For the Trump faithful, it comes down to plot armor

In a 2004 article in the New York Times Magazine, journalist Ron Suskind recounted a surreal conversation he had with an aide to President George W. Bush:

The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality’…’That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out.

Ron Suskind, “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” NYT Magazine, Oct 17, 2004

It was a simpler time. We thought we had reached our presidential nadir. The reaction from those of us in the reality-based community (RBC) to the statement by the aide—now believed to have been Karl Rove—was utter disbelief that such gibberish could emanate from the White House.

Like I said, a simpler time.

But in the fullness of time, that bush-league reference to created realities would be trumped…

…and given a shiny new name:

Chuck Todd’s sputtering, incredulous reaction to the invocation of “alternative facts,” like mine, was classic RBC. Conway had said something transparently insane. And then both Chuck and I went on our way, shaking our heads but never stopping to wonder if Karl and Kellyanne, each in their own era, might have signaled something useful about this ludicrous timeline of ours.

The question has a new urgency as a former president juggles the court calendar for four felony criminal indictments while his supporters retreat further into another false reality—one in which this obvious figure of unprecedented criminality, corruption, and incompetence is actually a Christ-like victim of a leftist conspiracy bent on keeping him from retaking the White House to resume his ordained mission to fix everything.

The RBC imagines that enormous energy must be required in Trump-supporting heads to manage the cognitive dissonance between the obvious reality and the Beloved Story. But there is no dissonance to manage in a mind that has never done any reality curation to begin with. It’s Beloved Story all the way down. Far from creating dissonance, a perceived attack on a Beloved Story often results in a redoubled commitment and deeper retreat into the story—a psychological defense called reactance or the backfire effect.

This is the essential point that we in the RBC keep missing. When you’ve spent a lifetime trying to figure out the real world around you, despite your own weaknesses and biases, it’s natural to assume that others are doing the same thing, just really badly.

That’s not what’s happening.

One of the defining features of the human mind is the continuous creation of what research psychologist Dan McAdams calls “narrative identity”—a coherent story into which we can comfortably embed ourselves. That process is inherently subjective. As much as we’d like to think of our senses and minds as faithful recorders of reality, it is never true. Every perception and data point passes through a subjective filter, and our identity emerges from that.

As neuroscientist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang puts it, “Emotion and cognition are not ever separate. There’s no such thing as one without the other. Emotion is the quality of engagement we have with the cognition, and the cognition is driving how we’re going to react and make sense out of it.”

Being in the RBC or engaging in science doesn’t exempt someone from this. The scientific method didn’t eradicate emotion from our observations of the world. It created procedures and systems that control for the subjective emotion that is always, always present where humans are involved, so we could maybe start getting more things right.

But our basic nature has not changed. We are not just incidentally storytellers—it is, for better or worse, a defining feature of who we are.

The luxury to care about the truth

Because of mostly unearned circumstances, I’ve had the luxury to care more about figuring out what’s true than about creating a story in which I could feel safe. When new information presented itself, I learned to deploy a small kit of tools that are mostly designed to get the mess that is me out of the way. It becomes a habit, then a way of life.

As a result, I’ve been able to take in some harsh realities—death is final, there is no all-powerful protector, we broke the climate and probably can’t fix it, my country/race/gender is responsible for enormous suffering, and so on—and incorporate them into my narrative identity without much need for alternative facts. More often than not, I have enough personal security to accept reality, even when it grates against my preferences.

This isn’t the human default.

Consider someone who lacks those advantages. They were born into a family that either didn’t value critical education or couldn’t afford it. They grew up surrounded by parents and peers and pastors who reinforced comforting narratives, plus an entire mediascape devoted to the profitable maintenance of that bubble. They are continually assured that they live in the greatest country in the world, that they worship the right god in the right way, that they will live forever under his wing, and that all those who contradict this story are in thrall to [insert demonic being or social system or political party here].

Now shift the culture under their feet in a way that tips them out of dead center.

A presidential candidate comes along who shares their temperamental disregard for reality, albeit for different reasons. When during the first Republican debate in August 2015, he says, “I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct,” jaws drop on both sides of the reality barrier—the RBC in horror, the narrative-weavers in love.

At that moment, Donald Trump acquired plot armor.

Bending the rules to protect the main character

Plot armor is present when you know an important character in a drama will survive a dangerous situation because they are needed for the plot to continue.

My son discovered this phenomenon at age nine, watching a lightsaber duel in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. “I hate these fights,” he said. “You know the good guy is going to win.” Maybe it’ll be magic, or luck, or the sudden appearance of the cavalry, or a bending of the laws of physics. One way or another, the necessary good guy will live.

That’s plot armor.

From the reality-based POV, it is beyond bizarre that 80% of white Evangelicals support Trump. But once you grasp narrative identity, it makes perfect sense. They are a people born and bred on the creation of preferred narratives that disregard inconvenient realities, narratives in which they are the good guys and they win. The reason Jesus couldn’t stay dead is the same reason Trump’s support will never drop below a certain floor: both are needed on set for the plot to continue to the cathartic fourth act.

From the white Evangelical perspective in 2015, reality was not a desirable storyline. Church attendance and membership were plummeting, the nonreligious were on the rise, a president of the wrong color was finishing his second term, reproductive rights were near their peak, and same-sex marriage was the law of the land. They could feel themselves sliding away from the center of the culture. This was not in the script, the story with which they were raised.

And in that moment, Trump said, You’re right, the world has gone crazy with all this political correctness. Everyone is blaming you, but it’s not your fault. It’s their fault! And I alone can fix it.

That was a moment of intense narrative lock, a way to restore the triumphant story of white Christian supremacy that had been rudely interrupted by all that progress. Nobody else was talking this way. And the other 6,895 candidates in that GOP primary, with their political mealy mouths and half measures, winked out of existence.

This is the crucial realization: Trump supporters are not trying to get it right. They didn’t arrive at their support by examining evidence badly. When the reality-based community says, “How the hell can they still support him?” then trots out the Access Hollywood tape and 30,573 lies and hush money for porn stars and calls for violence and religious and political illiteracy and two open-and-shut impeachments and four criminal indictments and call it “evidence”—it’s only evidence of our failure to get through our heads what they are actually engaged in. They are not trying to get it right. They are trying to finish a story in which they are the good guys and they win.

And you, with your bad storytelling, are going to get thrown out of the writers’ room.

I don’t remember who I was talking to when this dynamic finally struck me. I was arguing against some theological nonsense with an intelligent friend, years ago, assuming that we were engaged in the same enterprise, but seeing him miss the catch over and over, when it hit with the force of revelation: He is not trying to figure it out. He is writing an acceptable story and wondering why I am being so obtuse by losing the plot.

The fortunate thing about Trump’s plot armor is that it doesn’t translate to the ballot box. The unfortunate thing is that when he loses, at the ballot box or in the courtroom, there is no extreme measure the faithful remnant will not consider in defense of the Beloved Story.