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Subject: Why Rightists Believe Trump's Constant Stream Of Lies
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Ideas
The Motivated Ignorance of Trump Supporters

They can’t claim they didn’t know.
By Peter Wehner

On the morning of August 8, 2022, 30 FBI agents and two federal 
prosecutors conducted a court-authorized search of Mar-a-Lago, Donald 
Trump’s Palm Beach, Florida, estate. The reason for the search, according 
to a 38-count indictment, was that after leaving office Trump mishandled 
classified documents, including some involving sensitive nuclear 
programs, and then obstructed the government’s efforts to reclaim them.
On the day before the FBI obtained the search warrant, one of the agents 
on the case sent an email to his bosses, according to The New York Times. 
“The F.B.I. intends for the execution of the warrant to be handled in a 
professional, low key manner,” he wrote, “and to be mindful of the optics 
of the search.” It was, and they were.
Over the course of 10 hours, the Times reported, “there was little drama 
as [agents] hauled away a trove of boxes containing highly sensitive 
state secrets in three vans and a rented Ryder box truck.”
On the day of the search, Trump was out of the state. The club at Mar-a-
Lago was closed. Agents alerted one of Trump’s lawyers in advance of the 
search. And before the search, the FBI communicated with the Secret 
Service “to make sure we could get into Mar-a-Lago with no issues,” 
according to the testimony of former Assistant FBI Director Steven 
D’Antuono. It wasn’t a “show of force,” he said. “I was adamant about 
that, and that was something we all agreed on.”
The search warrant itself included a standard statement from the 
Department of Justice’s policy on the use of deadly force. There was 
nothing exceptional about it. But that didn’t prevent Trump or his 
supporters from claiming that President Joe Biden and federal law-
enforcement agents had been involved in a plot to assassinate the former 
president.
In a fundraising appeal, Trump wrote,
BIDEN’S DOJ WAS AUTHORIZED TO SHOOT ME! It’s just been revealed that 
Biden’s DOJ was authorized to use DEADLY FORCE for their DESPICABLE raid 
in Mar-a-Lago. You know they’re just itching to do the unthinkable … Joe 
Biden was locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger.
On May 23, Trump publicly claimed that the Department of Justice 
“authorized the use of ‘deadly force’ in their Illegal, UnConstitutional, 
and Un-American RAID of Mar-a-Lago, and that would include against our 
Great Secret Service, who they thought might be ‘in the line of fire.’”
Read: The two-time Trump voters who have had enough
Trump supporters echoed those claims, as he knew they would. Steve 
Bannon, one of the architects of the MAGA movement, said, “This was an 
attempted assassination attempt on Donald John Trump or people associated 
with him. They wanted a gunfight.” Right-wing radio hosts stoked one 
another’s fury, claiming that there’s nothing Trump critics won’t do to 
stop him, up to and including attempting to assassinate him and putting 
the lives of his Secret Service detail in danger.
The statement by Trump went beyond inflaming his supporters; it created a 
mindset that moved them closer to violence, the very same mindset that 
led thousands of them to attack the Capitol on January 6 and threaten to 
hang Vice President Mike Pence. Which is why Special Counsel Jack Smith 
filed a motion asking the judge overseeing Trump’s classified-documents 
case to block him from making public statements that could put law 
enforcement in danger. “Those deceptive and inflammatory assertions 
irresponsibly put a target on the backs of the FBI agents involved in 
this case, as Trump well knows,” he wrote.
Motivated ignorance refers to willfully blinding oneself to facts. It’s 
choosing not to know. In many cases, for many people, knowing the truth 
is simply too costly, too psychologically painful, too threatening to 
their core identity. Nescience is therefore incentivized; people actively 
decide to remain in a state of ignorance. If they are presented with 
strong arguments against a position they hold, or compelling evidence 
that disproves the narrative they embrace, they will reject them. Doing 
so fends off the psychological distress of the realization that they’ve 
been lying to themselves and to others.
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Motivated ignorance is a widespread phenomenon; most people, to one 
degree or another, employ it. What matters is the degree to which one 
embraces it, and the consequences of doing so. In the case of MAGA world, 
the lies that Trump supporters believe, or say they believe, are 
obviously untrue and obviously destructive. Since 2016 there’s been a 
ratchet effect, each conspiracy theory getting more preposterous and more 
malicious. Things that Trump supporters wouldn’t believe or accept in the 
past have since become loyalty tests. Election denialism is one example. 
The claim that Trump is the target of “lawfare,” victim to the 
weaponization of the justice system, is another.
I have struggled to understand how to view individuals who have not just 
voted for Trump but who celebrate him, who don’t merely tolerate him but 
who constantly defend his lawlessness and undisguised cruelty. How should 
I think about people who, in other domains of their lives, are admirable 
human beings and yet provide oxygen to his malicious movement? How 
complicit are people who live in an epistemic hall of mirrors and have 
