Donald Trump has often loved to talk about his sexual prowess. He boasted to Access Hollywood’s Billy Bush about grabbing women’s crotches non-consensually. He called the New York Post and begged them to run a headline bragging that his then-girlfriend, and later-second wife, Marla Maples, considered their relationship the “Best Sex I’ve Ever Had!” He bragged that he had so much sex that avoiding venereal diseases was “my personal Vietnam.”But the former president is suddenly shy about sex this week. It’s the third week of his trial in Manhattan on charges that he falsified business records to cover up hush money paid to a woman who says she had sex with him. That woman is Stormy Daniels, a porn actor and director, and today she testified in the trial, much to Trump’s consternation.[Quinta Jurecic: Trump’s misogyny is on trial in New York]At the start of proceedings today, Trump’s lawyers fiercely objected to Daniels’s presence—particularly to the danger that she would divulge “any details” of sex between the two. Trump also angrily posted and then deleted a missive on Truth Social about Daniels testifying. (He denies that any sex occurred.) Daniels has indeed been nauseatingly graphic about the encounter in other forums, but a prosecutor assured Judge Juan Merchan that the witness would not describe any “genitalia.”And she did not, though she did at one point describe the position in which she says they had sex. Trump’s lawyers, and sometimes Merchan of his own volition, repeatedly objected to prosecutors’ lines of questioning or to Daniels’s answers. The vibes were weird all around. Daniels had to be repeatedly asked to speak more slowly, by both the prosecutor and the judge. Reporters in the courtroom observed that Merchan seemed more on edge than at any other point in the trial so far.What Daniels described was less graphic and less prurient but perhaps more repulsive and more revealing about Trump. My colleague Quinta Jurecic wrote at the outset of the case that the real subject of the trial was Trump’s misogyny, raising the question: “Is this really the kind of man you want to be your president?” The day’s testimony was a window into just what kind of man that is, one dripping with sexual entitlement and presumption.[David A. Graham: Judge Merchan is out of good options]Daniels recounted a dinner appointment with Trump in Lake Tahoe in 2006 that she thought was about either socializing or business; it dawned on her too late that the goal for him was sex.One clear implication from Daniels’s testimony was that for Trump, this was nothing unusual. He simply expected that if a woman was around him, he was getting laid—not without consent, exactly, but not entirely with it, either. There was no conversation, Daniels testified: “I didn’t say anything at all.” After all, as Trump said in the Access Hollywood tape, “when you’re a star they let you do it.” In the same tape, he bitterly recalled hitting on another woman unsuccessfully. The failure rankled because it ran against his usual pattern.The two met at a golf tournament. After an initial introduction, Trump’s bodyguard approached her and asked if she’d have dinner with Trump. She demurred, profanely, but came around because she wanted to get out of another obligation. Besides, her publicist asked her, “What could possibly go wrong?”Daniels was directed to meet Trump in his penthouse room. This should have been the first sign of trouble: She said he met her wearing silk or satin pajamas that reminded her of Hugh Hefner. She asked him to get dressed in normal clothes, and he did.[Read: The cases against Trump—a guide]Their conversation over dinner sounds, bluntly, to be weird. Among the topics were how often Daniels was tested for STDs, and what protocols were for filming (her company always required condoms). In what maybe should have been another warning sign, they also talked about Trump’s sleeping arrangements with his third and current wife, Melania (Daniels said he said they didn’t even sleep in the same room).At one point, Daniels scolded Trump. “Are you always this rude? Are you always this arrogant and pompous?” she asked. (No one would have to ask today.) “Like you don’t even know how to have a conversation.” But she also testified that unlike many other people, he seemed less interested in the salacious side of the porn business and more curious about the financials. “He was very interested in a lot of the business aspects of it, which I thought was very cool,” she said. “These were very thought-out business questions."Eventually, Daniels was ready to head out and went to the bathroom. But when she emerged, she found Trump on the bed, in a t-shirt and boxers. He was between her and the door. She moved to leave, but he blocked her—not in a threatening manner, she said, though she also noted that he was larger than her and she was aware of the power dynamic. The next thing she knew, they were having sex.[Sophie Gilbert: Four more years of unchecked misogyny]Trump had gotten what he wanted. The two kept in touch for years, with him repeatedly dangling but never delivering on the prospect of Daniels appearing on The Apprentice. She said he never asked her to keep quiet about their hook-up, though she also didn’t discuss it widely, she said, because she was ashamed. It was only later, as Trump was running for president in 2016, that her hush-money deal was arranged.Last year, my colleague Sophie Gilbert wrote that a second Trump presidency would produce four years of unchecked misogyny. “I don’t believe Donald Trump hates women. Not by default, anyway,” she wrote. “The misogyny that Trump embodies and champions is less about loathing than enforcement: underscoring his requirement that women look and behave a certain way, that we comply with his desires and submit to our required social function.” Daniels’s account of her encounter with him showed exactly how that can work. It’s not that Trump bore any malice toward Daniels (that came later); it’s that she mattered to him only as a vehicle to sex.By now, Trump has gotten a great deal more than he expected or wanted that day in his Tahoe penthouse. Following a lunch break today, his attorneys argued for a mistrial on the basis of Daniels’s answers. Merchan refused but said several times that some things that came up would have been “better left unsaid.” The newly demure defendant would surely agree.

