One thing puzzled me throughout 2025: not that millions voted for a manifestly incompetent authoritarian, but that they did so while presenting it as wisdom, courage—even salvation.

Trump’s base is not a random mass; it's a coalition in which three groups dominate: economically anxious white non‑college voters from deindustrialised or rural regions; religious traditionalists, especially white evangelicals and conservative Catholics; and anti‑institutional insurgents shaped by alternative media and conspiratorial narratives.

1. The first group insists that Trump will “bring back jobs” and “protect our communities.” Their own towns have been gutted by offshoring, automation, financialisation, and decades of bipartisan deregulation. Yet they accept a story in which complex structural forces are reduced to immigrants, environmental regulation, and coastal liberals. This is not ignorance of facts that are unavailable; it is a desperate refusal to grasp that their hero governs on behalf of capital, not labour—while they cheer symbolic tariffs and spectacle in place of industrial policy. The ignorance lies in mistaking catharsis for strategy.

2. The religious bloc argues that Trump is a flawed but necessary instrument to defend “Christian civilisation.” They justify any cruelty—family separation, open bigotry, contempt for the poor—as collateral damage in a holy war over abortion, gender, and schools. In doing so, they invert their own professed ethics: fidelity, humility, and care for the vulnerable become negotiable once wrapped in partisan gain. The failure here is moral, not intellectual: a systematic self‑blinding that calls cynicism “discernment” and mistakes partisan rage for theological depth.

3. The anti‑institutional insurgents claim to be the only real skeptics. They denounce courts, media, elections, and science as corrupt—while granting near‑total trust to a leader and a media ecosystem whose business model is permanent outrage. They never ask why every disconfirming fact is dismissed as a “psy‑op,” why every failed prediction is forgotten, or why a movement built on “question everything” never questions itself. Their dumbness is epistemic: they incinerate all common standards of evidence, then mistake the resulting darkness for enlightenment.

So how stupid are Trump supporters? Stupid enough, collectively, to rally behind narratives that deepen their own precarity, erode their moral vocabulary, and destroy the shared factual ground any democracy requires. Not because they lack individual cognitive capacity, but because they exhibit functional idiocy in the classical sense: a withdrawal from public reasoning in service of identity defence, choosing domination over deliberation, and mistaking vindictiveness for justice.

Not because they lack the capacity to know better, but because they have chosen a politics in which knowing better is precisely the first sin.

#Leadership #OurYearOfCourage #Democracy #PoliticalPsychology #PublicReason