How 2020's trauma created Trump's death cult

Could the Covid disaster of 2020 — which Trump botched so badly that America has had more Covid deaths than any other nation in the world except Peru — be what’s fueling the Trump MAGA cult? Now She Says Trump’s MAGA Movement is Eerily Similar” Although the economy right now is doing better than at any time since the 1960s, polls show a majority of Americans would rather believe Trump’s lies that inflation is still with us and the historically low 4.1 percent unemployment rate is “fake news.” And tens of millions of Americans believe him. — Difficulty with trust, which may lead to skepticism of official sources and greater reliance on alternative information channels; vulnerability, in other words, to Trump’s lies and his claims of “fake news” when he’s fact-checked. — Avoidance behaviors leading people to avoid exposure to diverse information sources, keeping them trapped in Trump cult bubbles like rightwing hate radio and Fox “News.” Multiple studies have been done on the psychological impact of the Covid pandemic, finding anywhere from 5 to 55 percent of Americans suffering in a way that could be diagnosed as PTSD. It isn’t just triggering earlier trauma, it’s a traumatic experience in and of itself.” Literally millions of people have joined Trump’s cult — it is a cult, as its members are so impervious to factual information and it’s based on the personality of a single man — and the evidence suggests that many of them may have been made vulnerable to joining MAGA because of the trauma they experienced during the worst of the pandemic.