Habituation: The secret to not being shocked.

Those who have not fallen into the MAGA sphere shake their heads in wonderment at what his followers choose to ignore.

They have become habituated to his behavior to a point where they seemingly will live his famous assertion, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose voters.”

While that claim was part of a boast about loyalty from his followers, should it be taken literally? Could he really stand in the middle of a busy street in downtown Manhattan and shoot someone, and would his followers continue to support him?

If so, does that demonstrate loyalty or habituation?

Habituation refers to becoming less likely to notice a stimulus presented repeatedly. It affects our perception of everyday experiences and relationships.

Usually, when a politician breaks a promise, his/her followers turn against him. His competitors use the incident as a cudgel to expose him as a liar, yet for Trump, broken promises are just viewed as “Trump being Trump.”

Here is a summary from 2020, Trump’s last year in office:

Trump’s 40 Biggest Broken Promises. The president talks a good game—but it’s just talk. BY ROBERT REICH AUGUST 27, 2020 Trump voters. Nearly four years in, here’s an updated list of Trump’s 40 biggest broken promises.

1. He said coronavirus would “go away without a vaccine.” You bought it. But it didn’t. While other countries got the pandemic under control and avoided large numbers of fatalities, the virus has killed more than 170,000 Americans, and that number is still climbing.

2. He said he wouldn’t have time to play golf if elected president, but he has made more than 250 visits to his golf clubs since taking office—a record for any president.

3. He said he would repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something “beautiful.” It didn’t happen. Instead, seven million Americans have lost their health insurance since he took office, and he has no plan to replace it.

4. He said he’d cut your taxes and that the super-rich like him would pay more. He did the opposite. By 2027, the richest 1 percent will have received 83 percent of the Trump tax cut and the richest 0.1 percent 60 percent. But more than half of all Americans will pay more in taxes.

5. He said corporations would use their tax cuts to invest in American workers. They didn’t. Corporations spent more of their tax savings buying back shares of their own stock than increasing workers’ wages.

6. He said he would boost economic growth by 4 percent annually. Nope. The economy stalled, and unemployment has soared to the highest levels since the Great Depression. Over half of working-age Americans are employed—the worst ratio in 70 years.

7. He said he wouldn’t “cut Social Security like every other Republican, and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid.” His latest budget includes billions in cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

8. He promised to be “the voice” of American workers. He hasn’t. His administration has stripped workers of their rights, repealed overtime protections, rolled back workplace safety rules, and turned a blind eye to employers who steal their workers’ wages.

9. He promised that the average American family would see a $4,000 pay raise because of his tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. But nothing trickled down. Wages for most Americans have barely kept up with inflation.

10. He promised that anyone who wants a test for COVID will get one. But countless Americans still can’t get a test.

11. He said hydroxychloroquine protects against coronavirus. No way. The FDA revoked its emergency authorization due to the drug’s potentially lethal side effects.

12. He promised to eliminate the federal deficit. He has increased the federal deficit by more than 60 percent.

13. He said he would hire “only the best people.” He has fired a record number of his own Cabinet and White House picks, and then called them “whackos,” “dumb as a rock,” and “not mentally qualified.” Six of them have been charged with crimes.

14. He promised to bring down the price of prescription drugs and said drug companies are “getting away with murder.” They still are. Drug prices have soared, and a company that got federal funds to develop a drug to treat coronavirus is charging $3,000 a pop.

15. He promised to revive the struggling coal industry and bring back lost coal mining jobs. The coal industry has continued to lose jobs as clean energy becomes cheaper.

16. He promised to help American workers during the pandemic. However, 80 percent of the tax benefits in the coronavirus stimulus package have gone to millionaires and billionaires. And at least 21 million Americans have lost extra unemployment benefits, with no new stimulus check to fall back on.

17. He said he’d drain the swamp. Instead, he’s brought into his administration more billionaires, CEOs, and Wall Street moguls than in any administration in history, and he’s filled departments and agencies with former lobbyists, lawyers, and consultants crafting new policies for the same industries they used to work for.

18. He promised to protect Americans with pre-existing conditions. His Justice Department is trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act, including protections for people with pre-existing conditions.

19. He said Mexico would pay for his border wall. They laughed at him.

20. He promised to bring peace to the Middle East. Instead, tensions increased, and his so-called “peace plan” was dead on arrival.

21. He promised to lock up Hillary Clinton for using a private email server. He didn’t. Funny enough, Trump uses his personal cellphone for official business, and several members of his own administration, including Jared Kushner and Ivanka, have used private email in the White House.

