Q&A with author Carl Hoffman: MAGA psyche rooted in grievance, delusion, anger

Q: Of the avalanche of books about the political and cultural phenomenon of Donald Trump, “Liar’s Circus” has long struck me as the most engaging if most disturbing. It conjures musty motel rooms, long lines of Trump fans camped out to get into coliseums and ingratiating conversations with Trumpers that seem rational one moment, utterly insane the next. It's extraordinarily personal, given the intimacy you gained with those who regularly frequented Trump's far-flung rallies during his first presidency. The book was published Labor Day weekend 2020, two months before the general election. Have any further conclusions about Trump followers crystalized?

Carl Hoffman: Thank you for saying that. I’ll be honest with you: That’s my fifth book and the worst-selling one of all. It was a total flop. It got no attention and almost no one reviewed it and I sold like 6,000 copies. I appreciate your words more than you know.

Q: It’s extremely readable. You allow conversations with very interesting folks to unfold, each offering varying motives for his or her Trump obsession. It’s entertaining. I mean, there’s a gal from my hometown of Abilene — maybe you’ve seen her — who gets dressed up as Captain America in this skin-tight, red, white and blue outfit and drives in her sports car from Trump rally to Trump rally across America. She’s a Dyess Air Force veteran, a J6er, a lot of fun. She also believes former Vice President Pence should be executed for treason.

Hoffman: I worried that people meeting the characters in my book — Rick Frazier, Rick Snowden and Gale Roberts, for instance — would think I picked the most egregious, craziest nutcases rather than the norm. I don’t think that’s so. They were colorful in the way some people are, but their opinions and views, their conspiratorial views, their nonsensical views, their way of seeing the world as upside-down — at least I see as upside-down — were more prevalent than I thought. When I started this project, I thought I would have long, interesting political conversations with these people. A big Trump rally was 22,000 people, a small one is 10,000, and I thought the kooks would be a small percentage. In reality, out of 22,000 people, I think 21,900 believe most of the conspiracy theories one way or another. Characters such as Gale and Rick and Rick were actually pretty mainstream in their Trumpian thinking.

Q: Your book came out two months before the 2020 election.

Hoffman: That was one of the problems, the book coming out in the middle of the pandemic before a vaccine was available. No bookstores were open, I couldn’t do events, nobody was really flying at airports.

Q: With the passage of time, have any further conclusions about the psychological profile of Trump followers struck you?

Hoffman: No, everything those guys said, everything everyone said to me during my reporting, was right on then [in terms of MAGA thinking]. It’s as relevant today. It was true in 2019 and early 2020 when I met them and wrote down their words and it’s true now. I mean, there’s so many things to talk about, but what Trump has done is not because of Trump alone but because of the changing media landscape, which is really a changing technological landscape. The reality is 75 million people did not vote for Trump but 77 million people in 2024 did. There are two kinds of people [in the Trump camp]. There are smart, affluent people who know better but just are greedy and want lower taxes. But tens of millions of other people really do live in a world which is an upside-down world. I can’t emphasize this enough. Seventy million people don’t read a newspaper, probably don’t watch a network news show — I mean, NBC, ABC, CBS, something you think of as more or less neutral or factual. For many people it’s either Fox News or they get all of their news, all of their information, from social media. They literally don’t believe Trump did anything wrong, they literally don’t know the details of, say, the indictment behind his keeping [classified] documents — and the crazy thing is that’s an open-and-shut case. They don’t understand these things. They just think it was a witch hunt to go after him.

Q: A few people in our area were involved in January 6. I’ve been through their court filings. It’s clear the FBI wasn’t out there instigating violence. Most J6 defendants in sentencing memorandums acknowledge their presence in the attack, either explaining themselves as unwittingly caught up in all the excitement or excusing the crimes for which they were convicted by pleading some societal grievance such as PTSD or pandemic isolation or business failure. Yet political operatives at my front door trying to get me to vote Republican insist J6 was an “inside job.”

