Show Notes
There is a question that almost nobody is asking about MAGA, and it is the only one that matters in the long run. Not whether Trump will lose power. But what happens to the millions of people who made him part of who they are when he is no longer there to hold it all together. This is not a new question. It has been answered before. Twice. The Pattern In July 1943, Benito Mussolini was removed from power after twenty-one years of fascist rule in Italy. Within hours, the portraits came down. The party badges disappeared. Millions of Italians who had supported the regime, worn the black shirts, and repeated the slogan “Mussolini is always right” suddenly became something else. Overnight, everyone was a partisan. Everyone had always been against Mussolini. Everyone had secretly resisted. Historian Paul Corner at the University of Siena called this the Mussolini myth: a collective rewriting of the past driven by the need to construct a comforting version of history rather than confronting what actually happened. Italy never went through anything resembling Germany’s denazification. A neo-fascist party was part of Italy’s first postwar government in 1946. And the popular myths about fascism persisted for decades. Mussolini made the trains run on time. He was a strong leader. He modernized the country. The fascist mentality survived long after the fascist government fell, because nobody was ever forced to confront what they had actually supported.
Two years later, on May 8, 1945, Nazi Germany surrendered. Millions of Germans who had supported the regime, voted for it, cheered at the rallies, reported their neighbors, and benefited from the system were suddenly faced with the same psychological crisis. The historian Tony Judt wrote that Germans “spontaneously denazified themselves” on that day. They simply stopped being Nazis, without any internal reckoning. And when the Allies forced them to confront what had happened, the universal response was the same three words: we didn’t know. The Allies tried denazification. They forced thousands of German civilians to tour the concentration camps in their own neighborhoods. They banned former Nazis from positions of power. They imprisoned 250,000 people. They distributed questionnaires called Fragebogen that required every adult to account for their relationship to the regime. And within a few years, it was largely abandoned. By 1951, only 25% of Germans believed denazification had been necessary. In Bavaria, 85% of teachers who had been removed from their posts for Nazi affiliations were back at work. The first chancellor of the new West Germany, Konrad Adenauer, opened his first address to parliament by saying the government was determined, where acceptable, to “put the past behind us.” These are not ancient history. These are the two closest parallels to what is happening in America right now. And the psychological research tells us exactly why the same patterns are about to repeat.
Why Losing Trump Feels Like Losing Yourself William Swann’s identity fusion research at the University of Texas at Austin explains the first stage. When the boundary between personal identity and group identity dissolves, losing the group does not just change your political affiliation. It threatens your understanding of who you are. In a 2025 paper published in PS: Political Science and Politics, Swann and Philip Moniz studied identity fusion specifically in Trump supporters. Using a three-wave panel study spanning from before the 2020 election through 2024, they found that the more fused a supporter was with Trump, the more deeply they internalized his misinformation as their own personal truth. They did not simply agree with Trump’s claims. They absorbed them into their own sense of reality. In April 2026, Time Magazine profiled a retired police officer who had voted for Trump every time he ran. His son and daughter-in-law cut him off entirely. He lost access to his only grandchild. And when Trump is gone
More from The Lucas Bean Show
There is a particular kind of man who shows up to political rallies in body armor he bought online, drives a truck that has never hauled anything, and screams about strength while falling apart the moment someone disagrees with him. He is not hard to spot. He is the loudest person in any room he enters. He is also, according to decades of research, the most frightened. The video that accompanies this piece covers sociologist Robb Willer’s research on masculine overcompensation: the finding that men whose masculinity is threatened respond with exaggerated displays of dominance, aggression, and toughness. The effect is consistent and measurable. It shows up in attitudes toward war, attitudes toward gay people, and even in what kind of car a man wants to buy. But the research goes much deeper than one study, and the implications stretch far beyond a rally.