22. He promised to use his business experience to whip the federal government into shape. He hasn’t. His White House is in permanent chaos. He caused the longest government shutdown in our nation’s history when he didn’t get funding for his wall.

23. He promised to end DACA. The Supreme Court ruled that his plan to deport 700,000 young immigrants was unconstitutional, and DACA still stands.

24. He promised “six weeks of paid maternity leave to any mother with a newborn child whose employer does not provide the benefit.” He hasn’t delivered.

25. He promised to end Kim Jong Un’s nuclear program. Kim is expanding North Korea’s nuclear program.

26. He said he would distance himself from his businesses while in office. He continues to make money from his properties and maintain his grip on his real estate empire.

27. He said he’d force companies to keep jobs in America and that there would be consequences for companies that shipped jobs abroad. Since he took office, companies like GE, Carrier, Ford, and Harley-Davidson have continued to outsource thousands of jobs while receiving massive tax breaks. And offshoring by federal contractors has increased.

28. He promised to end the opioid crisis. Americans are now more likely to die from an opioid overdose than a car accident.

29. He said he’d release his tax returns. It’s been nearly four years. He hasn’t released his tax returns.

30. He promised to tear up the Iran nuclear deal and renegotiate a better one. Negotiations have gone nowhere, and he brought us to the brink of war.

31. He promised to enact term limits for all members of Congress, but he has not even tried to do so.

32. He promised that China would pay for tariffs on imported goods. His trade war has cost U.S. consumers $34 billion a year, eliminated 300,000 American jobs, and cost American taxpayers $22 billion in subsidies for farmers hurt by the tariffs.

33. He promised to “push colleges to cut the skyrocketing cost of tuition.” Instead, he’s made it easier for for-profit colleges to defraud students, and tuition is still rising.

34. He promised to protect American steel jobs. The steel industry continues to lose jobs.

35. He promised his tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations would pay for themselves. His tax cuts will add $2 trillion to the federal deficit.

36. After withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord, he said he’d negotiate a better deal on the environment. He hasn’t attempted to negotiate any deal.

37. He promised that the many women who accused him of sexual misconduct “will be sued after the election is over.” He hasn’t sued them, presumably because he doesn’t want the truth to come out.

38. He promised to bring back all troops from Afghanistan. He now says: “We’ll always have somebody there.”

39. He pledged to put America first. Instead, he’s deferred to dictators and authoritarians at America’s expense and ostracized our allies—who now laugh at us behind our back.

40. He promised to be the voice of the common people. He’s made his rich friends richer, increased the political power of big corporations and the wealthy, and harmed working Americans. 

Broken promises are a form of lying, something to which Trump followers have become habituated. By Jan, 2021, Trump’s false or misleading claims totaled 30,573 over 4 years.

He lied about the weather on the day he was inaugurated and he just kept lying. He lied about the Veterans Choice program, the size of the trade deficit with China the severity of COVID, the path of Hurricane Dorian, and a supposed compliment from the “Head of the Boy Scouts.

He claimed windmill noise causes cancer. He repeatedly said his new healthcare plan was coming in two weeks (It never came).

He lied that he had been named “Michigan’s Man of the Year.”

He claimed Rep. Ilhan Omar supported terrorists. He repeatedly claimed large, blue-collar men came to him shedding tears of gratitude.

He lied about Stormy Daniels, child-parent separation at the border, and saving pre-existing health conditions.

And he still lies that he won the election, despite 60+ lawsuits and recounts that determined otherwise.

It isn’t “just” his broken promises and lies to which his followers presumably are habituated. It’s his criminality, all of which he denies:

Classified Documents Case:

–Trump was indicted for mishandling top-secret documents at his Florida estate. The charges include repeatedly enlisting aides and lawyers to hide records demanded by investigators.
–A superseding indictment added charges related to surveillance footage deletion after FBI and Justice Department investigators visited Mar-a-Lago in June 2022.
–In total, Trump faces 40 felony charges in this case, with the most serious carrying a penalty of up to 20 years in prison.

Election Interference:

–In Washington, Trump faces felony charges for attempting to overturn the 2020 election results, leading to the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021.
–This case involves 13 felony counts related to election interference in Georgia.

Hush Money Payments:

–In New York, Trump faces 34 felony counts connected to hush money payments to a porn star.
–Trump also faces additional charges in Florida and the District of Columbia, bringing the total to 91 felony counts across all cases.

Trump University (Trump U.):

–Trump University was a for-profit education company founded by Donald Trump in 2004. It offered real estate courses and claimed to provide students with the knowledge and tools to succeed in real estate investing.
–However, Trump University faced numerous lawsuits and allegations of fraud. Former students accused it of deceptive practices, false advertising, and failing to deliver on promises.
–In 2016, Trump agreed to settle three lawsuits related to Trump University for $25 million.

