The Humiliation Is the Point. Humiliating the MAGA faithful only binds them more tightly to Trump
Posted by Sia on April 18, 2026, 8:51 am ADMIN
The Humiliation Is the Point. Humiliating the MAGA faithful only binds them more tightly to Trump
by Adam Kinzinger - Apr 17
On Easter Sunday, Donald Trump posted an AI image of himself as Jesus Christ.
Robed in red and white. Hands glowing with divine light. Healing the sick while bald eagles and fireworks filled the heavens above him. He left it up long enough for everyone to see it. Then he took it down.
And MAGA barely grumbled.
Within 24 hours the moment had passed, the post was gone, and the movement moved on — as it always does — to whatever came next.
I’ve been thinking about that ever since. Not about the image itself, which is deranged enough on its own terms. But about what it reveals about the deal MAGA has made with this man. Because I don’t think Trump posted that image by accident.
I think the humiliation is the point.
A Pattern, Not an Incident
To understand what Trump is doing, you have to stop thinking about each outrage as a separate event and start seeing them as a sequence.
He asked his supporters to believe the 2020 election was stolen — and they did, including many who knew better. He asked them to excuse January 6th — and they did, reframing a violent assault on the Capitol as a “tourist visit” and a “protest that got out of hand.” He asked them to accept that his 91 criminal indictments were a political witch hunt — and they did, turning his mugshot into a fundraising image.
Each ask was larger than the last. Each capitulation required more of them — more willingness to contradict their own eyes, their own values, their own stated beliefs.
And here’s what I’ve come to understand about how this works. Every time MAGA accepts something they previously would have considered unacceptable, Trump’s hold on them gets stronger, not weaker. Because now they’ve paid a price. They’ve told their neighbors, their families, their coworkers, that they believe this. Walking it back would mean admitting they were wrong. And the movement doesn’t allow that.
The humiliation isn’t a side effect of Trump’s leadership. It’s the mechanism of it.
This Past Week Alone
Consider what MAGA has been asked to absorb in just the last seven days.
Trump publicly feuded with Pope Leo — the first American Pope, a man with an 84% approval rating — calling him “weak on crime” and “terrible for foreign policy.” He claimed he was responsible for Leo’s elevation to the papacy. He said he likes the Pope’s brother better because “Louis is all MAGA.”
Catholics are an important piece of the MAGA coalition. Without them Trump loses in 2016 and 2024. And their Pope — their American Pope — just called out Trump’s war as driven by a “delusion of omnipotence.” Then, conservative American Catholics watched their president attack the head of their church like a political opponent.
And the MAGA movement absorbed it. Because that’s what the movement does.
In the same week, Tucker Carlson called the Iran war “the single biggest mistake any American president has made in my lifetime.” Alex Jones called it “a total disaster.” Candace Owens suggested Trump might need to be “put in a home.”
Trump’s response was to call them “stupid people” and “NUT JOBS.” He told Tucker to see a psychiatrist.
And the base? It largely shrugged. Because Trump calling his own allies NUT JOBS is just Tuesday now. The bar for what is normal has moved so far that nothing clears it anymore.
That’s not an accident either.
The Polling Underneath
Now here’s where it gets genuinely interesting.
Because while the movement is absorbing the humiliation at the cultural level, something different is happening underneath — in the numbers, in the polling, in the quiet calculations of people who don’t post on Truth Social.
Young white men without college degrees — Trump’s most loyal demographic — gave him 68% approval at the start of his second term. Today it’s 48%. A 20-point collapse in fourteen months.
The Iran war is driving it. Gas prices are making it visceral. A 25-year-old flooring salesman in Alabama named Gray Holland told USA Today exactly what millions of them are thinking: “He really ran on the concept of no wars. I just think we need to stay out of it.”
