Episode Details

There is a question that has haunted American political life for nearly a decade.

How does a man get caught on tape bragging about sexual assault, get found liable for sexual abuse in civil court, attempt to overturn a democratic election, walk away from four criminal indictments, and still have tens of millions of Americans convinced he did absolutely nothing wrong?

The answer is not political. It is psychological. And the research explaining it is decades old.

The Most Primitive Stage of Human Moral Development

In 1958, Lawrence Kohlberg, a psychologist at the University of Chicago, published his doctoral dissertation identifying six stages of human moral development organized into three levels.

The most primitive stage he identified he called obedience and punishment orientation. At this stage, an action is wrong only if it results in punishment. If you got away with it, it was not wrong. The worse the punishment, the worse the crime. No punishment means no crime. No arrest means no wrongdoing. No conviction means innocence.

Kohlberg designed this stage to describe the moral reasoning of young children. A child does not avoid stealing a cookie because stealing is wrong. They avoid it because they will get caught and punished. Remove the punishment and the moral prohibition disappears with it.

Kohlberg and subsequent researchers also found something that has significant implications for understanding contemporary American politics. While preconventional morality is developmentally normal in early childhood, some adolescents and adults continue operating at this level throughout their lives. Moral development, it turns out, is not automatic. It requires specific social experiences, relationships, and the freedom to reason through moral questions independently. Without those conditions, development stalls.

Trump supporters are reasoning at the same level as a seven year old child. And the research tells us exactly why they got stuck there.

Why They Never Developed Past It

Bob Altemeyer, a psychologist at the University of Manitoba who spent over forty years studying authoritarian personalities, co-authored a book with former White House counsel John Dean in 2020 titled Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers. The book draws on Altemeyer’s decades of research on what he called right-wing authoritarianism and documents the psychological profile of Trump’s base in precise detail.

What Altemeyer found is that Trump supporters score exceptionally high on measures of authoritarian submission. The tendency to defer completely to authority figures on questions of right and wrong. Not to question them. Not to evaluate them independently. To accept their version of reality as the only legitimate version and to follow them regardless of what they do.

This is not a random personality quirk. It is the direct product of authoritarian parenting.

Psychologist Diana Baumrind identified authoritarian parenting as the style in which obedience is demanded, questioning is punished, and emotional warmth is withheld as a tool of behavioral control. Children raised this way are never given the opportunity to reason through moral questions independently. They are told what is right. They are punished for asking why. The authority figure becomes the source of all moral truth. And that pattern becomes the template for every authority relationship that follows.

They grew up. Their moral reasoning did not.

When Trump tells them the election was stolen, it was stolen. When he tells them the FBI is corrupt, it is corrupt. When he tells them he is the victim, he is the victim. Moral criticism of the authority figure is not processed as information. It is experienced as an attack. And Altemeyer’s research confirms that no amount of fact-based argument, independent inquiry, or evidence presentation will change th