“No matter what happens in the courtroom in Manhattan in the coming days, weeks and months, no matter what is revealed, no matter the evidence or even the outcome, say longtime Trump watchers, former Trump employees, Republican strategists and operatives and experts on political rhetoric and autocratic means, his supporters at this point don’t care who he was or was not. “It’s irrelevant to who he is now and what he’s become,” Trump biographer Tim O’Brien told me.
“Trump’s rise in the American imagination rested on his appeal as an entrepreneurial guru and carnival barker. He has long since transitioned away from that role with his most loyal followers,” O’Brien wrote in his column for Bloomberg on Monday. The far more pertinent persona is the one he’s crafted since the summer of 2015. “He is an era-defining politician now, and he oversees a cult that cares little about his business foibles or setbacks …” Trump, after all, is “not an ex-president — he’s a right-wing, nativist, revolutionary leader,” as presidential historian Doug Brinkley once put it. “He has a movement that is massive with global implications …””
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“Trump could be fined $250 million. He could lose Trump Tower, the singular symbol of the image he sought from the start to convey. For most people, of course, unsavory aspects of their past can limit their prospects for the future. Not for Trump. Never have. He is, in the memorable words of an intimate, “the most present human being I ever met.” So the scenes this week are in some sense simply an extension of a time-tested Trump tactic and truth. He makes the past not matter.”
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“Last week, in a memo written by Club for Growth president David McIntosh to a Club-linked PAC called Win it Back, the takeaway was stark: Trump’s supporters do not care what he did or what he said before. They like him still. They like him now. “It is amazing,” McIntosh told me in a text. “All attempts to undermine his conservative credentials on specific issues were ineffective,” the memo said. “Even when you show video to Republican primary voters with complete context of President Trump saying something otherwise objectionable to primary voters, they find a way to rationalize and dismiss it.”
“What I saw there that really stood out to me was that people dismissed any negative information about Donald Trump as just another attack on Donald Trump,””
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/10/04/trump-supporters-fraud-irrelevant-00119770