A few months ago, I had an email exchange with a person who works in the right-wing-media world. He said that crime was “surging,” a claim that just happened to advance the Trumpian narrative that America during the Biden presidency is a dystopia.I pointed out that the preliminary data showed a dramatic drop in violent crime last year. (Violent crime spiked in the final year of Donald Trump’s presidency, during the coronavirus pandemic, and has declined in each year of Joe Biden’s presidency.) During our back-and-forth, my interlocutor at first denied that crime had dropped. He sent me links showing that crime rates in Washington, D.C., were increasing, as though a national drop in crime couldn’t be accompanied by an increase in individual cities. He insisted the data I cited were false, implying they were the product of the liberal media. “Perception is reality,” he told me. “Nobody is buying the narrative that crime is getting better.”Eventually, after I responded to each of his claims, he reluctantly conceded that crime, rather than surging, was dropping—but ascribed the source of the progress to Republican states. I corrected him on that assertion, too. (Crime has dropped in both red and blue states.) He finally admitted that, yes, crime was decreasing, and in blue states too, but said the drop was inevitable, the result of the pandemic’s end. So he blamed Biden when he thought violent crime was increasing and insisted Biden deserves no credit now that violent crime is decreasing.[Rogé Karma: The great normalization]I consider where we ended up a victory, but only a partial and temporary one. His fundamental storyline hasn’t changed. Virtually every day he insists that life in America under Biden is a hellscape and that his reelection would lead to its destruction.Welcome to MAGA world.I mention this exchange because it reveals something important about the MAGA mind. Trump and his supporters have a deep investment in promoting fear. At almost every Trump rally, the former president tries to frighten his supporters out of their wits. He did this in 2016 and 2020, and he’s doing it again this year.“If he wins,” Trump said of Biden during a rally in Schnecksville, Pennsylvania, “our country is going to be destroyed.” Trump also said this of Biden: “He’s a demented tyrant.” After Trump’s victories on Super Tuesday, he told an audience of his supporters, “Our cities are choking to death. Our states are dying. And frankly, our country is dying.”Other politicians have been fearmongers, but none has been as relentless and effective as Trump. He has an unparalleled ability to promote feelings of terror among his base, with the goal of translating that terror into votes.But as I recently argued, Biden has been president for nearly three and a half years, and America has hardly entered a new Dark Age. In some important respects, in fact, the nation, based on empirical evidence, is doing better during the Biden years than it did during the Trump years. And evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, who comprise the most loyal and embittered parts of the Trump base, enjoy perhaps the greatest degree of religious liberty they ever have, and they are among the least persecuted religious communities in history. The number of abortions, of particular concern for evangelical Christians, declined steadily after 1990. At the end of Barack Obama’s presidency, during which there was a decrease of nearly 30 percent, the number of abortions reached its lowest level since Roe v. Wade was decided, in 1973. (During the Trump administration, the number of abortions increased by 8 percent.)For many Trump supporters, then, fear is not so much the cause of their support for the former president as a justification for it. They use fear to rationalize their backing for Trump. They have a burning need to promote catastrophism, even if it requires cognitive distortion, spreading falsehoods, and peddling conspiracy theories.But why? What’s driving their ongoing, deepening fealty to Trump?Part of the explanation is partisan loyalty. Every party rallies around its presidential nominee, even if the nation is flourishing under the stewardship of an incumbent from the other party.But that reasoning takes us only so far in this case. For one thing, it’s nearly inconceivable to imagine that if any other former president did what Trump has done, Republicans would maintain their devotion to him. Richard Nixon committed only a fraction of Trump’s misdeeds, and the GOP broke with him over the revelation of the “smoking gun” tapes. It was not his liberal critics, but the collapse of support within the Republican Party, that persuaded Nixon to resign.Beyond that, Trump was not an incumbent this cycle. In 2020, he lost the presidency by 72 electoral votes and 7 million popular votes; Republicans lost