Why Do People Believe Anything He Says

Last week I met with one of my expert witnesses who is a psychiatrist. The conversation drifted from the case we are working to politics and Trump. I asked him one question that has been chewing at me for years.

How does a man with this many documented falsehoods, this many felony convictions on the record, this many sworn deposition contradictions, and this many fact-checked statements still command the loyalty of tens of millions of Americans?

I expected a shrug. Maybe a sigh. What I got instead was the most coherent explanation of the last decade of American politics I have ever heard. He walked me through the published research. He named the mechanisms. He cited the studies.

I will give you what he told me. First, here is the evidence pile we talked about.

We started with Trump’s most consequential controversies, from Stormy Daniels to E. Jean Carroll, from Epstein to January 6, from gas prices to tariffs to attacks on Gold Star families and decorated generals. His public statements collide head-on with sworn testimony, jury verdicts, court rulings, and the documented record. The pattern is consistent. The receipts are public. More than 100 are shared in this footnote.¹

So now the real question.

Why do people believe him

I listened to my expert. I asked him to skip the jargon and tell me what is actually happening inside the brain of a true believer.

Here is what he said.

One. This is not politics. This is identity.

Yale Law professor Dan Kahan has spent two decades publishing peer-reviewed studies on what he calls identity-protective cognition. His central finding: when a fact threatens your group identity, your brain treats that fact as a physical threat. You do not weigh it. You filter it.

A Trump supporter who has spent a decade defending him to family members at Thanksgiving dinner has a problem. Admitting Trump lied about Stormy Daniels means admitting their cousin was right and they were wrong for ten years running. The cost of accepting the fact is social annihilation inside their family and friend group. The cost of rejecting the fact is zero. People do the math without realizing they are doing it. They reject the fact.

This is not stupidity. Kahan’s studies show that the more scientifically literate a person is, the better they get at rationalizing away facts that threaten their group. Smart people do this with more sophistication than less educated people. That is the disturbing finding.

Two. The illusory truth effect is doing work every single day.

Cognitive psychologists call it the illusory truth effect. The more often you hear a statement, the more your brain tags it as familiar. Familiarity feels like truth.

Peer-reviewed research published in Public Opinion Quarterly in 2023 examined the relationship between Trump’s repeated false claims and misperceptions among the American public. The study found measurable correlation, with the strongest effect on consumers of right-leaning media. The Washington Post created a fact-check category called the Bottomless Pinocchio for claims that had been fact-checked as wrong yet repeated at least 20 times. Trump filled the category by himself.

When Trump says “rigged election” 1,200 times, his supporters hear “rigged election” 1,200 times. The brain stops checking after the third or fourth repetition. The phrase becomes furniture.

Three. Steven Hassan and the BITE model.

Dr. Steven Hassan is a licensed mental health counselor in Massachusetts who was deprogrammed from the Moon cult in the 1970s. He earned his doctorate and has spent 40 years studying authoritarian influence. His BITE model identifies four mechanisms that authoritarian leaders use to control followers: Behavior, Information, Thought, and Emotional control.

Hassan’s 2019 book The Cult of Trump, updated in 2024 with a foreword by George Conway, argues that Trump fits the BITE model with disturbing precision. Phrases like “fake news” and “build the wall” function as thought-stopping clichés. Information control happens through dedicated media ecosystems that filter every external fact. Emotional control runs on rage, grievance, and fear of the enemy from within. Behavior control shows up in the matching red hats, the chants, and the rallies that double as identity reinforcement rituals.

Hassan’s BITE model is not universally accepted in academic cult studies. Some scholars treat it as a useful framework, others as too broad. My friend was careful to flag this. Not every Trump supporter is in a cult. Plenty of people vote for him for tax reasons, immigration policy reasons, or pure tribal loyalty unrelated to belief in his specific claims. The cult-style dynamic, in their professional view, applies to a hard core of supporters operating inside a closed information loop with most of the BITE mechanisms running.

Four. Sunk cost and the doomsday cult problem.

Psychologists Elliot Aronson and Carol Tavris wrote a book called Mistakes Were Made But Not by Me. The central insight is what they call the pyramid of choice. Once a person makes a public commitment to a belief, every subsequent piece of evidence gets filtered through the need to justify the original commitment.

