https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/03/opinion/sway-kara-swisher-jonah-goldberg.html?showTranscript=1
And I think that one of the key indicators about whether or not you were going to flip is to look at people and institutions that were dependent upon mass audiences. If you were talk radio, which depended on maintaining your audience, those were the first gatekeepers, as it were, who flipped. And you could hear this on the “Rush Limbaugh Show.” I mean, you really could. In the early parts, he would criticize Trump and then he would catch hell from his listeners. And by the end of it, he saw his role as defending Trump, rather than actually keeping a Republican president honest.
And we got this dysfunctional, sociological phenomenon that said any criticism of Trump was joining the libs, blah, blah, blah, all that nonsense, but also that Trump himself was utterly immune to constructive criticism. And the way you would get praise from him is only by compliments. And we saw this with people like Lindsey Graham. If you can only influence someone through compliments, you get sucked into the logic of that, and everything that they do is great.
And on the intellectual side, you know, there was a real attempt— and some people are still trying, I think in vain— to create a coherent intellectual construct called Trumpism. And the problem with that is that Trump has no core principles. So if you are in a situation where you have a president who, as a matter of pride, boasts that he will change his mind on a dime, where he says, I go by my instincts and I’m not bound by any ideology and all this kind of stuff, the only safe harbor is cult of personality. And that cult of personality thing spread.