Glenn Beck Is Only Half-Right about MAGA's Image Problem That He Helps Cultivate

It's not that most Trump supporters are ignoring facts; it's that they're not being told the truth about their candidate.

On Monday, grifter Glenn Beck took issue with describing Donald Trump’s supporters as a “cult,” simultaneously ignoring the prevalence of MAGA diehards who fit the label and inadvertently demonstrating one major reason why other supporters continue to support him as if they were.

The comment came during a segment responding to Washington Post columnist Robert Kagan bleating about how to prevent Trump from leading us to “dictatorship in the United States.”

In the course of missing the real reasons why such talk is nonsense, Beck said the following of Trump’s support:

By the way, it's not a cult. A cult is brainwashed. Trump supporters, many of them only see the reality they're living in. They see clearly, what those on the left refuse to see. And they see clearly, the things that most, if not all elite Never Trumpers will never admit to seeing.

To anyone who’s spent more than five minutes interacting with MAGA, this is preposterous on its face. The man has been compared to Jesus Christ and is selling scraps of his clothing to the faithful alongside cringe-inducing digital art of himself as a superhero. Potential second-term press secretary Laura Loomer just made headlines for saying she can’t maintain a relationship because no boyfriend could possibly be more important to her than Trump. His apologists have set new contortionism records to excuse his every betrayal and screw-up. His fans routinely complain about things he was directly responsible for (Ronna Romney McDaniel, Kevin McCarthy, Paul Ryan, and the Covid-19 vaccines come to mind). Social media is teeming with zombies who frothingly recite insane lies about Ron DeSantis’s record, views, and associations literally for no other reason than Trump decided he was a threat.

But arguably the greatest evidence of MAGA’s cult element is the coverage Trump gets from conservative media, the leading personalities of which including Beck himself have given the 45^th president a pass for damn near everything all year. It is an open secret in the righty infotainment industry that many personalities are afraid of driving away MAGA audience members, which is reflected in their Trump commentary to an extent never seen in how any of these people covered George W. Bush, John McCain, Mitt Romney, or any number of prominent national Republicans. And a four-letter word that fits a group of people who can’t handle hearing negative things about an object of their devotion would be...?

In fairness, it’s true enough that as real as the Trump cult is, it does not represent the majority of Trump’s supporters, whom polls have shown are open to other candidates but defaulting to Trump simply because they’re not seeing or hearing compelling reasons to change horses. The primary responsibility for that lies with DeSantis’s failure to figure out how to get the truth in front of them, but the other half of the puzzle is conservative media’s cowardly negligence.

Trump’s enduring GOP support looks cultish because only a cultist could possibly ignore how comprehensively stupid and awful Trump is, but if you only get your political information from a combination of talk radio and certain websites or online personalities, there’s a very good chance you’re not even seeing any of that stupidity or awfulness. Instead, you’re being fed whoppers like these, from the same Beck segment:

The problem that Nikki [Haley] has, that Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis do not have, is that they are standing up for what people, the vast majority of Republicans, actually believe. They have also both proven themselves as the destroyers of the Deep State and the end of politics as usual in the GOP.

The guy who got rolled by the Deep State at every turn, to the point that he hired the U.S. Attorney responsible for keeping the Hunter Biden probe under wraps before the election solely because two Democrat senators recommended him, is a “destroyer” of the Deep State? The guy who (as mentioned and sourced above) saved the jobs of Ryan, McCarthy, and McDaniel is a “proven” alternative to “politics as usual in the GOP”?

In the case of Trump. Only getting stronger, every time, the left charges him with another bogus crime. I mean, honestly, the media -- you know, should have learned this in 2016. Would have been better if you just ignored him. But you can't help yourself. Which only makes him stronger, as you keep saying, he's got to be stopped.

This is one of the most pernicious fictions of the Trump era. They have only strengthened him among Republican primary voters predisposed to side with him against Democrats, not among the general electorate. While it’s true he now seems to be competitive with Joe Biden in polls, that’s a function of Biden’s terrible economy, obvious infirmity, and the world being on fire on his watch. Democrats are chomping at the bit to start their general-election program against Trump, whose trials and eventual convictions will massively impair both his ability to campaign and his viability in voters’ eyes.

But Glenn Beck, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Dan Bongino, and Laura Ingraham aren’t leveling with their audiences about that. Instead, they’re feeding them a fairytale about an essentially-serious conservative fighter and an electorate who sees through his persecution through which everything will work out if they just stay the course. If these talking heads really want people to stop people from viewing MAGA as a cult, there’s one simple thing they could do to help: stop serving up the Kool-Aid.