Ruth Ben-Ghiat, expert on authoritarianism, succinctly analyses what statement and I think it’s right on:
This as yet another loyalty performance for an audience of One, who is addressed as though he is still the head of state. We are also dwelling in the “upside-down world” of authoritarianism, as I call it. “Accountability” means stopping investigations into abuse of power, and “a threat to our entire system” = a threat to Republican plans to convert America to an autocracy under Trump’s lead. That’s the most telling phrase.
This is what it’s all about. The “you can believe me or you can believe your eyes” and “I know you are but what am I” and the rest of these crude descriptions of the intensely frustrating inversion of reality in which these people live is all in service of authoritarianism. Trump isn’t an intellectual or an academic and neither are most of his followers. They are authoritarians who are simply following their own instincts.
It’s not uncommon among our species. It’s just that the American system of government was supposed to be a structural impediment to permitting it as a form of government, which is not to say that it has succeeded in the past. (Uhm… slavery, Jim Crow, internment etc.) But this is different because they are using these openly dictatorial tactics to shut down dissent and brainwash half the country into believing that up is down and black is white.
I would guess that nobody is more surprised than Donald Trump that his lies were so easily believed by massive numbers of Americans. But he knows it now and he will use it. He is a sociopathic narcissist and nothing will stop him once he obtains presidential power again. I just hope some of these sycophants like Mike Johnson, who isn’t as stupid as Trump, understand that in order to demonstrate power, dictators often sacrifice loyalists just to show they can. Some of the biggest MAGA bootlickers are going to find themselves thrown to the wolves, just wait and see.