Trump Supporters Aren't Looking for Evidence. They Look for Your Guilt.

Philip Tetlock, psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, studied what happens when people feel their God, their country, and their leader are under attack. He calls it the intuitive prosecutor mindset. When that switch flips, the brain stops functioning like a judge and starts functioning like a prosecutor. The verdict comes first. The evidence comes second. Information that proves guilt gets amplified. Information that contradicts it gets ignored.Trump has convinced his followers that their God, their country, and their leader are under attack. All the time. By the same people.The results are not hard to find.Hillary Clinton was guilty before a single charge was filed. The FBI investigated for two years. They found nothing. It didn’t matter. Sixty million people chanted lock her up at arenas across America while the investigation was still open. The verdict had already been delivered.Immigrants are criminals. This is one of the most repeated claims in American politics. It is also one of the most thoroughly debunked. A 2024 Northwestern University study tracked incarceration data across 150 years and found that immigrants are 60% less likely to be incarcerated than people born in the United States. In 2023, a record number of migrants arrived at the southern border. That same year Texas saw a 15% drop in violent crime and Arizona saw an 8.8% drop. The data could not be clearer. It doesn’t matter. Build the wall.This is the intuitive prosecutor mindset in action. The anger comes first. The evidence gets recruited to support the anger. Anything that contradicts the verdict gets dismissed as fake news, deep state, or liberal propaganda.Tetlock found that the angrier people are, the more punitive they become. Not more careful. Not more discerning. More punitive. The intensity of the anger determines the severity of the punishment demanded. Trump has understood this from the beginning. He does not need to prove his opponents did anything wrong. He needs to keep his followers angry enough that they never stop prosecuting.This is why the targets keep changing but the verdict never does. Clinton. Immigrants. Soros. The media. The deep state. The identity of the enemy is interchangeable. The guilt is always predetermined.When the verdict is always guilty, justice was never the point.SourcesTetlock, P.E. (2002). Social Functionalist Frameworks for Judgment and Choice: Intuitive Politicians, Theologians, and Prosecutors. Psychological Review, 109(3), 451-471. University of Pennsylvania.Goldberg, J.H., Lerner, J.S., and Tetlock, P.E. (1999). Rage and Reason: The Psychology of the Intuitive Prosecutor. European Journal of Social Psychology, 29, 781-795.Jacome, E. et al. (2024). Immigrants and Incarceration: A 150-Year History. Northwestern University.American Immigration Council. (2024). Debunking the Myth of Immigrants and Crime.Third Way. (2024). The Myth of the Migrant Crime Wave. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lucasbean.substack.com/subscribe