There’s a familiar ritual that happens every time an authoritarian movement begins to collapse. The supporters disappear. Not physically. Psychologically. They scrub the evidence, rewrite the timeline, and emerge on the other side with a story they’ve rehearsed just enough to almost believe. “I never really supported him.” “I just voted against the Democrats.” “I don’t talk about politics anymore.” This is happening right now across America. The yard signs are coming down. The hats are going into drawers. The Facebook posts are being deleted. And millions of people who spent a decade loudly and publicly cheering for cruelty are quietly trying to exit the building before someone turns the lights on. The companion video to this piece says what needs to be said plainly: they’re not confused. They’re lying. They know what they did. They know what they defended. And they’re trying to erase the evidence before accountability arrives. This Substack examines why that matters, why it won’t work this time, and what history tells us about populations that try to pretend they were never part of the thing they spent years supporting.
Most political analysis starts with policy. Voters chose this candidate because of the economy, immigration, healthcare, taxes. And for most voters in most elections, that’s probably true. But Donald Trump is not most candidates. And the question that keeps surfacing isn’t why people agree with him. It’s why they love him more every time he does something cruel. The mockery. The insults. The attacks on disabled reporters, Gold Star families, and women. Behavior that would end any other political career has somehow become the foundation of his. In 2021, psychologist Matthew Yalch at Palo Alto University published a study in PLOS ONE titled “Dimensions of pathological narcissism and intention to vote for Donald Trump.” And what he found should make everyone uncomfortable, including the people it describes.
In February 2025, researchers at the University of Amsterdam published a study in Social Science & Medicine that should have rewritten every conversation about why people join the far right. They tracked over 40,000 people across nine countries, with data spanning fifteen years. They controlled for income, education, immigration attitudes, and political ideology. They wanted to know what actually predicts whether someone will support the populist radical right. The answer wasn’t immigration. It wasn’t economics. It wasn’t religion. It was loneliness. Lonelier individuals were consistently more likely to support radical right movements, with the association holding across all fifteen years of Dutch data and appearing across multiple European countries. The researchers noted that the effect sizes were comparable to the known health correlates of loneliness, meaning that the connection between loneliness and far-right support was statistically as meaningful as the connection between loneliness and heart disease, high blood pressure, and depression. A 2021 RAND Corporation study of former extremists and their families confirmed this from the other direction. Half of the former extremists surveyed said feelings of marginalization drove them toward radicalization, with most citing isolation and loneliness specifically. Individuals reported that the social benefits of joining extremist organizations, the friendship, the camaraderie, the sense of finally belonging somewhere, were among the most powerful forces keeping them in. These people didn’t join a movement because they were convinced by policy arguments. They joined because someone finally made them feel like they weren’t alone. And that tells us more about what MAGA actually is than any analysis of tariffs or border policy ever could.
A woman stood up at a political rally and asked a sitting congressman to create a federal law that would force her adult daughter to let her see her grandchildren. Not a therapy session. Not a family mediator. Not a phone call to her daughter asking what went wrong. A federal law. That single moment contains more psychology than most textbooks. Because what she revealed, in front of cameras and a cheering crowd, wasn’t a grandmother’s heartbreak. It was a narcissist’s playbook when someone finally tells them no. How a boundary becomes a theft. In 2002, psychologist Roy Baumeister at Case Western Reserve University published a theory that combined two existing psychological frameworks into something new. The first was narcissism, the personality structure built around an inflated self-image that requires constant validation. The second was psychological reactance, a concept developed by Jack Brehm at the University of Kansas in 1966, which describes the motivational state people enter when they perceive their freedom as restricted. Brehm found that when people believe a choice or behavior has been taken from them, they experience an intense drive to restore it, often wanting the restricted option more than they did before it was restricted. Baumeister’s insight was that narcissism supercharges reactance. When an ordinary person encounters a boundary, they may be disappointed, but they can process it. When a narcissist encounters a boundary, they don’t experience disappointment. They experience theft. The boundary isn’t perceived as another person’s valid choice. It’s perceived as something that belongs to them being taken away. And they feel entitled to take it back by whatever means necessary. Baumeister called it narcissistic reactance. This grandmother didn’t process her daughter’s boundary as a painful but legitimate decision by an autonomous adult. She processed it as her property being stolen. Those grandchildren aren’t people her daughter is protecting. In her mind, they are hers. Access to them is her right. And no one, not even their own mother, gets to take what’s hers.