Hoffman: It's cliché to say so, but it’s true: All the things Trumpers say of others are projections of themselves. Everything they accuse the left of doing are things the right is actually doing. January 6 is a good example. I have friends on Facebook, a large number of people who are not my political brethren. I don’t silence or block them because I’m interested in what they have to say. I practiced karate for almost 30 years and my teacher is like a father figure to me. He’s also the most right-wing, obnoxious, racist Trumpian. I never knew this about him until Trump came along, so I’m loathe to silence him. But here’s a guy who believes in Blue Lives Matter and sees BLM [Black Lives Matter] as rioters who should be thrown into prison and the key tossed away. Yet he posts every day about the “patriots” who went into the Capitol and how the [police officer] who is black, not white, killed Ashli Babbitt. I mean, here was a group of violent rioters who broke into U.S. property and assaulted the police. And the person who was shot by police because she was physically breaking through the last barrier between the rioters and the vice president of the United States — I mean, he’s got it all upside-down!

Q: The casual Trump voter I get. Some of my neighbors, for instance, don't particularly care for Trump, acknowledge they would have preferred someone less volatile as the Republican nominee. But they're also easily overwhelmed by the tedious complexities of such issues as tariffs and immigration and taxation, not to mention the flood of executive orders and social media posts coming daily from the Trump White House and Trump co-president and SpaceX entrepreneur Elon Musk and Trump himself. So they retreat into this non-thinking, knee-jerk default position of identity politics. They vote Republican and trust in Trump to bow to at least some Republican priorities, including not interfering with their 401(k) investments in the markets and not letting transgender people compete in sports.

Hoffman: I think you’re right. It’s also because the media system has changed. I’m 64, almost 65, and when I was growing up, people tuned to “Huntley & Brinkley” [which aired from 1956 to 1970 on NBC] or whatever each night. Every American watched the same newscast for a half-hour.

Q: We all had the same news. We discussed and debated the same facts.

Hoffman: Now these people, even the casual Trump voters, the people you’re talking about, don’t read the newspaper. I mean, maybe they read a local newspaper — I don’t know how much local newspapers say — but they don’t read, say, the Washington Post or the New York Times, they probably don’t even read the Wall Street Journal. They’re not engaging on an intellectual level with any of this. They’re removed from history. We’re getting further and further away from World War II and from fascism [which the United States belatedly fought]. What happened in World War II was a signature event of our lives. I was born after World War II, but it was still about Nazis and Mussolini. Twenty million Russians died and untold millions of other people. It was a generation about Anne Frank and the degradation of Nazism and racism and a world war in which Rosie the Riveter and the Greatest Generation represented the values that the whole Western world coalesced around. People today have forgotten those things. Casual Trump voters don’t seem to be aware of the connections between democracy and liberalism [as in “classical liberalism”: individual rights, civil liberties, democracy and free enterprise]. They’re being swept away by nonsense and all the political bulls--t thrown at them. There’s no other way around it. And at some point we have to assign responsibility. In “Liar’s Circus,” I was really empathetic to all these people [traveling to Trump rallies] — genuinely so — men who had lost power through everything from losses of manufacturing to changes in gender roles. I’m very sympathetic to these people. But at the end of the day, it’s like, at a certain point, all of these people who are living in places subject to economic decline, for instance, and who are penalized for their lack of education — at some point, those people just have to get up off their asses and move to New York City or LA or a factory town in the South or wherever the jobs are and go to work. And, yeah, college is expensive, but there are community colleges.

Q: You’re talking about victimhood, a theme that runs strong through your book and the MAGA movement. The White House sent me a list of its guests for Trump’s State of the Union address. Most are in some way victims. You’ll look in vain for people who, say, run a soup kitchen for the poor. Guests included a 15-year-old Texas girl who was the victim of computer-generated deepfakes created by a bully at her school and the wife and daughters of Corey Comperatore, the former firefighter and MAGA disciple killed by the gunman who also shot at Trump during that campaign rally in Pennsylvania in July 2024. One Trump honoree is 13-year-old Devarjaye “DJ” Daniel, a Houston youth suffering brain cancer, notwithstanding the fact that the Trump administration eliminated child cancer research funding — what one observer described as “a perfect encapsulation of MAGA morality.”

Hoffman: This explains the role of immigrants and trans people in the movement. There needs to be a target, an “other,” and that’s what those people are for this administration. Look, at the end of the day, for the Trump administration, it’s purely about power. It’s not really about making government more efficient, it’s not about reducing the deficit, it’s all about power and they’re building that power on victimhood, if you’ve been a “victim,” and exploiting that victimhood. One of the political talking points for the GOP for the last 20 or 30 years — really since Reagan — was about resentment over your money going to help inner-city black people, even though that was not always true — more poor whites were on public assistance than urban blacks. [Figures in 2024 indicate this remains true.] Nonetheless the pitch was your money was going to help these people and this country isn’t built on help [public assistance], it’s built on Horatio Alger themes [stories of poor boys triumphing over impoverished backgrounds through hard work and gaining middle-class security and respectability].

