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If you need any more evidence of how much of a cult the MAGA movement is and how thoroughly Republicans have been brainwashed, you need only to look at a poll from Sunday that illustrates why Donald Trump will be the 2024 GOP nominee, that his supporters are totally detached from reality, and that they will never abandon him.
The poll, conducted by CBS and YouGov, is both shocking and unsurprising.
Shocking because it still defies belief that a conman was able to gaslight tens of millions of Americans in a day and age where nonpartisan, factual information is widely available to almost everyone within seconds.
What’s even more flabbergasting is that this conman was Trump.
Maybe it would make some sense if the one who did the gaslighting were a charming, charismatic person. Or if it had been one of those televangelists who dupe religious people for a (very lucrative) living.
But Trump? Really?
On the other hand, the findings are also not surprising at all because this has been going on for so long.
With all that being said, what exactly did the poll show?
Well, where to start?
Perhaps most symptomatic of the success of the gaslighting is the answer of Trump supporters to the question of who they believe is telling them the truth. The former president topped that list with 71 percent, which was eight points ahead of “friends and family.”
If it had been an option, his supporters would probably also have said that they trust Trump, the king of lies, more than themselves.
For the rest of the Republican field, that poses the question of how you beat a guy like that. And the answer is that you don’t.
For the rest of us, it begs the question of whether there is any hope that these people — or “listless vessels,” as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) just described them — can be un-brainwashed. And the answer is that they probably can’t.
And that makes them a threat to the United States for years to come. Maybe not a violent threat in most cases, but a threat nonetheless.
The problem isn’t that 95 percent of them think that Trump is “fighting for people like me.”
No, what’s much more concerning is that more than three-quarters of them believe that Joe Biden is not the legitimate president.
The former are just gullible fools tragically misplacing their trust in a con artist.
The latter, however, are countless Americans thinking that an election was fixed and that something has been stolen from them.
You can’t have a functioning country where so many people believe a lie.
Finally, it’s no stretch to think that some of them might want to do something about it. And, seeing how there are tens of millions of Trump supporters, it only takes a tiny percentage of them to do some real damage.
We saw that on January 6.
