Why Trump diehards are remaining blind to reality

At what point do you, I, anyone or any group committed to a certain view admit that we were wrong?

This week, at a rally in Ohio, up to 7000 people were told by Donald Trump that ‘‘with the exception of the late, great Abraham Lincoln ... I can be more presidential than any president who has ever held this office!’’

And they gave him a great cheer. President Trump’s point was that he has little time for ‘‘being presidential’’ (ie dignified, measured and unifying) because he is too busy actually doing things.

But he could be if he wanted to be, believe him.

More than Reagan, more than the Roosevelts, more than Washington.

It was possibly the least presidential thing any American ever heard uttered by a president. And his audience still cheered. So what would stop them applauding him?

Obviously not his Twitter vendettas, nor the absence of any concrete achievement (apart, of course, from the ban on transgender people serving in the military).

Not his bizarre disavowal of his own attorney-general Jeff Sessions, nor even the attempts at collusion between his campaign team and agents of the Russian government.

Polling of Trump supporters suggests that they see all these problems either as part of an attempt to persecute their hero, or as utterly unimportant.

Worse, the criticism entrenches their view. So I invite Trumpites to try out this scenario.

Suppose that, last year, Iranian intelligence had procured information about Trump’s business deals.

Imagine that Chelsea Clinton, her husband and five or six other Clinton advisers had met an intermediary linked to the Iranian government to explore what that person could offer by way of dirt on the Trumps.

Would his supporters have (a) dismissed this as flim-flam or (b) demanded immediate punishment?

OK. It’s a rhetorical question and the example I’ve chosen suits my prejudices. Some other examples don’t.

For a start, I come from a family that got some very big things spectacularly wrong.

My parents were motivated by a desire for the meek to inherit the earth before and not after they died.

Mum and Dad became communists and communists understood that the Great October Revolution in Russia, 100 years old this autumn, had brought a new world into existence.

They fought for workers’ rights and better conditions and an end to racism and exploitation and so on.

They sacrificed a lot: money, careers, time. And they embraced some of the biggest lies of the 20th century.

They believed that the show trials of the 30s and late-40s were proper processes and that the purges were a regrettable necessity.

Then in 1956 the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, told the world that almost everything the bourgeois press had said about Uncle Joe Stalin was true and all the stuff the loyal British communists had been saying was utterly false.

And even then some communists wouldn’t believe it. I had a little red soft spot for Fidel Castro until the turn of the millennium.

In her 2010 book Being Wrong the American writer Kathryn Schulz examined the problem of admitting error.

There were the usual problems of ‘‘confirmation bias’’: actively looking for things that help your argument and dismissing things that don’t.

Take the tendency of partisans to complain that polls are wrong or even rigged when they go against you, and to cite them approvingly when they’re favourable.

But Schulz looked beyond this to the strategies that people devise to avoid an admission of outright error.

Her great example was the fate of the Millerites, a sect of Christians who convinced themselves that the world would end on October 22, 1844.

So they stopped planting and harvesting, gave their houses away and prepared to be received into the bosom of the returning Redeemer.

They called what happened next, ie nothing, the Great Disappointment.

But what they did not do was declare themselves to have been wrong. Instead they adopted, says Schulz, five defences.

And I invite readers to ask if any of them seem familiar.

The first was the ‘‘time-frame’’ defence: the Second Coming is still coming so I was just out by a little in my calculations.

The second was the ‘‘near-miss’’ defence. It almost happened as I said it would, or as Schulz puts it, ‘‘if I hadn’t been wrong I would have been right’’.

This is a close relative to the third, the ‘‘out-of-left-field’’ defence.

But, as Schulz says, ‘‘just about any event can be defined as unforeseeable if you yourself failed to foresee it’’.

Fourth is the ‘‘I was wrong but it’s your fault’’ defence.

And fifth is the ‘‘better safe than sorry’’ defence.

If Brexit fails it will have been the fault of the naysayers who talked down the country.

If pointing out to someone that they’re wrong merely confirms their sense of rightness, what are you to do?

Perhaps we shouldn’t be so pessimistic. Often people who are less committed than my parents would deal with wrongness by deciding that they weren’t as bothered over the big question as others assumed.

We can be obstinate but we can also be agile.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised to discover in a year or two that most of the people at that rally in Ohio on Tuesday had gone to see Trump out of mere curiosity.

The Times, London