What MAGA Really Believes, Part 2: I Watched 1 Hour and 4 Minutes of Their Reactions to Due Process and Found a Ritual of Loyalty Over Law

Authoritarianism doesn’t always march in with flags and threats, sometimes, it laughs.

This is a story about how MAGA performs loyalty in the face of facts, how groupthink disguises itself as confidence, and how authoritarianism in America is not merely imposed, it’s performed, over and over, through ritual deflection, mockery, and tribal reinforcement.

There’s something surreal about quoting the words of a president verbatim, his own executive order, typed, signed, and sealed, and watching a room erupt in laughter. Not because the words were false, but because they were true. And in the performative fortress of MAGA identity, truth is neither sacred nor debated, it’s simply inconvenient.

For an hour and four minutes, I attempted what should’ve been simple, to assert that due process must apply universally, or it ceases to exist at all. But the moment I uttered that fundamental constitutional principle in the context of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the MAGA crowd resorted to instinctual fallback positions, “He’s MS-13,” “He entered illegally,” “He’s a wife beater.” It didn’t matter that the Supreme Court had ruled 9-0 in his favor, or that the ruling explicitly rejected those claims as irrelevant. The Court wrote plainly, "This application is built on a series of strawmen... None of this is true" (Supreme Court of the United States, 2025). Elsewhere, the ruling dismisses the government's use of fearmongering with the following block quote:

“The Government also argues ... that the injunction ‘threatens irreparable harm to the public’ by ‘directing the return’ of an alleged ‘member of MS-13 to the United States.’ This argument fails for two reasons. First, the Government has conceded that Abrego Garcia ‘should not have been removed.’ ... It simply restores the status quo before Abrego Garcia’s unlawful removal. The claims in this case challenge Abrego’s removal, not his confinement.”

That is the clarity MAGA refuses to acknowledge, because acknowledging it would mean admitting they backed a violation of constitutional order. The facts were immaterial, the loyalty reflex had already been triggered.

They weren’t defending law, they were performing loyalty.

This wasn’t ignorance, it was psychological protection. What I witnessed was a case study in authoritarian cognition, a live demonstration of Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA), Social Dominance Orientation (SDO), motivated reasoning, and collective narcissism, not as academic concepts, but as lived political reflexes.

Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA)

RWA thrives on submission to perceived legitimate authority, aggression toward outgroups, and a desire for social conformity. The moment Trump’s decision was questioned, even on legal grounds, the defense was not legal, but tribal. They couldn’t say Trump was wrong, because that would rupture the ideological order. When I asked one woman to simply acknowledge that violating a court order was wrong, she replied, "I won't say it the way you want me to." This wasn't disagreement, it was deferral to the throne. The performance demanded fidelity, not fact.

Social Dominance Orientation (SDO)

The Garcia case triggered another mechanism, the drive to maintain group-based hierarchy. MAGA culture has long positioned immigrants, especially brown-skinned, Spanish-speaking ones, as a threat to “law and order.” The idea that someone from that group could receive legal protection, regardless of context, was intolerable. If Garcia was part of the outgroup, then justice was no longer applicable. In MAGA's worldview, rights aren’t universal, they’re earned by allegiance. And when power defends hierarchy, facts become irrelevant.

Motivated Reasoning

When the facts threaten the identity, the facts are reinterpreted to protect the self. This is motivated reasoning in its purest form. Rather than confront the truth, that DHS violated a Supreme Court order, they redirected to irrelevancies. When told the Court said the MS-13 claim was a strawman, they responded with, “He didn’t deny it.” That’s not logic, it’s confirmation bias with a badge. Their conclusion came before the facts. The facts were filtered, not understood.

Collective Narcissism

But perhaps most revealing was their reaction to Trump’s executive order, Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History. I quoted the document, line for line, highlighting how it demanded ideological conformity in museums, threatened funding for dissenting perspectives, and sought to reshape historical memory into sanitized nationalism (Executive Order, 2025). Their response? Laughter. Not a single substantive rebuttal, just ridicule.

Collective narcissism thrives on the belief that the group is not just special, but perpetually under attack. Any criticism of the group, its history, or its leader isn’t interpreted as disagreement, it’s heresy. The idea that systemic racism shaped American institutions isn’t seen as historical analysis, it’s seen as sabotage.

One claimed it wasn't authoritarian because the Smithsonian’s internal structure hadn’t changed, as if ideological control only counts when you topple the building. But this is exactly how modern authoritarianism operates, not through demolition, but through design. Cultural capture through board appointments, budget strings, and narrative sanitization.

This mirrors the classic authoritarian tactic used across history, from Mussolini’s control of Italian curricula to Orbán’s purges of Hungarian universities. Control over cultural memory isn't a footnote in authoritarian regimes, it is the foundation. Trump’s executive order, wrapped in patriotic language, is not benign nostalgia. It’s strategic revisionism.

The Psychology of Laughter as Defense

And when the ideological gears jammed, laughter took over.

The laughter was not because what I said was absurd. It was because they needed it to be absurd. To engage honestly would mean confronting the rot beneath the rhetoric. It would mean admitting that due process was violated, that power had overstepped, and that even Trump, especially Trump, was capable of lawless behavior. That level of self-reflection is unbearable to the authoritarian psyche.

Laughter, in this context, isn’t joy. It’s rejection. It’s a group-defense reflex, a shared signal that says, “We’re not taking this seriously, so we don’t have to deal with it.” It’s how insecurity hides when facts start knocking too loudly.

This wasn’t a debate. It was a ritual.

A ritual of denial, of tribal reinforcement, of mocking anything that threatened the sanctity of the movement. MAGA doesn’t need to prove you wrong. It only needs to laugh loudly enough to pretend the truth didn’t happen.

And so let the record show:

When asked to defend the Constitution, they defended the man. When shown a Supreme Court ruling, they countered with unproven labels. When offered facts, they fled to feelings. When handed Trump’s own words, they laughed, not because they disproved them, but because they couldn’t afford not to.

In the theater of MAGA, laughter isn’t the sound of victory. It’s the sound of retreat, retreat from facts, from accountability, from democracy itself.

Truth wasn’t defeated in that conversation, it was simply laughed off the stage by those who no longer recognize its shape. And when truth becomes a punchline, democracy becomes the joke.

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Sources:

• Supreme Court of the United States. (2025). Opposition to Application to Vacate the Injunction, Abrego Garcia v. Noem, April 7, 2025.

• Trump, D. J. (2025). Executive Order 13945: Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, March 27, 2025.

• Altemeyer, B. (1996). The Authoritarian Specter. Harvard University Press.

• Sidanius, J., & Pratto, F. (1999). Social Dominance: An Intergroup Theory of Social Hierarchy and Oppression. Cambridge University Press.

• Kunda, Z. (1990). “The Case for Motivated Reasoning.” Psychological Bulletin, 108(3), 480–498.

• Golec de Zavala, A., & Federico, C. M. (2018). “Collective Narcissism and the Motivational Underpinnings of Nationalism.” Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 6(2), 445–465.