Q: Your book reminds me of the Waco rally of March 2023 that I attended. It was one for the history books. It was the first Trump rally where, upon his arrival from the sky, rallygoers were invited to stand and pledge allegiance as a video played on huge screens showing January 6 inmates languishing behind bars and Trump in scenes of presidential pomp and patriotism. The soundtrack, which played as the Waco crowd recited the pledge, involved a recording of Trump reading the Pledge of Allegiance while a jailhouse choir of J6ers sang "The Star-Spangled Banner." Did anything happen in all the rallies you attended that compares?

Hoffman: No. And, of course, January 6 hadn’t happened yet. But the scene you describe — there’s no other way to say it — is a perversion of everything that America stands for and all of its values. It’s a complete flipping of them. But every Trump rally was like that to some degree. That’s why the book was called “Liar’s Circus.” I don’t like the idea of living in a bubble in which there is no truth, in which truth is inverted. And it’s a masterstroke for Trump that he was able to do that, to flip things and make hot cold and dark light. I mean, to say [Ukrainian President] Zelensky is a dictator and is responsible for the invasion of his own country — that’s not a nuanced thing, it’s not something that scholars can agree to disagree on. It’s an actual inversion of the truth.

Q: It's pretty astounding — Kremlin talking points are echoed by Trump and in a day or so your neighbors down the street are saying it too!

Hoffman: It’s beyond me. I mean, you can say these people don’t know their history, but why do you and I think differently? How is it that Liz Cheney, with whom I don’t agree on anything politically or policy-wise but who I admire because she stands for the truth — how did it get to be that she emerges as a truthteller? The question growing up for me was always: How could Hitler have taken power? How could this have happened? How could people have gone along with the Holocaust, the murder of six million people, the premeditated, meticulously synchronized murder of six million people? And it’s not just Germany but Mussolini in Italy and Franco in Spain. Look at the military junta in Argentina and Brazil and Pinochet in Chile. How could people go along with that?

Q: We’re seeing more evidence of this in the United States.

Hoffman: It’s a revelation. I didn’t realize people were so easily manipulated, but they are. In my book, my editor suggested [in 2020] that I take out these references to Hitler, that it’s not really that bad. And I said no, I think there really is a comparison. I feel that way even more now. I mean, 2025 is not 1933 and Trump is not Hitler. People are confused and misled by trying to be too literal. They’re different people. The thing about Trump is he has no real ideology. He’s just a sociopathic narcissist. I don’t say that in a flippant way. I think honestly, deep down, that’s the thing driving him — sheer, unadulterated power. I think that’s what the tariffs are about. He’s brought America to its knees; now he needs to do it to the whole world. That’s what Panama and Greenland and Ukraine are about. And I think people don’t grasp that enough. Musk may have an agenda. His agenda may be tech getting rid of regulations that impinge on the growth of his companies and his crazy techno dreams. That’s the case of the tech bros. But Trump just wants power. That’s all he wants, all he cares about. And that is different from Hitler to a certain extent. But the gutting of institutions and the rule of law — things are happening very quickly with Trump while larger things will take more time — but I believe that, unchecked, and I mean unchecked by the Supreme Court which may or may not happen, we don’t know, Trump will come after the media, he will try to suppress the mainstream media. I mean, already the Washington Post is self-censoring. He’s going to go after television news, I think there’s going to be a case somewhere down the line in which he tries to sue or the Justice Department goes after a reporter, a specific reporter like at the New York Times, and I think it’s going to go all the way. I don’t think there’s any stopping Trump. I guess it’s up to the Supreme Court or the people in some way, but I believe Trump is so insane that he has to dominate everyone and everything and that no one can be undominated by Donald Trump.

Q: I’m afraid the Supreme Court of the United States has in many ways led us to this point, whether in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission or Trump v. United States.