control of the Senate, and Democrats maintained their majority in the House. In the past, when a one-term president was defeated and dragged his party down in the process, he was shown the exit. But despite Trump being a loser, Republicans remain enthralled by him. So something unusual is going on here.Human beings have a natural tendency to organize around tribal affiliations. Some are drawn to what the Danish political scientist Michael Bang Petersen calls the “need for chaos,” and wish to “burn down” the entire political order in the hopes of gaining status in the process. (My colleague Derek Thompson wrote about Petersen and his work earlier this year.) And social scientists such as Jonathan Haidt point out that mutual outrage bonds people together. Sharing anger can be very pleasurable, and the internet makes doing this orders of magnitude easier.For several decades now, the Republican base has been unusually susceptible to these predispositions. Grievances had been building, with Republicans feeling as though they were being dishonored and disrespected by elite culture. Those feelings were stoked by figures such as Newt Gingrich and Pat Buchanan, who decivilized politics and turned it into a blood sport. And then came Trump, the most skilled and successful demagogue in American history.An extraordinary connection between Trump and his base was forged when he descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower in the summer of 2015 and employed his dehumanizing language. Almost every day since then, he has selected targets at which to channel his hate, which appears to be inexhaustible, and ramped up his rhetoric to the point that it now echoes lines from Mein Kampf. In the process, he has fueled the rage of his supporters.Trump not only validated hate; he made it fashionable. One friend observed to me that Trump makes his supporters feel as if they are embattled warriors making a last stand against the demise of everything they cherish, which is a powerful source of personal meaning and social solidarity. They become heroes in their own mythological narratives.But it doesn’t stop there. Trump has set himself up both as a Christ figure persecuted for the sake of his followers and as their avenging angel. At a speech last year at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump said, “In 2016, I declared, ‘I am your voice.’ Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution. I am your retribution.”“You’re not selling ‘Morning in America’ from Mar-a-Lago,” Steve Bannon, one of the MAGA movement’s architects, told The New York Times’ Charles Homans. “You need a different tempo. He needed to reiterate to his followers, ‘This is [expletive] revenge.’”Malice, enmity, resentments: These are the emotions driving many Trump supporters. They’re why they not only accept but delight in the savagery and brutishness of Trump’s politics. They’re why you hear chants of “Fuck Joe Biden” at Trump rallies. His base constantly searches for new targets, new reasons to be indignant. It activates the pleasure center of their brain. It’s a compulsion loop.Which brings me back to the exchange I described at the beginning of this essay. My interlocutor was clearly rooting against good news; though he would deny it, the implication of his response was that he wanted crime to get worse. Not because he was rooting for innocent people to die, though that would be the effect. What appeared to animate him—as it has for the entire Biden presidency—is the awareness that good news for America means bad news for MAGA world. Worse yet, good news would be celebrated by people—Biden, Democrats, Never Trumpers—he has grown to hate. But hate is an unattractive emotion to celebrate; it benefits from a polite veneer.[Read: You should go to a Trump rally]In this case, the finishing coat is fear, the insistence that if Biden is president, all that Trump’s supporters hold dear will die. This isn’t true, but it doesn’t matter to them that it’s not true. The veneer also makes it easier for Trump supporters—evangelical Christians, “constitutional conservatives,” champions of law and order, and “family values” voters among them—to justify their support for a man who embodies almost everything they once loathed.Even as Donald Trump’s politics has become more savage, his threats aimed at opponents more ominous, and his humiliation of others more frequent—he has become ever more revered by his supporters.I imagine that even some of the Republican Party’s harshest liberal critics could not have anticipated a decade and a half ago that the GOP would be led by a man who referred to a violent mob that stormed the Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power as “political prisoners,” “hostages,” and “patriots.” It’s been an astonishing moral inversion, a sickening descent. And it’s not done.