Can Trump's core supporters be talked out of backing him?

No. But some might decide on their own that there are better alternatives.

This article by Eve Fairbanks is from what I call the Trumpsplaining school of liberal journalism. By that, I means it’s an attempt by a liberal to explain the Trump phenomenon — in this case, Trump supporters — to her fellow liberals in terms other than as a form of sickness. (I recognize that this is not the analog of “mansplaining” in which a man explains something to a woman in a way she considers condescending.)

Fairbanks wants to convince her fellow liberals that core Trump supporters can change their minds about him — they can become disillusioned. To accomplish this, she needs to overcome the liberal mindset that, as she describes it, Trump voters have a “fundamentally irrational cast of mind.”

Fairbanks considers this belief by liberals a coping mechanism. “It’s underrated,” she says, “how humiliating it remains for Democrats to have lost to Trump” in 2016. To “survive that loss,” Democrats need to believe that “Trump voters can’t take evidence on board — can’t think at all.” She adds:

There’s immense comfort in the belief that, even if you temporarily got owned, you are still fundamentally the smarter, better people and that your loss couldn’t have been avoided.

By this point, Fairbanks has shifted from explaining Trump and his supporters to liberals to explaining Trump’s liberal antagonists to the rest of us. She’s painting a picture of the Trump-hating left, and not a flattering one.

The picture gets worse. Some of Trump’s antagonists, Fairbanks observes, have resorted to biological determinism:

Over the course of the Trump era, numerous scientists and analysts have posited that conservatism comes down to “the shape of your brain,” with MAGA tendencies deriving from a larger amygdala — a fear-driving, evolutionarily “ancient” portion that “hijacks” the “thinking brain.” His fans are, other analysts claim, “less cognitively complex” or even likely to suffer disproportionately “from psychological illnesses that involve paranoia and delusions … like those with schizotypy personalities.”

If anyone expects Trump voters to change their views, one former Washington Post reporter wrote, then they haven’t confronted “a few fundamental, universal and uncomfortable facts about the human mind.” Trump voters aren’t made, they’re born, and no one should expect them to be anything other than what they are.

Fairbanks rejects this view, sort of. She won’t say that characterizing Trump supporters as “psychotic,” “developmentally injured,” “pathological,” and “stricken by mental shortcomings” is “necessarily unfair.” She just thinks “there’s ambiguity in what Trump supporters think,” and that “they’re less uniform than we like to believe.”

Thus, she concludes, there’s “room for persuasion.”

But persuasion of what? And by whom?

Trump’s core supporters will never adopt the liberal and Never Trump view that he was a bad president or that he is unfit to hold the office again. But might a goodly number of them come to believe that Trump is no longer the ideal leader to “make American great again”? Might they become tired of all the drama associated with Trump and all of his dwelling on past grievances? Might they begin to doubt his electability in 2024?

Yes. They might.

But if they do, it won’t be because liberals or Never-Trump conservatives persuade them of these things (and it’s presumptuous for Trump’s strident antagonists to think they have standing to try). These will be conclusions they reach on their own — the result of a quiet processing of cascading events.