The New Yorker:

For many of Donald Trump’s followers, his appeal has an almost mystical dimension. What happens when the spell breaks?

By Manvir Singh

On April 1st, the day before President Donald Trump’s tariffs cratered global markets, House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters “to trust the President’s instinct on the economy.” In the days afterward, Johnson’s message was echoed by legions of online supporters, who, amid plunging stock prices and predictions of a global recession, reminded one another to “trust the plan,” a catchphrase popular on QAnon forums.
For many devotees, Trump was a political savant. He was playing “4-D chess,” they said, supposedly outsmarting billionaire backers like Bill Ackman and Elon Musk, analysts who expected trade wars and job losses, and the twenty-three Nobel Prize-winning economists who cautioned that his policies would cause “higher prices, larger deficits, and greater inequality.” Elsewhere in the magaverse, self-proclaimed prophets announced that a divine plan was under way. In an April 7th video that’s been viewed nearly four hundred thousand times, the Iowa-based evangelist Julie Green claimed that God had warned her of the economic crash before the tariffs were announced. “Your economy, and all the markets, have been overtaken by the enemies from within,” God reportedly told her. “Their control over your nation, and its economy, is all collapsing in front of you.”

The tone marked a vibe shift from the technocracies of yesteryear. “I know that sometimes when I was President, and even when I was a candidate, folks would say, ‘Barack, you’re talking too long. You’re too professorial. You’re explaining stuff too much,’ ” Obama said, in 2018. His was a politics of complexity and deliberation, of data and binders and reasoned debate. Trump’s first term began in this style. Working alongside institutionalists like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, and through appointees like Gary Cohn and H. R. McMaster, his Administration kicked off with a familiarly wonkish feel. But, in the eight years since Trump first took office, procedure has given way to prophecy. For millions of his followers, the President is no longer the Administrator-in-Chief but something closer to the hero Rama in the Hindu epic the Ramayana: a divine avatar destined to wage a holy war against evil.

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