ELECTION 2020
From Fake News to Election Fraud
Trump, COVID, and Flying Saucers
President Trump often said that COVID-19 was a hoax, that it would go away, and that people should just go about their lives. Many people, most notably his supporters, believed him.
Republicans, for example were less likely to wear masks. Then President Trump became infected, was hospitalized, and was given heroic, often experimental, treatments. Many people, including members of the U.S. Senate and of his administration, also became infected as a result of attending a White House ceremony at which they did not wear masks (and to which no Democrats were invited). Social scientists have a term for the condition in which deeply held beliefs are manifestly contradicted by irrefutable facts.
That term is cognitive dissonance.
The theory of cognitive dissonance emerged from a classic, if amazing, study entitled When Prophecy Fails by Leon Festinger and his colleagues Henry Reiken and Stanley Schachter, social psychologists at the University of Michigan (Harper, 1956). Briefly, a woman named Mrs. Keech believed that she had received messages from the planet Clarion that Earth was going to be destroyed in a cataclysmic flood but that flying saucers would come to an appointed place just in time to save the true believers and fly them off to Clarion. She became the leader of a cult of true believers, many of whom had abandoned their jobs, homes, and possessions and who would assemble at the appointed time and place to be saved. Lo and behold, the faithful were not saved by the flying saucers and the earth was not destroyed. The facts contradicted their beliefs and they experienced cognitive dissonance.
This theory should predict how President Trump’s faithful followers will cope with the news that he had been infected by the Covid-19 virus.
One method is to reject the messages containing the contradictory information — Trump never said those things. The disease failed to kill him so the whole thing was a fear-mongering exaggeration by his opponents.
Similarly, they can decide that the source of the information was untrustworthy. (fake media). Third, they might accept the new information and reject the old beliefs. Here, we have a tantalizing bit of information. Those members of the cult who assembled at the appointed time and place were most likely to reject the new information and those who failed to assemble were the most likely to reject the old beliefs. Those who assembled can be assumed to have been more intense believers, something akin to the strength of party identification and/or the intensity of support for Trump. Those most likely to reject Trump’s prior views on Covid-19 will be the less intense, the more moderate, of Republicans and of Trump supporters. He will become more dependent on his narrower, more ideological base at a time when he needs to reach out to the center to be likely to prevail in the election.
Also, the true believers are more likely to misrecall or distort Trump’s earlier message. (He knew all along that it was airborne. He never told people not to wear masks, etc.) A final method is to deny the importance of the issue. For a more detailed discussion, see pp. 193–194 of Kenneth Sherrill and David Vogler, Power, Policy, and Participation (Harper and Row, 1977).
If the theory of cognitive dissonance is right, Covid-19’s impact on Trump’s supporters should be analogous to the impact of the missing flying saucers on the membership of Mrs. Keech’s cult. The base will narrow and shrink. Mrs. Keech went on to become a member of Dianetics, a cult-like predecessor of Scientology. President Trump will search for another gimmick in an effort to broaden his base. Mrs. Keech found Dianetics and Scientology. President Trump’s shiny object will be election fraud.
