Jonathan Chait: “On January 23, 2016, Donald Trump notoriously declared, ‘I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.’ That statement was understood at the time as a metaphorical expression of the depth of Republican voters’ commitment to him…”
“The dynamic Trump observed is that he had created a bond with his supporters that no outside facts could break, even something as blatant as a cold-blooded killing on an American street. And that is the nub of the crisis into which we have plunged over the past decade.”
“All politicians spin and distort to some extent, of course. Trump’s innovation was to grasp that, because the conservative movement had trained its devotees to ignore mainstream media and rely completely on information supplied by its own loyalists, his ability to control his supporters’ perceptions effectively had no limit. And because his supporters would believe anything, he could do anything.”
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