They point to the Heaven’s Gate cult. Members pooled money to buy a telescope to watch for the alien spaceship behind the Hale-Bopp comet. When they could not see the spaceship, they tried to return the telescope on the grounds that it was defective. Then they died by suicide. The evidence never reached them. The commitment had become the evidence.

Trump supporters who put a sign on their lawn in 2016, who lost a friendship over him in 2018, who alienated a sibling in 2020, who told their daughter she was wrong in 2022, are not going to admit in 2026 that they were taken. The cost is too high. The pyramid is too steep. So they rationalize.

Five. The shared psychosis framework, with caveats.

Forensic psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee, formerly a voluntary faculty member at Yale School of Medicine, edited the 2017 book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, which featured 27 mental health professionals analyzing his public behavior. Her framework, published in Scientific American in January 2021, calls the dynamic between Trump and his hard-core followers a “narcissistic symbiosis” and a “shared psychosis.”

Yale declined to renew Lee’s appointment in 2020 after a complaint from Alan Dershowitz over a tweet in which Lee suggested Dershowitz had a “shared psychosis” with Trump. Yale cited her violation of the American Psychiatric Association’s Goldwater Rule, which prohibits psychiatrists from offering professional opinions about public figures they have not personally examined. Lee sued Yale. The lawsuit produced significant debate within psychiatry about whether the Goldwater Rule should apply when a public figure poses a perceived threat.

I share this framework here with the caveat my expert gave me. The Lee analysis is one expert view. The American Psychiatric Association’s mainstream position is that long-distance diagnosis is improper. Lee’s framing remains contested. Whether you find it useful is up to you.

Six. The need for a strongman during status anxiety.

Bob Altemeyer, a retired University of Manitoba psychologist, spent decades studying what he called the right-wing authoritarian personality. His finding, replicated many times since the 1980s, is that a measurable percentage of any population scores high on three traits: submission to authority, aggression toward out-groups designated by that authority, and conventionalism, meaning a strong preference for traditional norms.

When that subset of the population experiences status anxiety, economic, cultural, demographic, or religious, the percentage who become active followers of an authoritarian leader rises sharply. The leader does not create the personality. The personality was always there. The leader activates it.

The American working and middle class has experienced 40 years of wage stagnation, the loss of manufacturing, an opioid epidemic, three wars, a financial crisis, and a pandemic. Status anxiety is the operating environment. Trump did not invent the anger. He named the enemies and gave the anger a destination.

What this all adds up to

Pull these six explanations together and a coherent picture emerges of why the lie pile does not work as evidence.

The believer is not weighing facts against facts. They are protecting an identity, repeating phrases until the phrases feel true, operating inside an information environment that filters out contradicting facts, justifying a decade of public commitment, and meeting psychological needs that have nothing to do with policy.

When you show them Trump’s felony convictions, you are not showing them a fact. You are asking them to detonate their identity. They will not do it.

This is why fact-checking does not work the way we hope. The Washington Post Fact Checker built a database of 30,573 false or misleading statements during Trump’s first term alone, an average of 21 per day. The believers either never saw the database, dismissed the database as biased, or accepted the database while continuing to support him. The facts were not the problem. The facts were never the problem.

So what do we do

My expert witness and I talked about this for another hour or so.

The honest answer is that you cannot argue someone out of an identity. You can only love them through the door on the other side, when life events make the cost of staying inside the belief greater than the cost of leaving it. A divorce. A son who comes home from a January 6 prison sentence and tells the truth. A medical bill that arrives in an envelope a tariff just made larger. A funeral for a friend.

What we can do, the rest of us, is keep the receipts.

Keep the Stormy Daniels timeline. Keep the 34 felony convictions. Keep the E. Jean Carroll deposition video. Keep the Epstein flight logs. Keep the AAA gas price data. Keep the “enemy from within” Fox transcript. Keep the January 6 footage and the medical examiner’s reports. Keep the tariff rulings from the Supreme Court. Keep John Kelly’s CNN interview about what Trump said at his son’s grave.

Keep them clean. Keep them sourced. Keep them ready.

Because somewhere out there, every day, a Trump supporter is having a quiet moment of doubt. They saw something that did not fit. They heard something that landed wrong. They are about to ask their first honest question in ten years. When they do, they need to find the receipts waiting where they have always been. And that’s one reason I wrote this post. To give you the receipts both here and in the footnote.

The cult of repetition built the believer. The patience of evidence will outlast the cult.

