The Humiliation Is the Point

Humiliating the MAGA faithful only binds them more tightly to Trump

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On Easter Sunday, Donald Trump posted an AI image of himself as Jesus Christ.

Robed in red and white. Hands glowing with divine light. Healing the sick while bald eagles and fireworks filled the heavens above him. He left it up long enough for everyone to see it. Then he took it down.

And MAGA barely grumbled.

Within 24 hours the moment had passed, the post was gone, and the movement moved on — as it always does — to whatever came next.

I’ve been thinking about that ever since. Not about the image itself, which is deranged enough on its own terms. But about what it reveals about the deal MAGA has made with this man. Because I don’t think Trump posted that image by accident.

I think the humiliation is the point.

A Pattern, Not an Incident

To understand what Trump is doing, you have to stop thinking about each outrage as a separate event and start seeing them as a sequence.

He asked his supporters to believe the 2020 election was stolen — and they did, including many who knew better. He asked them to excuse January 6th — and they did, reframing a violent assault on the Capitol as a “tourist visit” and a “protest that got out of hand.” He asked them to accept that his 91 criminal indictments were a political witch hunt — and they did, turning his mugshot into a fundraising image.

Each ask was larger than the last. Each capitulation required more of them — more willingness to contradict their own eyes, their own values, their own stated beliefs.

And here’s what I’ve come to understand about how this works. Every time MAGA accepts something they previously would have considered unacceptable, Trump’s hold on them gets stronger, not weaker. Because now they’ve paid a price. They’ve told their neighbors, their families, their coworkers, that they believe this. Walking it back would mean admitting they were wrong. And the movement doesn’t allow that.

The humiliation isn’t a side effect of Trump’s leadership. It’s the mechanism of it.

This Past Week Alone

Consider what MAGA has been asked to absorb in just the last seven days.

Trump publicly feuded with Pope Leo — the first American Pope, a man with an 84% approval rating — calling him “weak on crime” and “terrible for foreign policy.” He claimed he was responsible for Leo’s elevation to the papacy. He said he likes the Pope’s brother better because “Louis is all MAGA.”

Catholics are an important piece of the MAGA coalition. Without them Trump loses in 2016 and 2024. And their Pope — their American Pope — just called out Trump’s war as driven by a “delusion of omnipotence.” Then, conservative American Catholics watched their president attack the head of their church like a political opponent.

And the MAGA movement absorbed it. Because that’s what the movement does.

In the same week, Tucker Carlson called the Iran war “the single biggest mistake any American president has made in my lifetime.” Alex Jones called it “a total disaster.” Candace Owens suggested Trump might need to be “put in a home.”

Trump’s response was to call them “stupid people” and “NUT JOBS.” He told Tucker to see a psychiatrist.

And the base? It largely shrugged. Because Trump calling his own allies NUT JOBS is just Tuesday now. The bar for what is normal has moved so far that nothing clears it anymore.

That’s not an accident either.

The Polling Underneath

Now here’s where it gets genuinely interesting.

Because while the movement is absorbing the humiliation at the cultural level, something different is happening underneath — in the numbers, in the polling, in the quiet calculations of people who don’t post on Truth Social.

Young white men without college degrees — Trump’s most loyal demographic — gave him 68% approval at the start of his second term. Today it’s 48%. A 20-point collapse in fourteen months.

The Iran war is driving it. Gas prices are making it visceral. A 25-year-old flooring salesman in Alabama named Gray Holland told USA Today exactly what millions of them are thinking: “He really ran on the concept of no wars. I just think we need to stay out of it.”

These men aren’t posting Tucker Carlson clips in public. They’re not calling Trump a NUT JOB. They’re not doing anything dramatic. They’re just quietly starting to feel like the deal they made isn’t paying out. The humiliation works on the people who are publicly invested — the influencers, the rally-goers, the social media loyalists who have staked their identities on Trump. It works less well on the guy who voted for him because he wanted cheaper gas and no more foreign wars and is now watching both promises fail simultaneously at the pump.

That’s the part Trump can’t fully control. Public loyalty is easy to manufacture. Private doubt is harder to suppress.

What I Think Is Actually Happening

I want to be honest with you about what I think this means — and what it doesn’t.

I don’t think MAGA is breaking. I don’t think there’s some dramatic rupture coming where the movement looks in the mirror and decides enough is enough. That’s not how this works and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.

What I think is happening is more subtle and ultimately more significant.

Trump has spent a decade training his movement to accept humiliation as proof of loyalty. The more outrageous the thing he asks them to believe, the more committed they become — because disbelief now would mean admitting everything they’ve already accepted was wrong. It’s a trap that gets harder to escape the longer you’re in it.

But the trap has a cost. And the cost is accumulating.

Every Easter Sunday image, every Pope feud, every call to see a psychiatrist, every NUT JOBS post — each one requires another withdrawal from an account that isn’t bottomless. The people publicly inside the movement will keep paying. They’ve come too far to stop now.

But the people at the edges — the ones who voted for him without becoming true believers, the ones who wanted cheaper gas and no foreign wars, the ones who are watching their grocery bills and their energy costs and wondering what they actually got — those people don’t owe Trump their humiliation.

And that’s where November 2026 gets decided.

Here’s the hard truth: the humiliation ritual works until the day it doesn’t. Until the day enough people decide that the price of belonging is higher than the price of leaving.

We’re not there yet.

But we’re closer than Trump wants you to think.

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