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Both tribes think the enemy is united while their own team is involved in constant internecine conflict. I think there is something to this, that both observations are half right, but that the apparent symmetry is merely a lack of distinction between where enforcement occurs, where the lines are drawn.
Trump demands absolute loyalty from his servants. His will is absolute. You may disagree, but nonetheless must carry out his commands. Even a whiff of disloyalty is punished swiftly with a removal from power. But people on the right are permitted to believe almost anything at all. There is no ideological coherence in the movement. Trump himself believes in almost nothing. Whore mongering pimps, psychopathic industrialists, and cultural Muslims will break bread with techno feudalists, orthodox Christians, and entho nationalists.
Democrats get absolutely no loyalty from their servants. Bernie Sanders can have his rally commandeered by random loud black women. Obama and Biden can be decried as war criminals for carrying out ordinary presidential duties. Biden can have his entire presidency undermined by professional staff who think they know better than him. He can have the entire blue team apparatus flagellate him for exercising the presidential pardon for his own son. But a New York Times journalist needs to put a five paragraph prostration that they totally don't hate trans people before an article suggesting that maybe the particular style of affirmative care currently used to treat dysphoria is causing patients some harm. A member in good standing on the left must believe all the right things and endorse them full-throatedly or they shall be forever removed from polite society.
The right demands submission of the will. The left demands submission of the self.
The inability to properly simulate the world as individual actors with different views and values even when they're allied together into groups is one major cause of this. Low mental processing skills + social pressure towards tribalism + an extremely complex mental simulation makes for easy failure. It's so complex that failure can happen sometimes even among smart people who otherwise understand the concept.
I call it "hivemindism" but I'm sure there's some more proper term out there. The tendency to treat groups as though they too were an individual leading to the Goomba fallacy. The tendency towards collective punishment cause the one in power can not understand (or can not be bothered to care about) the individuals within. The tendency to relying heavily on stereotypes and other cognitive shortcuts instead of taking each person as they are. The Chinese robber fallacy is a great example of this too, but it can also be something like "group is .2% more likely to be X" so they are actually more likely, but not enough that anything meaningfully changes either (like even if trans mass shooters were at higher rates, it would still be a pittance of trans people because mass shooters are extremely extremely rare.)
Some of this hivemindism is people doing it to themselves. Tribalistic idiots with low processing skills often seem to fail at understanding they too are individuals within their group, and this leads to things like being surprised when the "enemy list" expands to include them or being unable to accept that those Scottish criminals are in fact still True Scotsman even if they are a non criminal Scotmans. For instance the horde of internet commentators that always pops up during a political violence event to claim "that's not a liberal" or "that's not a conservative".
There are pockets of the internet still trying to claim that the Minnesota politician shooter was hired by Walz, or that Robinson is a conservative Republican or that the Nancy Pelosi attacker was a gay lover or other nonsense conspiracies because they simply can not fathom that out of millions of people, not every single one can be expected to be an angel.
And this poor reasoning is what leads to things like Trump pardoning literal cop beaters. It's easy to say that he must just support political violence if it's done in his name, but it's more likely the man who has shown tribalistic tendencies since the start simply can not fathom that some people who support him might be bad. He defaults to the conspiracy and false flags because there is no other explanation he can comprehend for why a supporter of his might have misbehaved.
Scott Alexander talked about this type of phenomenon over a decade ago https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/04/ethnic-tension-and-meaningless-arguments/
And I agree with that, it is genuinely dumber than even ad hominem and yet ridiculously common.
Trump is incredibly petty and targets people with his hate and insults all the time for minor disagreements or push back and this has a genuine silencing effect. Like there's only a handful of Republican politicians who have pushed back openly on tariffs or stuff like his price controls and expansion of the executive power and and this is from the historic "free trade party" and "party of small government", and those politicians are mostly the libertarians like Rand Paul and the retiring ones like Tillis.
That's just what loyalty is. You don't only reward people who are loyal to you when they're good people. Otherwise loyalty doesn't mean anything. You can't really pathologize that as "the man who has shown tribalistic tendencies". We're all tribalistic. That's what tribe means, it's inherent in the definition of the concept. You're just professing that your tribe requires you to misunderstand Trump's tribe.
There is probably no politician in modern times who has been criticized as much by his own party apparatus as Donald Trump has been. To the extent that that isn't obvious in the year 2026 it's because we've now had ten years of Trump fighting and winning with officials in his own party.
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