Tell the truth. Save the receipts. Wait for the door to open.

That is the work.

The name of the expert who walked me through this material has been kept private at his request. I am not a psychiatrist. I am a trial lawyer who has spent four decades watching juries decide who is telling the truth and who is not. Those instincts work in a courtroom. They work here too.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

---

The receipts only matter if someone keeps them. Subscribe to Uncensored Objection for transparent, accurate, objective analysis of breaking political news, delivered the same way I’d deliver it to a jury.

1. 1. Mexico will pay for the border wall.

2. I will end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours.

3. The 2020 election was stolen from me.

4. Barack Obama was not born in the United States.

5. My 2017 inauguration drew the largest crowd in history.

6. Three to five million people voted illegally in 2016.

7. I passed the largest tax cuts in history.

8. COVID-19 will disappear like a miracle.

9. Anybody who wants a COVID test can get one.

10. I never suggested injecting bleach or disinfectant.

11. My Charlottesville response was perfect and forceful.

12. January 6 rioters were peaceful tourists, or antifa.

13. My January 6 speech was extremely calming.

14. The Presidential Records Act let me keep classified documents.

15. Hurricane Dorian was forecast to hit Alabama.

16. I have a secret plan to replace Obamacare.

17. Wind turbines cause cancer and kill all the birds.

18. The 2025 strikes obliterated Iran’s nuclear program.

19. The BLS commissioner rigged jobs numbers against me.

20. Ukraine started the war and Zelensky shows zero gratitude.

21. I never had an affair with Stormy Daniels.

22. My 34-count trial was rigged, a witch hunt, a sham.

23. Joe Biden weaponized the justice system against me.

24. Judge Merchan blocked me from using advice-of-counsel defense.

25. I never met E. Jean Carroll, she’s not my type.

26. The Carroll case is a hoax and made-up story.

27. I had a falling out with Epstein 15 years ago.

28. I was never a fan of Jeffrey Epstein.

29. The Epstein files are a Democratic hoax.

30. Gas prices hit $1.98 a gallon in three states.

31. Gas prices are coming way down right now.

32. Inflation has been solved, prices are down across the board.

33. Democrats are the enemy from within.

34. Democrats are more dangerous than China and Russia.

35. I’m not threatening anybody with my enemy comments.

36. January 6 was a beautiful thing, a day of love.

37. The rioters posed zero threat that day.

38. I had nothing to do with the January 6 rally.

39. China and other countries pay the tariffs, not Americans.

40. Tariffs make the United States rich at no cost.

41. My tariff authority under IEEPA is unlimited.

42. John McCain is not a war hero because he was captured.

43. McCain was a loser; why are flags at half-staff?

44. I never called fallen soldiers losers or suckers.

45. The Atlantic story about Aisne-Marne is fake news.

46. I don’t get it, what was in it for them?

47. My generals are a bunch of pussies.

48. Mattis is the world’s most overrated general.

49. General Milley’s actions deserved execution in times gone by.

50. Ghazala Khan wasn’t allowed to speak at the convention.

51. I made a lot of sacrifices building businesses and creating jobs.

52. Hillary Clinton started the birther conspiracy theory.

53. I built over 500 miles of border wall.

54. We never have an empty seat at my rallies.

55. Over 100,000 people attended my Butler, Pennsylvania rally.

56. Biden was essentially convicted in his classified documents case.

57. Biden said “it’s great to be in Florida” while in New Hampshire.

58. Mexico is paying for the wall through the USMCA deal.

59. I obviously never meant Mexico would write a check.

60. My promise to end Ukraine war in 24 hours was sarcastic.

61. Zelensky has expressed zero gratitude for our efforts.

62. Russian tanks didn’t reach Kyiv because of mud, not resistance.

63. The U.S. has given Ukraine more aid than Europe has.

64. Ukraine started the war with Russia.

65. The flu kills more Americans than COVID will.

66. We have COVID totally under tremendous control.

67. The 15 U.S. COVID cases will soon be near zero.

68. Eggs are down 93 to 94 percent since I took office.

69. Egg prices have fallen 79 percent under my administration.

70. There has been no inflation under my second term.

71. The 2020 election had massive fraud in multiple states.

72. Dominion voting machines switched votes from Trump to Biden.

73. Dead people voted in large numbers in 2020.

74. Suitcases of fraudulent ballots were pulled from under tables in Georgia.

75. Mike Pence had the authority to reject electoral votes.

76. I won Georgia by hundreds of thousands of votes.

77. I just need Raffensperger to find 11,780 votes.

78. The FBI planted evidence at Mar-a-Lago.

