The Parallel Universe of Trump’s MAGA Land

Living in a World of Post-Truth Politics

“These are numbers that don’t make a lot of sense but they kinda sound good.” 

Statistician Andrew Gelman

“In essence, the insistence on ‘alternative facts’ stymies the possibility of compromise. When one side clings to its own version of reality, there can be no constructive debate or middle ground. Each faction becomes entrenched in its own worldview, unwilling or unable to understand the other. Democracy thrives on the ability to reach compromise through debate; when this fundamental aspect of political negotiation is undermined, democracy falters.“ 

Marc Friedman, blogger, October 29, 2024

“The MAGA religion thrives on grievance, nostalgia, and the intoxicating allure of a strongman’s promises. It replaces scripture with tweets, prophets with pundits, and salvation with slogans. Yet, like all dogmatic movements, its greatest weakness is reality—an inconvenient truth that, sooner or later, even the most fervent faith cannot ignore. Until then, the MAGAnites march on, mistaking zeal for wisdom, rage for righteousness, and a golden idol for a god.” 

Blogger Ivan4America, May 2nd.

What truly frustrates so many in the anti-Trump/MAGA world, even as fissures are finally cracking into that parallel universe, is the utter rejection of empiricism, refusal to analyze and think like the elites they despise. Yet MAGA land is struggling with the Epstein files and the disconnect between Trump’s rosy picture of the economy and his followers simply being unable to find that rosiness in their own lives. They were promised “America First” and a withdrawal of American involvement in foreign conflicts, as Trump baits Venezuela with boat strikes and one of our largest fleets hovering nearby. Trump’s 18-minute speech on December 17th touted a “reality” that challenges the hard perception of so many of his committed followers… and subsequent poll numbers show his efforts are falling on increasingly deaf ears.

But Donald Trump’s proclivity to fabricate (see his hand-drawn and very incorrect embellishment of a NOAA hurricane map above) and exaggerate are seen some as the gospel, others as merely illustrative and still others as flat wrong. Michael Hiltzik, writing for the December 19th Los Angeles Times, notes: “Much attention has been focused on Donald Trump’s use of words — that is, his peculiar style of oratory. But more attention should be paid to another feature of his discourse: his use of numbers.

Trump doesn’t use numbers the way most of us do, as ‘things that can be added, subtracted, multiplied, and divided,’ as Columbia University statistician Andrew Gelman put it. Rather, he uses them as rhetorical objects… That habit was vividly on display during Trump’s televised speech Wednesday night [12/17]. He claimed that President Biden’s immigration policies had admitted ‘11,888 murderers.’ That his own tariffs and trade deals had brought in ‘$18 trillion of investment’ from abroad. That deals he negotiated with drug companies and foreign countries had ‘slashed prices on drugs and pharmaceuticals by as much as 400, 500 and even 600 percent.’…

“It’s almost tempting to call all these assertions ‘whoppers,’ but that hardly does justice to the sheer audacity of Trump’s number-mongering. Yet, again, his goal is not to provide numbers to be added, subtracted, multiplied and divided, but to shower his audience with numbers big enough to make their eyes glaze over.

“As Gelman observes, the problem with this approach as policy ‘is not just the innumeracy, it’s the blithe disregard for it, the idea that being off by multiple orders of magnitude ... just doesn’t matter.’ The Trump tradition is to dismiss hard information as ‘fake news’ or ‘alternative facts,’ and hope that voters will just go along… Stay tuned, because Trump’s numbers are likely to get ever more preposterous. But actual math can be a harsh mistress, and it may not be long before the absurdity of Trump’s version becomes obvious to everyone.”

If evangelical MAGA followers, believe Trump is the anointed one, I wonder whom they think created the laws of physics. In post-truth MAGA America, ideology has replaced facts. Matthew McIntosh, in the October 25th Brewiminate, posits: “This transformation has not occurred in isolation. The digital age has supplied the perfect infrastructure for post-truth politics, a sprawling ecosystem of echo chambers, algorithmic curation, and viral storytelling that rewards outrage more than accuracy. Within that environment, MAGA became less a political movement than a shared mythology, one sustained by repetition and ritual rather than evidence or accountability.

“The danger is not only that facts are ignored, but that they are replaced, redefined by those who wield emotional authority. When evidence collides with identity, identity often wins. And when entire communities begin to live within those identity-based realities, institutions built on shared verification (courts, elections, journalism) start to lose legitimacy. What follows is not merely misinformation, but disorientation: a public sphere in which persuasion no longer requires proof, only conviction.

“This is the crisis of belief at the heart of post-truth America. It is not a temporary fever but a reordering of how truth itself functions in political life. The question that now confronts the nation is stark: can a democracy survive when its citizens no longer agree on what is real?... “Digital media has amplified this shift. Algorithms that reward engagement (likes, shares, and emotional intensity) have effectively transformed anger into currency. Studies by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have shown that false information spreads faster and farther than factual reporting on platforms such as X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook. The architecture of attention itself has become post-truth, privileging speed, simplicity, and outrage over nuance and verification. The political consequence is a populace that no longer consumes information to learn but to belong.

“The erosion of factual consensus, however, is not simply a media problem. It reflects a broader cultural redefinition of what truth means. For much of the twentieth century, Americans shared a baseline of institutional trust (in science, journalism, the judiciary, and education) even amid political divides. In the MAGA era, that baseline has collapsed. Truth is no longer a common space but a contested one, shaped by emotional narrative rather than empirical evidence. This is not just epistemological drift; it is a civic unraveling.

“The loss of that shared foundation marks a profound transformation in American life. When facts lose their gravity, politics ceases to be a forum for debate and becomes a theater of belief. What once anchored public discourse now floats freely, pulled not by reason but by feeling and by those most adept at manipulating it.” Until that world is shattered by an avalanche of painful facts slamming into the sham-filled ideology. Do new leaders redefine that body of assumptions? Do such notions fade in time? Or are they replaced by another set of toxic values? Worse, do they take down the very society that gave them the freedom to entertain and spread those falsehoods in the first place?

I’m Peter Dekom, and history shows cycles of deep and cruel religiosity are often replaced by periods of enlightenment and invention… or….