These men aren’t posting Tucker Carlson clips in public. They’re not calling Trump a NUT JOB. They’re not doing anything dramatic. They’re just quietly starting to feel like the deal they made isn’t paying out. The humiliation works on the people who are publicly invested — the influencers, the rally-goers, the social media loyalists who have staked their identities on Trump. It works less well on the guy who voted for him because he wanted cheaper gas and no more foreign wars and is now watching both promises fail simultaneously at the pump.
That’s the part Trump can’t fully control. Public loyalty is easy to manufacture. Private doubt is harder to suppress.
What I Think Is Actually Happening
I want to be honest with you about what I think this means — and what it doesn’t.
I don’t think MAGA is breaking. I don’t think there’s some dramatic rupture coming where the movement looks in the mirror and decides enough is enough. That’s not how this works and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.
What I think is happening is more subtle and ultimately more significant.
Trump has spent a decade training his movement to accept humiliation as proof of loyalty. The more outrageous the thing he asks them to believe, the more committed they become — because disbelief now would mean admitting everything they’ve already accepted was wrong. It’s a trap that gets harder to escape the longer you’re in it.
But the trap has a cost. And the cost is accumulating.
Every Easter Sunday image, every Pope feud, every call to see a psychiatrist, every NUT JOBS post — each one requires another withdrawal from an account that isn’t bottomless. The people publicly inside the movement will keep paying. They’ve come too far to stop now.
But the people at the edges — the ones who voted for him without becoming true believers, the ones who wanted cheaper gas and no foreign wars, the ones who are watching their grocery bills and their energy costs and wondering what they actually got — those people don’t owe Trump their humiliation.
And that’s where November 2026 gets decided.
Here’s the hard truth: the humiliation ritual works until the day it doesn’t. Until the day enough people decide that the price of belonging is higher than the price of leaving.
It's like being in a bad marriage or relationship that is disfunctional and abusive, but being afraid to leave for fear of being alone.
People seem to need someone else to blame for their own failures or unhappiness. In trumpworld, it is immigrants, blacks, women and "liberals" who are to blame for everything that goes wrong. Blame the 'minorities' and the "baby killers" who are "weak" and "immoral." They are easy targets.
What many MAGAs fear most is what trump fears most. Becoming irrelevant or being left behind.
MAGA sold out their faith- their Christianity for something felon gave them
Posted by Pikes Peak 14115 on April 18, 2026, 3:20 pm, in reply to "Many good points" ADMIN
They proved able to overlook a lifelong criminal, rapist, philanderer, liar, fraud, sexual abuser, pedophile, malignant sociopathic narcissistic cancer of a man because he gave them the SCOTUS justices who overturned Roe V Wade.
It's all about children who in reality they care nothing about, don't give a sh!t about.
In defense of the felon, MAGA is attacking the Catholic Church and its protection of clergy pedophiles. Is THIS Pope responsible for their crimes? Only if he doesn't work to learn from the past and remove clergy who do that.
Other faiths have their criminals too. The Baptists, Methodists, and even Salvation Army have a record of sexual abusers put in positions of trust. The former pastor at my dysfunctional church was arrested, tried, and convicted of sexual assault on children.
I was there before "he" was appointed, left during his appointment, and returned after he was gone to help clean up the damage he caused. As far as I am concerned, the MAGA who looked the other way and did nothing are just as bad.
You can look away from a painting, but you can't listen away from a symphony
is that in ‘the good old days’ it was the Catholic Church that was in league with the kings and political leaders in their quests for the spoils of war, gold and land. And now that seems to be reversed as well, with the Protestants assuming that role now?
in order for some to feel ‘better than’ or superior to others.
Many of the ‘Protestants’ have been taught to believe that Catholics and/or the Catholic Church is the problem… that they aren’t spiritual enough or aren’t interpreting scripture the right way or don’t know what God or Jesus are all about, or some such. There always seems to be a contest going on for claiming to know the will or mind of God.
Isn’t it ironic that they are supporting a pedophile to go against the supposed ‘pedophile’ Catholic Church?
on April 18, 2026, 8:51 am