79. I declassified all those documents with my mind.

80. The documents at Mar-a-Lago were planted by the FBI.

81. The classified documents case was politically motivated.

82. Sharpiegate showed Alabama was originally in Dorian’s path.

83. Windmills drive whales loco and cause cancer.

84. Migrants are eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio.

85. Crime is way down because of my policies.

86. Other countries are emptying their prisons into America.

87. I have concepts of a healthcare plan. My plan rolls out in two weeks.

88. I’m the only one who can fix it.

89. Nobody knew healthcare could be so complicated.

90. The 2017 tax cuts paid for themselves.

91. Mexico would deport migrants for us at no cost.

92. NATO countries owe the United States back dues.

93. Putin started withdrawing troops because of my election victory.

94. The Mueller investigation completely exonerated me.

95. There was no collusion and no obstruction.

96. The Steele dossier and Epstein files are equally fake.

97. Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation.

98. The DOJ and FBI are weaponized against Republicans.

99. The Southern Poverty Law Center indictment proves a Democrat conspiracy.

100. I am the most transparent president in history.

And it’s worth going into a bit more detail on the following:

The 34 felony convictions. A Manhattan jury convicted Trump on May 30, 2024, on all 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree. The verdict was unanimous. Judge Juan Merchan sentenced him on January 10, 2025, to an unconditional discharge, the lightest sentence available under New York law. The convictions remain on the record. No fines, probation, or jail time were imposed. Trump filed his formal appeal in October 2025. That appeal is pending. Trump called the trial “rigged,” a “witch hunt,” a “sham,” and a “hoax.” The grand jury was made up of New York citizens. The trial jury was twelve New York citizens, screened and approved by both prosecution and defense. Joe Biden had no role. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is a state prosecutor, not a federal one.

E. Jean Carroll. Trump said he never met her, that she was not his type, that her allegations were a hoax. A 1987 photograph from an NBC event shows Trump, his then-wife Ivana, Carroll, and Carroll’s then-husband John Johnson together. A federal jury found Trump liable in May 2023 for sexual abuse and defamation and awarded Carroll $5 million. A second jury awarded her an additional $83.3 million in January 2024 because Trump kept making the same false statements after the first verdict. The Second Circuit upheld the larger verdict and rejected en banc review in June 2025. Trump’s appeals continue.

The civil fraud case. A New York appeals court in August 2025 vacated the $355 million civil fraud penalty Judge Arthur Engoron had imposed, calling the financial sanction “excessive.” The court still upheld the underlying liability for fraud and most other punishments, including a three-year ban on Trump serving in corporate leadership at any New York company. The case is the subject of further appeals.

Jeffrey Epstein. Trump said in 2019 he had a falling out with Epstein, had not spoken to him in 15 years, and was never a fan. In 2002 he told New York magazine: “I have known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy. He is a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” Federal flight logs released by the Justice Department on December 23, 2025 showed Trump flew on Epstein’s private jet many more times than had been previously reported. Trump in July 2025 called the Epstein files a “hoax” written by “Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration.” The files were created by federal prosecutors over decades, including under Republican administrations. Epstein’s 2008 plea deal was negotiated by Alexander Acosta, who Trump later named Labor Secretary.

Gas prices going down. This week, with U.S. crude oil back above $100 per barrel, Trump continues to claim gas prices are coming down. AAA data shows the national average gasoline price was $4.30 per gallon as of April 30, 2026, per CNN’s Daniel Dale fact-check. Pump prices have continued to rise into May. In April 2025, Trump claimed gas had hit $1.98 per gallon in three states. The lowest state average at the time was $2.66 in Mississippi, per AAA. Daniel Dale published the headline: “Trump keeps making up gas prices.”

Democrats are the enemy. Trump told Maria Bartiromo on Fox News on October 13, 2024 that Democrats are “the enemy from within” and “more dangerous than China, Russia and all these countries.” He named Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi as examples. He suggested the National Guard or military “if really necessary” could handle these Americans on Election Day. When Howard Kurtz asked him to clarify whether Schiff was an enemy or a political opponent, Trump answered: “Of course he is an enemy.”

