I guess this goes here?
Trump fans trust him, and only him.
These people are completely unreachable. They are so wrapped up in a web of lies that they can no longer recognize truth.
CORALVILLE, Iowa — Joannie Firkins, 63, does not trust the COVID vaccine. She does not trust the Internal Revenue Service. She does not trust the results of the 2020 election and she certainly does not trust President Biden.
The one entity the Iowa City hair salon owner does trust, however, is former president Donald Trump.
“I believe Trump is appointed by God — appointed-slash-anointed, however you want to say it,” said Firkins, as she stood outside a hotel ballroom last week, a couple of hours before Trump was set to speak. “He’s the only one that’s speaking the truth.”
If Trump dominates the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary in January, as the polls suggest he will, it will be in part because of voters such as Firkins — a true believer who supported him in 2016, when he first ran for president, and whose devotion has only deepened in the ensuing years of critical headlines, criminal indictments, and other legal woes.
The depth, intensity, and tenacity of these voters’ support of Trump has been a fixture of the presidential primary campaign, turning them into a bloc that is so well known, some pollsters have a name for them: the Always-Trump base.
Less appreciated, however, is the fact that, for many of these voters, devotion to the former president is tightly bound with a deep distrust of the government, of basic institutions, and of his opponents. It is a distrust that he himself has intentionally stoked from the stump over the past eight years as he has railed against the country’s election administrators, government agencies such as the FBI and the Department of Justice, educators — and some within his own party.
“He can be a dictator for a day, hello!” Firkins said, praising a comment made by Trump earlier this month that alarmed democracy experts but left his biggest supporters excited. “He’s going to shut the border and he’s going to start drilling. We’re going to get our prosperity back.”
In-depth interviews of more than 20 Trump supporters in the early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire reveal just how much the doubts Trump has seeded among his followers, and his claims of being besieged, have deepened their enthusiasm for him and eroded their faith in their party and their government, laying the foundation for a presidency they hope will be as expansive as possible.
The article goes on to quote half a dozen other trumpsters, all of them over 60, and ends with this:
Scott Brown, 32, a former Massachusetts resident who now lives in New Hampshire, said he did not initially support Trump when he first ran for president in 2016 — he backed a libertarian candidate instead — but that changed during his presidency.
“I saw how the media would constantly lie about him, misconstrue, like when he passed his tax policy. That was a big turning point,” Brown said. “Them saying it’s a tax break for the rich when literally everyone gets a tax break.”