sincerely—or half-sincerely—convinced themselves they are on the side of 
the angels?
Throughout my career I’ve tried to resist the temptation to make 
unwarranted judgments about the character of people based on their 
political views. For one thing, it’s quite possible my views on politics 
are misguided or distorted, so I exercise a degree of humility in 
assessing the views of others. For another, I know full well that 
politics forms only a part of our lives, and not the most important part. 
People can be personally upstanding and still be wrong on politics.
But something has changed for me in the Trump era. I struggle more than I 
once did to wall off a person’s character from their politics when their 
politics is binding them to an unusually—and I would say 
undeniably—destructive person. The lies that MAGA world parrots are so 
manifestly untrue, and the Trump ethic is so manifestly cruel, that they 
are difficult to set aside.
If a person insists, despite the overwhelming evidence, that Trump was 
the target of an assassination plot hatched by Biden and carried out by 
the FBI, this is more than an intellectual failure; it is a moral 
failure, and a serious one at that. It’s only reasonable to conclude that 
such Trump supporters have not made a good-faith effort to understand 
what is really and truly happening. They are choosing to live within the 
lie, to invoke the words of the former Czech dissident and playwright 
Vaclav Havel.
One of the criteria that need to be taken into account in assessing the 
moral culpability of people is how absurd the lies are that they are 
espousing; a second is how intentionally they are avoiding evidence that 
exposes the lies because they are deeply invested in the lie; and a third 
is is how consequential the lie is.
It’s one thing to embrace a conspiracy theory that is relevant only to 
you and your tiny corner of the world. It’s an entirely different matter 
if the falsehood you’re embracing and promoting is venomous, harming 
others, and eroding cherished principles, promoting violence and 
subverting American democracy.
In his book The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to 
Preserve White Supremacy, J. Russell Hawkins tells the story of a June 
1963 gathering of more than 200 religious leaders in the White House. 
President John F. Kennedy was trying to rally their support for civil-
rights legislation.
Among those in attendance was Albert Garner, a Baptist minister from 
Florida, who told Kennedy that many southern white Christians held 
“strong moral convictions” on racial integration. It was, according to 
Garner, “against the will of their Creator.”
“Segregation is a principle of the Old Testament,” Garner said, adding, 
“Prior to this century neither Christianity nor any denomination of it 
ever accepted the integration philosophy.”
Two months later, in Hanahan, South Carolina, members of a Southern 
Baptist church—they described themselves as “Christ centered” and “Bible 
believing”—voted to take a firm stand against civil-rights legislation.
“The Hanahan Baptists were not alone,” according to Hawkins. “Across the 
South, white Christians thought the president was flaunting Christian 
orthodoxy in pursuing his civil rights agenda.” Kennedy “simply could not 
comprehend the truth Garner was communicating: based on their religious 
beliefs, southern white Christians thought integration was evil.”
A decade earlier, the Reverend Carey Daniel, pastor of First Baptist 
Church in West Dallas, Texas, had delivered a sermon titled “God the 
Original Segregationist,” in response to the 1954 Supreme Court decision 
in Brown v. Board of Education. It became influential within pro-
segregationist southern states. Daniel later became president of the 
Central Texas Division of the Citizens Council of America for 
Segregation, which asked for a boycott of all businesses, lunch counters 
included, that served Black patrons. In 1960, Daniel attacked those 
“trying to destroy the white South by breaking the color line, thus 
giving aid and comfort to our Communist enemies.”
Now ask yourself this: Did the fierce advocacy on behalf of segregation, 
and the dehumanization of Black Americans, reflect in any meaningful way 
on the character of those who advanced such views, even if, say, they 
volunteered once a month at a homeless shelter and wrote a popular 
commentary on the Book of Romans?

Readers can decide whether MAGA supporters are better or worse than 
Albert Garner and Carey Daniel. My point is that all of us believe 
there’s some place on the continuum in which the political choices we 
make reflect on our character. Some movements are overt and malignant 
enough that to willingly be a part of them becomes ethically problematic.
Read: The voters who don’t really know Trump
This doesn’t mean those in MAGA world can’t be impressive people in other 
domains of life, just like critics of Trump may act reprehensibly in 
their personal lives and at their jobs. I’ve never argued, and I wouldn’t 
argue today, that politics tells us the most important things about a 
person’s life. Trump supporters and Trump critics alike can brighten the 
lives of others, encourage those who are suffering, and demonstrate 
moments of kindness and grandeur.
I understand, too, if their moral convictions keep them from voting for 
Joe Biden.
But it would be an affectation for me, at least, to pretend that in this 
particular circumstance otherwise good people, in joining the MAGA 
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