January 6 Capitol riot. Trump has called January 6 “a beautiful thing,” “a day of love,” and “a peaceful protest.” More than 140 Capitol and Metropolitan Police officers were assaulted, per the Justice Department. Property damage exceeded $2.8 million. Federal prosecutors charged more than 1,580 people. Roughly 1,270 were convicted, mostly through guilty pleas. More than 600 defendants pleaded guilty to or were convicted of assaulting or obstructing law enforcement, with 170 of those involving a deadly or dangerous weapon. Four officers who responded to the attack died by suicide in the months that followed: Capitol Police Officer Howard Liebengood, MPD Officer Jeffrey Smith, MPD Officer Gunther Hashida, and MPD Officer Kyle DeFreytag. A fifth officer, Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, collapsed at the Capitol on the night of January 6 and died the following evening. The D.C. medical examiner ruled in April 2021 that Sicknick died of natural causes from two strokes, with manner of death listed as natural. The examiner stated that the events of January 6 “played a role in his condition.” Capitol Police accepted the findings while continuing to honor Sicknick as having died in the line of duty.

The January 6 pardons. On January 20, 2025, Trump issued full pardons to roughly 1,500 January 6 defendants on his first day in office. Fourteen members of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, including founder Stewart Rhodes and former chairman Enrique Tarrio, initially had their sentences commuted rather than pardoned. Tarrio received a full pardon in March 2025. In April 2026, the Justice Department moved to dismiss outright the seditious conspiracy convictions of the remaining Proud Boys and Oath Keepers members.

The illegal tariffs. Trump claims the tariffs were legal and that China and other countries pay the tariffs and the United States is getting rich. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Princeton, Columbia, and the National Bureau of Economic Research published peer-reviewed studies showing effectively 100 percent of the tariff costs are paid by American importers and passed to American consumers. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 on February 20, 2026 in Learning Resources v. Trump that Trump’s IEEPA tariffs were unconstitutional. Chief Justice Roberts wrote the majority opinion, joined by Justices Gorsuch, Barrett, Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson. The decision struck down tariffs. The U.S. Court of International Trade ruled in May 2026 that the Section 122 replacement tariffs Trump imposed after the Supreme Court ruling were also unlawful.

Insults to military leaders and politicians. Trump in 2015 said John McCain was “not a war hero” because he was captured. McCain spent more than five years as a POW in Hanoi and refused early release to stay with fellow prisoners. The Atlantic, in a September 2020 article by editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, reported that Trump in 2018 called those buried at the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in France “losers” and “suckers” and said: “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” Trump publicly denied the reporting and called it “made-up Fake News.” The story was independently confirmed by the Associated Press, Fox News, the Washington Post, and others using their own sources. Former Chief of Staff John Kelly, a retired four-star Marine general who lost his son Robert in Afghanistan, confirmed the reporting on the record to CNN in October 2023. Kelly added that Trump, standing at the Arlington grave of his son Robert on Memorial Day 2017, said: “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” Bob Woodward’s 2020 book reported, with on-the-record sourcing from then-aide Byers via former Defense Secretary Mattis, that Trump said his “fucking generals are a bunch of pussies. They care more about their alliances than they do about trade deals.” Trump posted in September 2023 that General Mark Milley’s actions were worthy of execution “in times gone by.” Defense Secretary Jim Mattis resigned in protest in December 2018 over Trump’s Syria withdrawal. Trump later called Mattis “the world’s most overrated general.” Trump publicly attacked the Khan family, Gold Star parents, in July and August 2016, suggesting Ghazala Khan was not allowed to speak at the Democratic National Convention because of her religion. Khan responded in a Washington Post op-ed that her grief, not her religion, kept her silent.

Stormy Daniels. Despite the picture of the two of them smiling together, Trump said for years he never had an affair with her. In a March 2022 statement after a procedural defamation ruling, he wrote: “I never had an affair with Stormy Daniels, nor would I ever have wanted to.” Daniels described the 2006 encounter in a 2011 In Touch magazine interview, on 60 Minutes in 2018, and at the 2024 trial. Michael Cohen testified under oath that he paid her $130,000 on Trump’s behalf days before the 2016 election. Cohen pleaded guilty to federal campaign finance violations directly tied to that payment.

---

Related Articles:

Cognitive Dissonance in Red Hats: The Psychology of Unshakable Trump Support

Red Hat. Blue Heart. One House: A Story of Quiet Resistance.