Doctrine over Person: Thought Reform in Trump’s MAGA, Part 8

"What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening"

Many Americans had strong reactions to the January 6th, 2021 attack on the US Capitol, but curiously, the response of Republicans, particularly MAGA supporters and politicians, has changed significantly over time. For something many people observed through their own eyes and ears, at least through the filter of the media, one would not expect a major change in opinion after the event.

Between March and September of 2021, Pew Research Center found that the portion of Republicans who felt that it was important to find and prosecute the Capitol rioters fell from 79%, nearly four out of five, to 57%, or a little over half. Between 2021 and 2024, CBS News found the portion of Republicans who approved of the actions of the people forcing their way into the Capitol had risen from 21% to 30%, and that people who identified as part of the MAGA movement were nearly twice as likely, (43%) to approve. It seems that the more time passed following the attack on the Capitol, the more Trump supporters agreed with it. 

Within a week of the January 6th attack, a Pew survey found that more than half of Republicans – 52% – said that Donald Trump bore either a lot, or some responsibility for the riot. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell spoke for those who strongly blamed Trump when he said the following month, “There is no question – none – that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day. No question about it. The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes, and instructions, of their president.”

But by 2024, Mitch McConnell and most Republican congresspeople – many of whom had been evacuated on January 6th to physically protect them from the MAGA mob – supported Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. Republican 2024 primary voters gave Trump the overwhelming majority of delegates despite (fading) reservations about January 6th, and Donald Trump was once again the Republican Nominee for President. Why had there been such a shift in sentiment?

While it’s possible that new information had been learned about January 6th that made people feel more positive about the riot, and Trump’s role in it, it’s also possible that Robert Jay Lifton’s themes of thought reform outlined in other sections of this article have played a role toward changing minds. Perhaps a combination of disinformation/milieu control about January 6 and the 2020 election, loading the language (Stop the Steal, Witch Hunt, Unselect Committee), and a combination of Lifton themes have influenced people including our next one…  

Lifton’s theme of Doctrine over Person says that thought reform environments require people to sublimate their actual experience to the group’s black and white myth of reality. Writes Lifton:

…another characteristic feature of ideological totalism: the subordination of human experience to the claims of doctrine. This primacy of doctrine over person is evident in the continual shift between experience itself and the highly abstract interpretation of such experience….

For when the myth becomes fused with the totalist sacred science, the resulting "logic" can be so compelling and coercive that it simply replaces the realities of individual experience. Consequently, past historical events are retrospectively altered, wholly rewritten, or ignored, to make them consistent with the doctrinal logic…. 

Rather than modify the myth in accordance with experience, the will to orthodoxy requires instead that men be modified in order to reaffirm the myth (Lifton, pp. 83-84, 85).

The dynamic of doctrine over person encourages people to trust a movement more than their own perceptions of reality. Trump said as much in 2018 while speaking to a Veterans of Foreign Wars audience about news coverage of trade deals, telling them, “just remember, what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”  

MAGA Myths

Let’s look at attempts to reinterpret, rewrite, or ignore events in order to affirm MAGA myths:

• Myth that MAGA and it’s submovement Stop the Steal did not cause the January 6 riots: In October 2024, Trump shared a post on Truth Social blaming the government, without evidence, for orchestrating the Capitol attack, “January 6 will go down in history as the day the government staged a riot to cover up the fact that they certified a fraudulent election.” Readers may want to consult the feature-length documentary Fight Like Hell (WARNING: includes riot violence and violent language).

• Myth that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen:  No legal proof of decisive electoral fraud has been made in any state.  

• Myth of an overwhelmingly successful 45th Presidency: The official website of Trump’s first term in office claims several Trump achievements during the Covid Pandemic, but doesn’t mention America’s 1.2 million pandemic deaths, which according to worldwide statistics is a half-million more than the next closest country. The summary also doesn’t mention that Trump was twice impeached.

• Myth that Trump was an overwhelming self-made business success:  Trump boasts about being a great businessman, but has suffered six corporate bankruptcies. He claimed to have built his business from a $1 million loan he was obligated to repay to his father, but a newspaper investigation reported he received $413 million worth of financial benefit from his father (in 2018 dollars). 

An environment of doctrine over person may leave MAGA supporters holding to ideas not supported by evidence – or that are even contrary to their own personal experience and memory. The myth of MAGA and its goodness may leave followers unconcerned about the failings or inconsistencies surrounding the movement or its founder.  

Navigation within this article series:

Thought Reform in Trump’s MAGA - Intro
Milieu Control in Trump's MAGA, Part 2
Mystical Manipulation in Trump's MAGA, Part 3
The Demand for Purity in Trump's MAGA, Part 4
The Cult of Confession in Trump’s MAGA, Part 5
Sacred Science in Trump’s MAGA, Part 6
Loading the Language in Trump’s MAGA, Part 7
Doctrine over Person in Trump’s MAGA, Part 8
The Dispensing of Existence in Trump’s MAGA, Part 9
Conclusion: Thought Reform in Trump’s MAGA, Part 10

References:

Lifton, Robert Jay (2019). Losing Reality: On Cult, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry, The New Press.