Countering the MAGA Cult of Personality
A Homeland Institute poll I conducted found low support for intervening against Iran, as did many other polls. But Trump’s disastrous 2026 Iran War has not had as strong of an immediate effect on polling as it should have, both in regard to Trump and to the war.
There are several reasons for this. First, the average citizen has been insulated from the true economic fallout, which aside from rising gas prices is yet to come. And the releasing of strategic oil reserves has created a cowardly optimism that rising gas prices will be temporary. The true extent of the devastation in Israel and the gulf states is being suppressed by a draconian media blackout. The military might be lying about the true number of dead and injured. And Fox News is pushing North Korean-tier propaganda that the war is going well and that we should trust the Dear Leader.
But the main reason is that MAGA has become a cult of personality. So, how did we get to the point where MAGA firmware updates surpass those of the Covid scam? And where the likes of Mark Levin are exalted above Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Joe Kent?
Lauren Witzkie on Telegram: The filth on the left are telling you the guy on the right isn’t MAGA, isn’t a patriot, isn’t loyal, and hates his own nation. You make the call.
The answer is that humans are hard-wired to better remember feelings than facts. The commonsense advice that people will forget the specifics of what you did for them but will never forget how you made them feel is backed up by scientific studies.
For example, Sharot et al., 2004 found that emotion heightens the feeling of remembering (confidence and vividness) without necessarily improving the objective accuracy for details. Furthermore, Levine and Buck, 2004 found that “people experiencing negative emotions tend to focus in on specific details, while happy people take in a situation more broadly.” This is one reason that witnesses can allege ludicrous facts without actually lying, and thus courts are reluctant to bring charges of perjury, even when one struggles to imagine how a witness could not be intentionally lying.
When Donald Trump came down the escalator, he said things which gave forgotten Americans hope. Sometimes he even did things to help them, which in subjective comparison to Obama and Biden felt like a new golden age even if objectively they were scraps off the table. That Trump promised to build a wall, end the forever wars, deport all illegal migrants, etc. gave people a vague, warm fuzzy sense of hope, which is why he ironically has been able to systematically break those same campaign promises with apparent impunity. Its really no different than libtards voting for Obama a second time after he raised the cost of health insurance after promising to lower it. Both MAGA and the libtards remember how their respective antichrist figure gave them hope, with the specific details which indicate a betrayal fading like sidewalk chalk in the rain.
This is one of many reasons why mass democracy is a poor system of government. Harry Emerson Fosdick may have intended to praise democracy when he said, “Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people.” But it should be taken as a critique because human nature is unreasonably difficult to change. We cannot expect the masses to hold politicians accountable because of their biological and psychological limitations. We shouldn’t be mad at them for how nature made them, but we shouldn’t entrust government to them either.
But delivering good policy to the people by disenfranchising most of them isn’t going to happen anytime soon. So what can be done in the meantime?
Before we answer that, we need to put the abusive MAGA cult of personality into perspective. It is not as big of a problem as it seems.
First, many of the poll reports purportedly showing widespread support for the 2026 Iran War focus in on “MAGA Republicans.” This is not methodologically sound. Not all Republicans are MAGA Republicans, even if the number of Republicans who self-identify as MAGA Republicans jumped from between 50-55% before the war to 63% now. This is almost tantamount to focusing in on what Democrats who self-identify as Democratic Socialists think about any given policy.
There are two ways to win elections: increasing turnout among the base, or wooing centrists. Pre-Trumpian politics focused on pandering to centrists, while post-Trumpian politics show the wisdom of firing up the base to increase turnout. But high agency voters who are willing to change their vote may be making a comeback, but not in a return to moderate centrism.
In 2024, Trump made significant gains among young voters and Hispanics. Young voters don’t want to die for Israel, but they do want an affordable home, and Trump has callously dismissed both concerns. And working-class Hispanics ironically have the most to gain from mass deportations because they compete with illegal migrants the most, while they are indifferent to Israel because of low rates of Zionist heresy among them. Thus, Trump may be as blindsided by a swing in the opposite direction as Kamala was in 2024.
You can fool all of the goyim some of the time, and some of the goyim all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the goyim all of the time.
And there is a psychological trait in the masses which is actually in our favor: a preference for consistency. In his 1978 book Home Style, Richard Fenno drew on an earlier study of his. Fenno observed that Congressmen cultivate a personal style tailored to their district to gain trust and then do not change it in the slightest. Thus, we can use consistency to our advantage.
Tucker Carlson has been remarkably consistent. He may have strayed a little into the paranormal, but his underlying style, and more importantly, his policies, have never changed. Not only does Tucker appear honest, he is. The only time I have doubted his integrity is when he appeared to lie about his CIA connections. But his apparent lying about the CIA was so easily rebutted that I doubt he did so in a calculated manner. My working hypothesis is that he doesn’t walk to talk about something bad which happened and which he may be atoning for. I can’t blame him for that.
Tucker has given people hope, but unlike Trump, in a manner that is not abusive. And he could likely build a coalition of other figures such as Joe Kent, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Thomas Massie who are authentically America First. And because he interviewed Nick Fuentes and Peter Brimelow, it is unlikely that a Tucker administration would cancel our guys. Tucker may disagree with us, but we would be just another segment of the electorate he has to incorporate.
And despite what Trump and Richard Spencer may think, most people don’t like arrogance. Trump’s arrogance will finally catch up to him when it becomes apparent that his vibe-based war planning doesn’t work. The newly minted MAGA Republicans jumped on board because they erroneously perceived that the Iran War was a success, and thus they will jump off as the economic effects hit.
Thus, the best way to counter the MAGA cult of personality is to give them a better personality with better policies to rally around. Let’s press Tucker to run in 2028.
In the meantime, we need to sit back and try to enjoy the spectacle of abandoned voters scourging Trump, the Republicans, and the oligarchs by handing Congress to the Democrats in the midterms. Sadly, we have little to lose with a Democrat Congress after the midterms. We weren’t getting more DOGE cuts, Trump does not seem interested in having Congress pass his tariffs, if the SAVE Act isn’t passed by then it won’t be passed at all, the J6ers are not going to see a single cent of restitution, and most importantly Trump has switched from mass deportations to only deporting criminals. He’s even increasing the number of work visas for big agriculture. We may see Trump impeached and convicted this time around. Then the Left will go to work on his family.
Trump could have saved his country, his family, and himself—but Trump’s ego and Israel’s interests came first.
https://counter-currents.com/2026/03/countering-the-maga-cult-of-personality