Opinion | Trump Is an Open Book for Closed Minds

The mystery of 2024: How is it possible that Donald Trump has a reasonable chance of winning the presidency despite all that voters now know about him? Why hasn’t a decisive majority risen up to deny a second term to a man in line to be judged the worst president in American history?The litany of Trump’s liabilities is well known to the American electorate.His mendacity, duplicity, depravity, hypocrisy and venality are irrevocably imprinted on the psyches of American voters.Trump has made it clear that on a second term he will undermine the administration of justice, empower America’s adversaries, endanger the nation’s allies and exacerbate the nation’s racial and cultural rifts.John Podhoretz, in a 2017 Commentary article, “Explaining Trump’s Charlottesville Behavior,” offered up one piece of the puzzle, addressing the question, “Whose early support for Trump itself played a key role in leading others to take him seriously and help propel him into the nomination?”Podhoretz’s prescient answer: a conspiracy-oriented constituency with little regard for truth:If there’s one thing politicians can feel in their marrow, even a non-pol pol like Trump, it’s who is in their base and what it is that binds the base to them.

Only in this case, I’m not talking about a base as it’s commonly understood — the wellspring of a politician’s mass support.I’m talking about a nucleus — the very heart of a base, the root of the root of support.

Trump found himself with 14 percent support in a month.Those early supporters had been primed to rally to him for a long time.”I’m talking about Alex Jones and Infowars, the conspiracy-theory radio show/website on which Trump has appeared for years; the radio show has 2 million listeners a week, and Jones was said in 2011 to have a larger online presence than Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck.I’m talking about the WWE, which televises wrestling and which, in 2014, could claim a weekly audience of 15 million ...