Cause, on 04 April 2025 - 12:49 PM, said:
I don’t know how we get out of this.
Just like Putin won’t/can’t end the war in Ukraine due to the sunk cost fallacy… the longer the war continues and the more Russia loses the less Putin can end the war without looking like a loser that rolled the dice on a risky gamble and left Vegas without even the shirt on his back.
Trump likewise has gone from promising to lower prices on day one to asking the American people to understand we are in a years long transition to a brighter future past the pain. He is right. Everyone else is wrong. Prices are rising (he doesn’t care he says). The stock market is tumbling (a president who craters stocks should be fired he once said). The starting point of the Tariffs are sky high, there is realistically no room to ramp up, only down but he is in fantasy land if he thinks others won’t retaliate. He is fighting a trade war on 60 front simultaneously. He wants to annex Canada, he wants Mexico to pay for the wall, sorry he wants other courtries to pay for the tarrifs. The demands are ridiculous. So what concession can he win to end them. What disaster can force his hand to end them without looking like a fool.
If we are not rich in 6 months, maybe the plan just needs a year. If not a year two? If not two he needs a third term to avoid jail and finally usher in the victory he promised.
You are watching both the traits of a cult writ large AND those who have taken advantage of that cult for power (Most of the republicans in Congress, or his hand picked judges ect.).
And we must apply the de-cult traits to this as well. Some people find their way out of that cult when SOMETHING that affects them snaps them out of it (r/conservative, for example, seems to by an large feel that it's the Tariffs, the stock market crashing, threats to annex sovereign ally nations, and mostly the third term talk...they were in lockstep with him until the last two months), but that small group of people aren't going to have some massive public road to Damascus moment...their disavowance of the leader and his cult will happen quietly and in a lot of cases they won't even TELL you out loud they've abandoned him...they will keep a mask up that they are still a part of it as they fear retribution from the other cultists AND the "I told you so's" from the sane side...it's also a mental break that their brains fight like it's an attack. But expecting the rest of them (en masse) to get out and realize he's ratfucking them with EVERY decision...it's simply not going to happen.
Hard facts: 909 people died at Jonestown at the behest of cult leader Jim Jones (the vacant majority from self-imbibed cyanide poisoning), and of the people who lived there only 85 survived. So out of just under 1000 people 8.5% of those people got out. Nearly 93% of them did EXACTLY what their leader suggested they do all the way up to and including killing themselves for him.
This is what the US is dealing with. The VAST majority of these Americans will NEVER get out of the cult, they will ride him all the way into poverty, illness, civil war, or death. THE VAST MAJORITY. This is not fear mongering, this is stats on Cults.
The only good news is that cult leaders CANNOT be swapped out. Once Trump is gone (from being voted out, impeached and removed, dies of his ill health, ect.) it's not like they can shove Vance, or Bannon or Jr, or anyone else into that slot and expect to hold onto that cultish base...it's never happened in the history of cults and it's been tried. So as a very thin silver lining...one day we will wake up to his obituary, and only THEN can the vast majority of MAGA start to heal and accept what they were involved in...but for most of them that will come over decades of their lives. Deprogramming regular cultists takes a long ass time and the key factor MUST be that the leader is not in their orbit or lives anymore...so until Trump is no longer around, these yahoos will continue to follow him. And it Deons't matter what he does...he could ask them to drink cynanide Kool-aid and they absolutely would. FFS he has them eating horse dewormer in doses that will strip the lining of their intestines and they will thank him for that...
"When the last tree has fallen, and the rivers are poisoned, you cannot eat money, oh no." ~Aurora
"Someone will always try to sell you despair, just so they don't feel alone." ~Ursula Vernon