Hoffman: And I’m not confident they’re going to be the bulwark we need them to be. I mean, these people — [Justices Samuel] Alito and Clarence Thomas — are really something. Can you imagine being a Supreme Court justice and taking a $250,000 RV and food and housing and all these things [from wealthy, influential patrons] and never thinking these are things you need to report and actually saying it’s not corruption when it’s the very definition of corruption?

Q: Did past experiences immersing yourself in the cultures of Borneo and New Guinea tribes [resulting in the Hoffman books “The Last Wild Men of Borneo: A True Story of Death and Treasure” and “Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism and Michael Rockefeller’s Tragic Quest for Primitive Art”] help you understand what political scientists describe as tribalism or the MAGA psyche? Two key features of tribalism figure around hierarchy and obedience.

Hoffman: You say hierarchy and obedience, but it’s more complex. There’s ritual, a lot of ritual — and Trump is all about the ritual. The rallies are rituals, the wearing of colors, the regalia, the flags mounted on pickup trucks with slogans like “Don’t Tread on Me.” All of these are rituals about identity. Tribalism by definition has an “in” group and an “out” group. You know, like the Asmat, the people who killed Michael Rockefeller in 1961, people with whom I spent a lot of time — and they’re not doing that [cannibalism] today — but at the time of Rockefeller’s death, villages were in constant warfare with each other. If you were members of one village, you were enemies of another village. Nazism was built on portraying as “others” the Jews, Eastern Europeans, the Poles — and Trumpism is about making “others” of immigrants and trans people. The role of immigrants in this country — I don’t think Trumpism is going to change that in any particular way. He’s not going to expel all those people. All of this is performative. If you do the math, you can see it’s never going to happen. But “Liar’s Circus” was built on spending a lot of time with these people [Trumpers], spending a lot of empathetic time with them. I mean, I enjoyed my time with them for the most part. The friendships I made were genuine in the sense that it’s not like I liked everyone but, well, [Trump rallygoer] Rick Frazier’s been to my house since the book came out. These were friendships.

Q: Even though they know you’re on the other side of all this?

Hoffman: Oh, yeah. I couldn’t have done what I did if I’d just gone in there and said to these people, “You’re a f---ing racist!”

Q: Well, it’s obvious in the book you enjoyed these people. I enjoyed those I met at the Waco Trump rally, though over eight hours of interviews they were exhausting in their giddiness and obsessiveness and detachment from reality. There’s something charming if naïve about them.

Hoffman: They’re funny as hell. They have a zest for life and a joyfulness. It was all kind of a big party. That’s really what it was. The point is with these tribes in Borneo and New Guinea, you can’t just parachute in there as a journalist and demonstrate attitudes about them. You have to be open and listening and be willing to give of yourself. And so the process is the same [in gaining insights from Trump fans].

Q: One individual from our area who participated in the January 6 insurrection is something of a keyboard warrior. He didn’t fight any cops — he let all the other guys fight the cops — and then he strolled into the U.S. Capitol. He got several months in prison. I spent a summer just following his social-media group, patterned after the Whiskey Rebellion of the early 1790s. They continually posted memes that seemed to yearn for a world somewhere between two Mel Gibson flicks — "The Patriot" and "Braveheart." Some of those individuals peppering your book would seem to qualify but I may be wrong.

Hoffman: No, I think you’re right actually. They long for an easier, more black-and-white time. A lot of them seem to yearn for a world of the 1950s. But we’re not in that world today and I don’t think we can go back. And look at all Trump is doing. Is the government really going to be more efficient? That is, are you going to get more [government] efficiency with less [personnel staffed to do jobs of public service]? All the people who voted for Trump — are their lives going to be better? Is inflation going to go down? Is the price of gas going to go down? Is the air going to be cleaner? Are they going to get their masculinity back? Are they going to get back to the days of men going to work in a mine or a factory where they’re making good money and they’re supporting their families and they feel good about themselves and their wives look at them and bat their eyelashes when they get home and they can afford one or two cars on their salaries? I could be completely wrong, but I think by the end of Trumpism, when it comes, the world is going to be more brutal, more violent with fewer government services and the deficit isn’t going to be any lower and things are going to be more expensive and there’s going to be less humanity because AI is all about getting rid of people. And the less we go shopping, the less we go to work, the less whole we are and the more separate we are from each other and the things that matter and give us meaning. Trumpism isn’t going to give any of the things that the people who voted for it imagine.