Trump Foundation:

–The Trump Foundation was a private charitable organization established by Donald Trump in 1987.
–In 2018, the New York Attorney General’s office filed a lawsuit against the Trump Foundation, alleging that it engaged in illegal conduct, including self-dealing, misuse of funds, and coordination with Trump’s presidential campaign.
As part of a settlement, the Trump Foundation agreed to pay $2 million, dissolve, and distribute its remaining assets to legitimate charitable organizations.

So many cases, so many crimes. But in every case, Trump’s descriptions of the judges, prosecutors, and witnesses include: “Totally biased,” “crooked,” “partisan,” “hostile,” “deranged” “a lunatic,” and “corrupt,” and the case is “rigged, a “witch hunt” and part of a Democratic scheme to get him.

No normal person would accept all forty of the broken promises, all 91 felony counts, plus the criminality of Trump U. and Trump Foundation with a yawn and a ho-hum, or worse yet, make excuses for them.

No normal person would agree that every single one of the dozens of judges and prosecutors (including those in his 60+ failed attempts to prove the election was tainted) is “totally biased,” “crooked,” etc.

Maybe one judge is “corrupt.” Possibly even two. But dozens? All? Who would believe such idiocy?

Could every case against him, every thought with which he disagrees, be a “hoax”? He says so.

Perhaps it isn’t just habituation. Could it also be:

Hedonic Adaptation:

Hedonic adaptation describes how humans quickly readjust to an emotional baseline. We become insensitive to new stimuli, requiring more intense experiences to evoke emotions.

Think of it as a “hedonic treadmill”: We keep running, but our happiness level stays relatively constant.
This phenomenon impacts our ability to appreciate novelty over time.

In summary, our adaptability allows us to embrace new circumstances, but it also means we may underestimate the impact of change.

Understanding these tendencies can help us navigate life’s transitions more effectively.

In Trump’s case, the hedonic adaptation may involve people who are unhappy and bitter about how the world has treated them.

Trump taps into this bitterness by expressing it with his own hatred.

Trump promises the unhappy, bitter people vengeance, retribution, and retaliation. What scant satisfaction his ravings provide quickly wears off — That is the hedonic adaptation — so the people need to crave more and more.

And Trump keeps providing.

Not only does Trump express hatred for all the judges who rule against him and all the prosecutors who take his case, but he has indicated hatred for: Immigrants, Mexicans, Muslims, people from “shithole” countries, gays, liberals, the poor (“takers”), blacks, browns, Chinese, journalists (who don’t support him), the well-educated, climatologists, NATO, NAFTA, labor unions, and Obamacare.

The list of his hatreds is long. It also includes Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Megyn Kelly, John McCain, James Comey, Nancy Pelosi, Robert Mueller, Greta Thunberg, Jimmy Kimmel, Rosie O’Donnell, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Meryl Streep, Jeff Bezos, Meghan Markle, Colin Kaepernick, and Elizabeth Warren, to name just a few.

The only people, Trump claims to love and admire aside from Ivanka are brutal dictators like Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Ferdinand Marcos — and yes, even Hitler!

SUMMARY

Hatred, fear, and brutality all typify the angry emotions of the MAGA crowd. Trump has made them angry, given them victimhood, and then portrayed himself as both a victim and as their protector.

They are willing to forgive Trump anything, no matter how antisocial and psychotic, so long as it is expressed as anger and hatred for “them, ” i.e. those people who plot against “us.”

The “deep state” and “the swamp” are favorite targets because these vague pejoratives are non-specific while being all-inclusive. Every bitter heart resents “the deep state” and “the swamp,” and though each person’s deep state and swamp may be different, they all can agree on the hatred.

Thus, Trump is a unifying force in hatred, an internal contradiction in which MAGAs lose themselves. The man they cling to as a cure for their discontent, actually stirs their discontent.

The more their world revolves around him, the more fear and hatred he stokes in them, and the more they believe they need him.

In every sense, Donald Trump is heroin to the dispossessed.

His hate filled promises provide his people with brief elation and hope. When the promises are not kept, the elation fades, but the hope remains, as does the anger, hatred, and discontent. So the addicts return for more.

No facts, no logic can cure MAGAs. Like drug addictions, Trump addiction is forever. It only can be managed, and only if the victim wants relief. One wonders whether the management requires “the 9 Step Journey.”

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty

Twitter: @rodgermitchell Search #monetarysovereignty
Facebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

……………………………………………………………………..

The Sole Purpose of Government Is to Improve and Protect the Lives of the People.

MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY