Consult/Politico survey found that 67 percent of Republicans said the election was probably or definitely not free and fair. And a Monmouth University poll found that 75 percent of Republicans were “not too confident” or “not at all confident” that the 2020 election was conducted fairly and accurately. Sixty-four Republican members of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives have signed a letter asking that members of Congress throw out Pennsylvania’s slate of electors."

"...We have now reached the stage where it isn’t just that Republicans fail to rebuke Trump. It isn’t just that Republicans are frightened into silence by fear of the base. We are now at the stage when a critical mass of the Republican party has adopted Trump’s disordered personality for its own."