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On Aug. 12, the day a judge <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/push-for-public-release-of-warrant-used-to-search-trump-home/2022/08/12/d57fdeb0-1a44-11ed-b998-b2ab68f58468_story.html" target=_blank>unsealed the search warrant</a> that the FBI had used to take <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/08/trump-mar-a-lago-search-fbi/" target=_blank>documents from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate</a>, friends of mine, as well as Democratic lawmakers and commentators, began to say that the news couldn’t sway Trump’s supporters. The revelation that the former president squirreled classified documents out of the White House and might have violated the Espionage Act ought to be a red line, they said. But it wouldn’t change any minds.

“Whatever crimes he commits, his supporters will be loyal to him,” one buddy wrote on Facebook. “Unwelcome but important fact to face,” the otherwise great writer David Frum <a href="https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/1559168859885940737?s=20&t=rEkon2jkKTehiJFCGozY0g">tweeted</a>. “Trump absconding with the country’s highest secrets - storing them unsafely - and then lying about returning them - SHOULD have upset his … supporters. It didn’t. If anything, the latest Trump scandal has strengthened Trump’s hold, not only on his core support, but on the broader GOP.”

But is this true? The rapidly forming consensus that Trump’s voters wouldn’t be moved reminded me of many moments over the last six years. Nearly as soon as Trump took over the presidency in 2017, those who dislike him characterized each revelation about his misbehavior — his lies about immigrants, the border wall and the size of his inauguration crowd; his take on white supremacists (“very fine people”); his refusal to accept the 2020 election results; that bonkers time he presented a National Weather Service map that had been adjusted with a Sharpie — as the thing that, finally, ought to turn his fans against him, but also the thing that, bafflingly and heartbreakingly, would not.

The idea, such commentators hold, is that support for him constitutes a religious fervor akin to that of cultists who, when their guru is disrobed, only become more devoted. Six months into his presidency, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/the-strange-effect-fact-checking-has-on-trump-supporters/532701/">the Atlantic was wondering </a>why “the president’s backers … don’t waver in their support for him.” In September 2020, Colbert I. King <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dont-waste-your-breath-trying-to-change-trumpists-minds-just-vote/2020/09/18/c99ae496-f926-11ea-a275-1a2c2d36e1f1_story.html">wrote in The Washington Post</a> that Democrats “should not waste time trying to persuade [Trump’s] supporters to turn their backs on him. It’s simply not going to happen. … Trump’s fans today are more, not less, entrenched.”

Sometimes that conviction seems based in evidence, like the <a href="https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/reports/monmouthpoll_us_110519/">much discussed 2019 poll</a> finding that 6 in 10 Trump fans could not “think of anything that Trump could do” that would make them disapprove of him. Other times, though, it’s taken as self-evident, related to a fundamentally irrational cast of mind that Trump voters must have for his adversaries to make any sense of the fact that anybody supported him at any time. In 2018, a leading cognitive neuroscientist <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mind-in-the-machine/201812/complete-psychological-analysis-trumps-support">concluded</a> that Trump’s fans would “follow [him] off a cliff” thanks ultimately to unique and broad “brain responses” that are “automatic and not influenced by logic or reason.”

Want to understand Trump’s die-hard fans? Look to alternative medicine.

I have relatives who voted twice for Trump. I talk with them often. And in conversations, I’ve found them deeply confused and disturbed by the recent events at Mar-a-Lago. They’re troubled by the alleged pilfering of classified documents, by the possibility that Trump’s lawyer lied for him and by the fact that any defense of Trump now has to rest on the claim that he’s stupid.

These are people who blew off early Trump lies as either minuscule or necessary. But they’ve been worn down over time. I was visiting one of these relatives in New York on the Friday when the search warrant was unsealed. She was glued to her phone — not to watch Fox News or Trump’s furious incitements on Truth Social, but to read the plain content of the warrant. “This is so bad,” she kept murmuring. “It looks inappropriate or wrong.”

She and my other relatives are more disturbed than I expected them to be. And they’re also shy about that, and ambivalent in expressing it, which is revealing in its own way. A recurring media motif in the last few years has been the reporter who ambushes a Trump voter at a restaurant hours after some new allegation lands and asks them whether they’re ready to forswear their vote. They’re almost always defensive, even defiant.

But defensiveness is everybody’s first instinct when their beliefs are challenged. Think of how people insist online that their marriages are picture-perfect just as those marriages head toward collapse. Bravado can be a tell — it often belies worry and ambivalence.

This primal scream over Trump's enablers provides only partial catharsis

The habit of instantly assessing what Trump voters think of an allegation doesn’t tell us much about their views but rather helps create the picture that they’re immovable. Would the Trump voter I visited explicitly tell a pollster right now: “I am so disturbed by what happened last week that I fully support the Jan. 6 hearings,” the same hearings she spent a year criticizing? Would she say right now: “After last week, I’ve become a Democrat”?

No. That’s not how people think. Most of us don’t suddenly change our minds about politics, love or our lives via a last straw, a breaking point.

If you want to sense when someone is changing their mind, you have to look for subtler signs — to the faltering tone of their defenses, to their silences. Listening for such cues in the words of people with whom I’m close is why, in August 2016, I thought Trump had a stronger chance than most polls showed. Most of the eventual Trump voters I knew lied to pollsters back then. They even denied to me that they intended to vote for him — but in a timid, guilty way that suggested that, alone in the booth, they really might.

I’ve often wondered why Trump’s opponents conclude so much from his voters’ reactions just after an allegation drops. Could it be that defiance and immovability are the reactions we partly want from them, not just the ones we dread? There’s something very seductive in the idea that Trump supporters are unreachable — even if the characterization superficially presents itself as a lament. It salves the shame of losing to them in 2016 and shores up our sense of superiority. We love reason. They vote with their lizard brains.

Recently, “The Daily Show” sent a reporter, Jordan Klepper, to <a href="https://uproxx.com/viral/jordan-klepper-trump-rally-wisconsin-conspiracy-theories/">ambush Trump voters at a rally</a>. One interviewee seemed somewhat confused about what he was asking, but then she said: “I just watched a movie last week with Robin Williams in it. It was called ‘<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Man-Year-Robin-Williams/dp/B09Q6DXZC9/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2NPOD3IC2GJV3&keywords=man+of+the+year+robin+williams&qid=1660854352&s=movies-tv&sprefix=man+of+the+year+robin+william%2Cmovies-tv%2C111&sr=1-1" target=_blank>Man of the Year</a>.’ And guess what — they had election fraud back then!”

This was gold. “Is this [movie] a documentary?” Klepper asked.

“Are there any lessons we can take from ‘<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Mork-Mindy-Complete-First-Season/dp/B0002I837M/ref=sr_1_4?crid=2YQPOYWSVETS2&keywords=mork+and+mindy&qid=1660854378&s=movies-tv&sprefix=mork+and+mindy%2Cmovies-tv%2C174&sr=1-4" target=_blank>Mork and Mindy</a>’?”

The reason this encounter is satisfying for many viewers, and not merely dispiriting, is that it embarrassed the Trump voter. It’s underrated how humiliating it remains to Democrats to have lost to Trump. It still amazes me how little that humiliation and shame were explored after 2016. It was bad enough to lose to such an unfit candidate. It was far worse to lose after crowing that you were destined to win.

Psychologically surviving that loss required Democrats to believe that Trump voters can’t take evidence on board — can’t think at all. There’s immense comfort in the belief that, even if you temporarily got owned, you are still fundamentally the smarter, better people and that your loss couldn’t have been avoided.

Democracy is on the brink of disaster. For voters, it's business as usual.

At times, the left’s explanation for Trump’s support has come to rest on biological determinism. Over the course of the Trump era, <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/conservative-and-liberal-brains-might-have-some-real-differences/">numerous</a> <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2017/11/22/at-yale-we-conducted-an-experiment-to-turn-conservatives-into-liberals-the-results-say-a-lot-about-our-political-divisions/">scientists</a> and <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/08/radicalism-post-trump-gop/619891/">analysts</a> have posited that conservatism comes down to “<a href="https://qz.com/1238929/your-political-views-are-influenced-by-the-size-of-your-brains-amygdala/">the shape of your brain</a>,” with MAGA tendencies deriving from a larger amygdala — a fear-driving, <a href="https://www.verywellmind.com/what-happens-during-an-amygdala-hijack-4165944">evolutionarily “ancient” portion</a> that “hijacks” the “thinking brain.” His fans are, other analysts claim, “<a href="https://www.psypost.org/2022/05/trump-supporters-use-less-cognitively-complex-language-and-more-simplistic-modes-of-thinking-than-biden-supporters-study-finds-63068">less cognitively complex</a>” or even likely to <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mind-in-the-machine/201812/complete-psychological-analysis-trumps-support">suffer disproportionately</a> “from psychological illnesses that involve paranoia and delusions … like those with schizotypy personalities.” If anyone expects Trump voters to change their views, one former Washington Post reporter wrote, then <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/10/15/i-asked-psychologists-to-analyze-trump-supporters-this-is-what-i-learned/">they haven’t confronted</a> “a few fundamental, universal and uncomfortable facts about the human mind.” Trump voters aren’t made, they’re born, and no one should expect them to be anything other than what they are.

As much as they superficially wish for it, I don’t think many liberals or anti-Trump Republicans have thought through what would happen if there were a mass change of opinion against Trump. We have called Trump supporters bigots, cultists, <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-shared-psychosis-of-donald-trump-and-his-loyalists/">“psychotic” and developmentally injured,</a> “<a href="https://www.psypost.org/2021/05/study-pinpoints-two-aspects-of-pathological-narcissism-that-predicted-the-intention-to-vote-for-trump-in-2020-60797">pathological</a>,” <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/05/heres-the-real-reason-we-all-underrated-trump.html">stricken by “mental shortcomings,”</a> and “<a href="https://www.indy100.com/news/donald-trump-peter-whener-maga-b1909916">akin to drug addicts</a>.” I’m not saying any one of these characterizations is necessarily unfair. But if Trump voters did come around to a more left-wing view, then that would mean that a whole bunch of irredeemably warped people we spent years fearing and loathing would suddenly be in our boat. In our camp.

If we have seen them so deterministically and then they come in our direction, that might suggest we are not so different. We pride ourselves on assessing things rationally. There’s no way they could have the same capacity — or so we assume. The corollary to them turning out to have some of our capacities is that we may be a little more like them than we prefer to think — a prospect too gruesome for many Democrats to imagine.

This all sets up a big problem. It means that regardless of the evidence Democrats gather of Trump’s unfitness or criminality, they also have to believe it will never truly matter. That it might make things worse. But such thinking too easily leads to an enervating logic of self-defeat. Investigating and discussing his acts does matter, even if it’s in ways we can’t immediately see.

It would be too bad if the narrative that Trump’s voters are unreachable hardened completely. Looking back at the polls that supported arguments about Trump’s invulnerability is an odd experience, because many of them just aren’t that dispiriting. If 6 out of 10 Trump voters said they’d never lose confidence in him, 4 out of 10 thought they might. There’s a lot of uncertainty and ambiguity in what Trump’s supporters think, even room for persuasion; they’re less uniform than we like to believe. But we might have to change our minds about them if they start changing theirs. Whether we’re prepared to do that is an open question.

Eve Fairbanks's first book, "<a href='https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Inheritors/Eve-Fairbanks/9781476725246'>The Inheritors</a>," was published by Simon & Schuster in July

Eve Fairbanks

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For The Washington Post

Rob Dobi

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No, Trump voters aren’t incapable of changing their minds about him

When we claim that Trump’s supporters are immovable, we’re saying more about our own assumptions and anxieties than we are about their beliefs