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I will grant you that the attack ad he paid for after then Central Park Five case was not something which obviously benefited him.
But my impression is that most of the times he sticks his neck out for an unpopular belief, it is a belief which is directly about himself. He genuinely believes that he deserves the Nobel prize. He might even genuinely believe, against all evidence, that the Democrats stole the 2020 election. Or that of course the international trade could be much improved upon by having a genius dealmaker such as himself renegotiate everything. (Very charitably, one could claim that he genuinely believes in protectionism.) He believes that his allies should be rewarded and his friends should be punished.
I will also grant you that it is hard to know what he genuinely believes because his home ground is Simulacrum level four, where words have no relationship to anything in physical reality. Perhaps he genuinely believes every conspiracy theory he has ever pushed, starting from the Birther thing. Perhaps he believes some of the stuff he has said. Perhaps he has, in his mind, the ability to track which of his statements agree with his world model and which don't. Or perhaps he has long lost that ability.
Some big CW topics are abortion, gun rights and immigration.
Trump is very much not part of the Christian Right (which opposes abortion). He certainly does not believe that sex should be between husband and wife only (which is at the end of the day what the Christian Right is all about).
Nor does he seem to really care about gun rights. His administration was quick to blame Pretti for bringing a gun to a protest. Are you telling me that in a world where he could win the mid-terms by passing gun bans, he would decide to lose instead out of a principled belief in 2A?
Immigration is certainly the topic most central to his political persona, and he is rather consistent about it, cracking down on illegals and restricting legal avenues to migrate to the US. In his personal life, he is a bit less anti-immigrant, of course. My take is that he made a conscious decision to make this his political niche ca. 2015.
What are your examples of Trump suffering for his beliefs, preferably beliefs which are not about him?
The Central Park Five were guilty.
His political career started by mainstreaming illegal immigration and deportations into a political arena that did not want to talk about it, even though it immediately resulted in him losing contracts and business opportunities. He stuck by Corey Lewandowski when he was accused of assaulting a reporter for lightly brushing past her. Trump maintained a strong position on tariffs for decades against much ferocious opposition and no obvious benefit for his own interests. He was happy to be booed by a crowd of Republicans for criticizing Bush for lying about the Iraq War. He got gay marriage out of the Republican platform. He built a wall. They dragged his name through the mud with all manner of fake accusations, women he assaulted who couldn't even remember when it happened, they tried putting him in jail. Most famously, he dodged a bullet to the head and then stood up before a crowd of his supporters and pumped his fist and told them to keep fighting.
I could go on, really, but this is all tedious repetition of the obvious truth. Trump does not enter politics, does not run for president, does not become president, without big, massive, huge personal sacrifice. He could have sat on a beach in Miami with his billions and his tower in New York after a very accomplished life, and nothing would have happened, and he would be fine. You don't have to like what he did but you can't seriously deny that he sacrificed a lot, that for one small alteration in fate here or there he would have lost everything. That it has worked out so far and made him more successful is not actually evidence that he did this out of his own self-interest. If it was that easy you would see a lot more imitators trying to do what he did.
And most of his successes in politics are based on promises he made long ago, because he has actually been extremely consistent in attempting the things he said all along he wanted to do.
I just do not think this is a serious belief you can actually credibly defend. Maybe it sounds nice as some kind of slapdash pubtalk barcrawl locker room talk. But do you really, honestly, earnestly, believe that Trump is best modeled as a kind of void whose words bear no relation to anything whatsoever? Not just that he lies, or even that he lies more than other politicians. But that for Trump "words have no relationship to anything in physical reality"? What does that do to your view of the world?
I'm not sure why you invoke the Christian Right here actually, except as maybe a comparison or metaphor, but I have to point out that the Christian Right is peaked. Trump killed it. They are not the animating force in Republican politics anymore, as much as they'd like to be.
Yeah you can think it's stupid to bring a gun to obstruct police officers and also believe in the 2nd Amendment. There's no part of the 2nd Amendment that logically entails ignoring cause and effect. Support for the 2nd Amendment doesn't require that every time a guy has a gun I declare he's justified and in the right. Notably, if Trump wanted to take the opposite position, and didn't believe in the 2nd Amendment at all, he could have run as a Democrat. Like he was in the 90s.
Not of the crime of which they were convicted, but that is beside the point. And again, I brought this up as a point in favor of him having serious beliefs. Paying for these ads was not a good business decision, after all.
There is an ancient joke which goes "What is the difference between a used car salesman and a computer salesman?" - "A used car salesman knows when he is lying."
Trump is the computer salesman. A bullshitter rather than a con artist or schemer.
Take the 2020 election results. Now, it might be that his thought process was 'Conceding defeat to Biden will critically weaken my brand. I better lie about the election being stolen to keep my base.'
But that is not my take of his behavior. I think it was genuine cognitive dissonance on his part. "I know that I am a great president, much better than Obama, who won reelection. Therefore, it is impossible that I lost. Thus, the Democrats must have cheated." It is not rare in humans, but it is rare to see it so openly expressed in politicians.
What definitely did not happen was that Trump carefully summed up reported irregularities and decided that they made the election close enough to demand a recount.
I do not think that even Trump's followers believe that his claims are literally true. "Oh, I invested my life savings in a Ukrainian company, because Trump promised that if elected he would settle the conflict before he even became president" is not something which happened a lot. "Stop the steal" might be more correctly understood as "Boo to Biden", though the J6 crowd was mistaking it for a claim on physical reality in some parts.
In the words of Hannah Arendt:
Are the immigrants eating our cats? Is Denmark guarding Greenland with a dogsled? Were the Epstein files on Bondi's desk, or did they not exist at all? Did Pretti plan to shoot ICE officers? These look like claims over physical reality, but for the people making them, they are not. They are more like the hallucinations of a freewheeling LLM. They do not seek to deceive followers into having a wrong but coherent world model, but try to persuade them that trying to have a coherent world model at all is just not worth the trouble.
This is not rational. Your idea of what true MAGA would believe if they believed Trump is not how people actually observably act. The fact that people don't invest life savings in Ukrainian companies (???) is actually good evidence MAGA is serious, because MAGA is grounded in some kind of reality. What you are describing is how people would act in a cult, which, despite all sorts of ideas current online, is not actually how MAGA behaves.
This is cope, plain and simple. MAGA is real and believes the things it says it believes. Trump is real and believes the things he says he believes. It's you who's hallucinating by conflating factual disputes (they stopped counting votes in several swing states simultaneously) with obvious poetic license (Oh, Denmark didn't actually send a dogsled?).
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