Never Trump Republican David French agrees with you.

David French: I live in a town called Franklin, Tenn., that is south of Nashville, and it’s a very red part of America. Most of my friends, a vast majority of my family, are all Trump supporters and have been Trump supporters from the beginning.

I first started writing about the MAGA movement in late 2015. Like a lot of people, I didn’t initially take Trump seriously, but very quickly, I realized this was very serious and he was absolutely resonating. And so, I began talking to friends, to relatives. Why? What is it about Donald Trump that appeals to you so much? And that conversation has never really stopped for nine years.

If you’re on the outside, your experience with MAGA is all of the anger projected outward. So you see MAGA as almost entirely an angry movement.

MAGA likes inflicting pain on its political enemies. It likes and enjoys creating these ridiculous and absurd memes. It loves to provoke people who are on the outside. It’s part of the joy of this MAGA movement that can include this extreme aggression online.

One of the reasons this has all been on my mind is that an online rumor, an online lie, actually, that Haitian immigrants in Springfield were eating dogs and cats made it all the way to Donald Trump, and Donald Trump stated it very blatantly and explicitly in his presidential debate with Kamala Harris.

Audio clip of Donald Trump: In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country. And it’s a shame.

French: That took this issue and put it front and center with the American people, creating an immense amount of anger, and sadly, on the ground in Springfield, Ohio, it created real danger for the legal Haitian immigrants who are there, as they began to receive threats, acts of intimidation. And this is particularly toxic because absolutely nothing fires up his base like immigration.

I knew that MAGA was going to take this torch and carry it as far as it possibly could. And they did it in that particular way that MAGA interacts with the larger world, with this sense of gleeful transgression. They have fun being outrageous. They have fun being provocative. They like to “trigger the libs.” What MAGA is very good at doing is turning around back to its own people and saying, “See, we struck a nerve.” They’ll use words like, “If you’re taking flack, it means you’re over the target.” And so they use the backlash almost as proof that they’ve hit a nerve and all of this just creates an endless process of doubling down.

And one thing that I think that liberals tend to miss about the MAGA movement is they miss its underlying sense of community and its joy. So there is a strong sense of belonging within MAGA and they have a great time being MAGA. If you’re on the outside, you see MAGA as almost entirely an angry movement. And so this idea that it’s also a lot of fun and fellowship, that is something you don’t see at all. But if you’re on the inside of it, is one of its most dominant characteristics.

The people who are in on the joke, the core MAGA people who are pushing the memes out, look, if it’s true, great. If it’s not true, who cares? They’re having a good time.

Clip of TikTok: I don’t know about you, but I’m Voting Donald Trump, baby.

French: Imagine a frat boy element where you’re talking about, “We just had a rager and sure, we overturned a police car and we trashed a neighbor’s house, but hey, that was a party!” It’s kind of like a political version of that.

Clip of Donald Trump Jr.: “You know, honestly, I’m waiting for Merrick Garland to indict my father for being part of an assassination. You know, that’s what’s next.”

Jesse Watters: “It’s a conspiracy.”

Trump Jr.: “Nothing would surprise me at this point.”

Watters: “Right.”

French: They’re trashing our body politic. They’re wrecking, in many ways, the G.O.P., but they are having a good time and hey, the people they’re making mad, they don’t like them anyway.

And you might think for a minute that, well, wait, this can’t go on forever. Surely, surely the majority of Republicans, when they know they’ve been had, when they know these are lies, will stop paying attention to these memes. They’ll reject this method.

And the really sad answer is that the Republican response to Jan. 6 and the Big Lie showed us the tolerance that Republicans have for dishonesty and for lying if it is directed against their hated Democratic enemies.

So for example, right after Jan. 6, there was favorability polling and there was one of the most chilling graphs I’ve ever seen, and it was measuring the favorability of Mitch McConnell, Mike Pence and Donald Trump among Republicans. And after Jan. 6, Mitch McConnell’s ratings plunged, Mike Pence’s ratings plunged, and Trump’s barely budged.

McConnell and Pence stopped the coup attempt on Jan. 6. Trump was pursuing it, and Republicans stuck with him and rejected the people who stood up for the Constitution on that day. And don’t think for a minute that the larger MAGA influencer universe didn’t see that, understand that. And the message was very clear: If you want to remain in good standing in the G.O.P., if you want to remain in good standing in the Republican Party, you go along with Trump, period. End of discussion.

And so what you’ve seen is a social dynamic within the larger G.O.P. where MAGA is united, MAGA has a purpose, MAGA has a community, and then everyone else is more fractured.

This Springfield story will die down eventually. The memes will run out. MAGA will get bored of it. But watch out.

We’re moving into that time where mail-in ballots are going to start coming into state election officials, and you’re already beginning to see some of these election conspiracies bubbling up.

News clip: And what we have found is that some of the voter rolls in the swing states are chock-full of illegal aliens and other people who should not be on the voter roll.

French: You’re already beginning to see doubts being cast on mail-in ballots again.

News clip: We promise to show you the fraud. We’re literally screen-clipping out of the secretary of state files. So buckle up. It’s happening.

French: A lot of people are looking at these transparent lies, obvious falsehoods, baseless accusations, and saying, “How is this happening again? Why are we here again?” And one of the answers, quite frankly, is that MAGA has a lot of fun doing this.

So watch out. We’re just a few weeks away from some conspiracies regarding voting, especially as Trump continues to trail in the polls. The explanation for that will be corruption. The explanation for that within MAGA will be fraud, and so you’re going to see the Big Lie start bubbling up again very soon.

Under no circumstances must a Lib be allowed to score a win, or a Con be seen to suffer a verbal defeat in debate.

Like the religious fundamentalists of my Southern Baptist school days, not even the slightest molecule of Darwinian logic be allowed to survive unchallenged lest the entire Biblical Creationist idea come tumbling down like house of cards.

If the Haitians aren’t barbecuing household pets, then Trump and Vance must be mistaken, and if they are wrong about one thing, then nothing they say can be believed! The lie must be maintained at all costs or the whole fantasy comes crashing down in apocalyptic fury. No matter how ridiculous, how absurd, the forces of orthodoxy must rally and push the lie ahead to its ultimate conclusion.

There’s a lot in common between Trumpist Conservatism and North American rural Christian fundamentalism. I recall one Christian explaining to me how God placed fossils in the ground in the appropriate rock strata just to test our faith and belief in Scripture. Or how human footprints have been found alongside dinosaur footprints.

Another example, when the Ukrainians refused to be blackmailed into providing fake political evidence against the Bidens, suddenly the brave struggle against an evil Putin morphed into a noble Russian invasion of a corrupt neo-Nazi Ukrainian dictatorship. Anything goes to save the phenomenon. In this case, the forces of darkness are descending on poor Springfield before the word gets out that Trump didn’t fact check his own copy.

“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do, Dana, because you guys are completely letting Kamala Harris coast.”

“I say that we’re creating a story, meaning we’re creating the American media focusing on it, but yes, we created the actual focus that allowed the American media to talk about this story and the suffering created by Kamala Harris’ policies.”

–J.D. Vance