Aspirational Impunity and the MAGA Base

Why They Love Trump for His Crimes, Corruption, and Unmodulated Hatred

Fascist leaders need fascist followers. In our fervor to call out Trump’s undisguised ambitions to rule as an unaccountable fascist leader, we in the pro-democracy coalition tend to minimize the role of the former president’s fascist followers in his rise to power. Whether he wins or loses or finally succumbs to the cumulative toxic load of the fast food he so enjoys, they are not going away. Once he passes from the stage of politics, there will likely be a succession battle between the multitude of corrupt and authoritarian Trump mini-mes currently waiting in the wings. We don’t know whether any of them will have the charisma, psychopathic ruthlessness, and ability to reflexively lie with conviction required to capture the obedience, evoke the reverence, and harness the displaced rage of the MAGA cult. Nevertheless, the base’s zealous longing for a vengeful dictator is unlikely to disappear with Trump.

By all accounts, the fully Trumpified GOP and its Russian allies are engaged in many legal and illegal schemes to disenfranchise Democratic voters and mal-inform the Republican segment of the electorate. However, those efforts may, in the end, turn out to be unnecessary. Polls agree that about half the country already wants Trump returned to power. That means that half the country wants a Fuhrer on day one. Little about Trump’s corruption, white supremacist worldview, history of sexual predation, and plans to end democracy is secret. So, to endorse him is to endorse all of that.

It would be nonsensical to acknowledge that the former president is a fascist but, as some pundits have done, claim that his voters are not. “Fascist” is not simply an epithet for someone we don’t like. It is a meaningful descriptor of a worldview and set of policy aims that either fits or does not. We cannot let our empathy for Trump supporters’ collective psychic wounds, economic stresses, status anxiety, delusional nostalgia for the former president’s years in office, and misplaced sense of grievance blind us to their eager willingness to be foot soldiers for MAGA. Fascist Trump followers driven by a life of cruel humiliations and financial hardship are still fascists. If they think you are “poisoning the blood “of the nation and the source of their problems, they will happily see you swing from the nearest lamppost.

By all indications, they are thrilled at the prospect of an autocrat ruling without restraint: jailing and executing his opponents, censoring books, shutting down media that criticize him, kidnapping the children of non-white immigrants and deporting millions of others, returning women to the status of male property, appropriating the military as his personal militia, and aligning with the world’s dictators to relegate democracy to the dustbin of history. I want to reiterate that none of these plans are covert; they have long been Trump’s explicit promises. The MAGA base knows what it’s getting. For the literate wonks among them, like JD Vance, “Project 2025” is gratifying fascist policy porn, not a manual for implementing a program of grim dystopian oppression.

The psychology underlying the widespread reverence for Trump and his vision of a fascist future is complex and multifaceted, which is why so much of my recent book is devoted to addressing it. Here, I will limit my focus to only one aspect of that psychology: the compelling effect of Trump’s legal, political, and social impunity.

Impunity is a quality that helps us understand why the revelations of Trump’s crimes and corruption have failed to dampen his followers’ adoration of him and have even increased it. What half the country might regard as traits too disabling for him to function as a business or political leader turn out to be fundamental to his brand, both before and during his time in office. Put more starkly, Trump’s psychopathology – his narcissism, sociopathic entitlement, unquenchable vengeance, verbal incontinence, and unrestrained impulsivity – along with the failure of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the justice system more broadly to place meaningful limits on him, have been critical to his success and what his followers most adore about him.

Impunity has defined Trump’s success as a business and political conman, putting the shine on his brand. The fact that he has been openly corrupt, lying, racist, predatory, and cruel – and until recently never been held to account or made to pay a significant price – is what half the population finds repellent and infuriating. It is also what the other half continues to experience as powerfully seductive and admirable.

Sociologist Brooke Harrington describes Trump’s ability to evoke “aspirational impunity” in his base. In this mindset, the rule of law, taxes, and military service are for suckers and losers. Once this premise is accepted, Trump’s corruption is admired, envied, and coveted instead of disqualifying. Whether he’s grabbing a woman’s crotch, a bag of Saudi or Russian cash, or fraudulent tax deductions, the important thing is to avoid accountability for it. The Supreme Court has told him that when you're the President, they must let you do it.

Harrington argues that the financial elite expects to be above the law but relies on the law to control the non-wealthy chumps saddled with a disproportionate tax burden. The elite are thus free to use the public infrastructure without having to fund it. Rather than simply resenting and demanding a change in that inequity, many working and middle-class conservatives envy and long for that privilege themselves. So, cultivating this aspirational impunity not only helps members of the economic elite like Trump remain unaccountable but also makes ordinary people admire them for getting away with it.

One way of thinking about Trump’s moral impunity is the role he plays as a “permissive super-ego” for qualities that would engender disapproval and rejection by the liberal half of the country – sadism, xenophobia, misogyny, bigotry, and corruption. He functions as the sociopathic daddy who says, in essence, “Be cruel, violent, and bigoted, just like me. And I will love you even more for it.” He famously made the false promise to protect his violent rally attendees from any legal consequences if they assaulted protestors in the crowd.

Trump also derives a significant benefit from his notorious impulsivity. He consistently exhibits a near-total lack of inhibition.  Trump will say or do whatever comes to mind without regard for the consequences, which generally never ensue. On the one hand, it is part of what generates outrage, revulsion, and fear among those outside the MAGA cult. Every Trump hearing, investigation, and indictment fills the liberal half of the country with the fleeting hope that justice will be done and his impulses constrained. Such hopes are predictably dashed when corrupt and cowardly MAGA politicians and judges find new and creative ways to grant their leader impunity.

On the other hand, the base admires and adores Trump’s impulsivity. They glory in his willingness to offend people with racist or misogynist remarks, attack opponents with puerile schoolyard insults, threaten violence against his enemies, praise Nazis, and voice admiration for Arnold Palmer’s genitalia. They see those as expressions of authenticity. He can say all the things they dare not utter. He can do things that ordinary citizens would be punished for. Up to this point, despite a few unfavorable legal judgments, Trump has been unstoppable. Even before he survived the assassination attempt, he was viewed as invincible, something to which his followers could only aspire. That makes it easy to see him as an undefeatable and ruthless warrior for all their grievances, a superhero who will smite all those who threaten to impede their own fantasies of omnipotence.

And should he be reelected, the MAGA justices of the Supreme Court have ensured that his despotism will be untrammeled. By encouraging his followers’ fusion with him, Trump cultivates the fantasy that one day, they too can be wealthy, unaccountable predators who can say whatever they want to anyone and assault whomever they choose and, like him, suffer no consequences. In the meantime, they will have to content themselves with trolling and punching down at Trump-designated targets.

As Ezra Klein has observed, the first Trump administration was not as disastrous as it could have been because the former president was surrounded by inhibitors who blunted many of his worst impulses. Of course, that would not be the case if there were a second Trump term. He will exercise the absolute power with which the high court crowned him. And his fascist base will sing their new God-king’s praise.

While the Fox News/GOP post-truth indifference to facts and the passions of his fascist base may propel Trump back into power, it may also be their undoing. As is the case today, only an accusation will be required for the new MAGA lynch mobs to identify and attack or kill suspected traitors. In a world of normalized paranoia, circular firing squads are a predictable outcome. The relentless search for demons and the disloyal could be even more unslakable than the witch-hunts of medieval Europe, the purges of Stalin’s Russia, or the terrorism of Hitler’s Black Shirts. The neighbors you’ve known for decades could be the “enemy within.” Or, they could conclude that you are.