The deep-seated belief among MAGAs, especially their Dear Leader, the Semi-Sentinent Rotting Carrot Donald Trump, is that everyone is as shitty and selfish as they are. So, they cannot comprehend how people think outside of their own narcissism, and therefore, cannot wrap their heads around the idea of people caring about anything other than their own self-enrichment and a deep dedication to a delusional belief that they are right about everything.

Despite the presence of Living Self-Parodies Bret Stephens and David Brooks, the New York Times can still produce great reporting and opinion pieces. Yesterday, the Paper of Record ran a guest essay by Yonatan Touvan, a foreign-policy analyst and writer based in Tel Aviv, that is in part about this very thing.

Touvan notes that modern wars cannot be fought successfully by relying solely on traditional concepts of might and kicking ass, and powerful nations like Israel and the United States ignore this at their peril. Touvan uses the example of how the Iranian adventure seems to be spinning out of control.

It is tempting to describe this as a failure of intelligence. Technically, it is not. The spycraft kind of intelligence behind the war planning and execution is extensive. Recent reporting suggests that Israeli intelligence spent years penetrating Tehran’s traffic cameras and communications networks and built what one unnamed Israeli source described to CNN as an A.I.-powered “target-production machine” capable of turning enormous volumes of visual, human and signals intelligence into precise strike coordinates. That is an extraordinary achievement of surveillance and targeting.

Yet never has so much been seen, so precisely, by so many people who understand so little of what they are seeing. A system can tell you where a man is. It cannot tell you what his death will mean for a nation. Such systems are trained on behavior, not on meaning — they can track what an adversary does but not what he fears, honors, remembers or would die for.

While this is about Israel, it might as well be about the Trump administration, too. Trump, his administration, and many of his MAGA supporters cannot comprehend two things. One is that not everyone (or at least people who matter, i.e. white guys) believes the same thing that they do, and the other is that this belief can lead to disaster for their so-called ideals.

And I use ideals loosely, because outside of pursuing wealth and power, Trump doesn’t have any. Despite lacking either, his supporters follow their dear leader in this to a tee. It is very true that often conspiracies are due to a lack of awareness and/or understanding of a specific thing. There is little doubt that the strong belief in the “Soros is paying protestors” is based on the very real fact that proponents of this particular conspiracy theory cannot wrap their heads around gathering to support other people who don’t look like them.

I will add that I helped organize No Kings III in State College, Pa., and have yet to receive my Soros check. But we did get a good turnout so maybe I need to assume that I will

This is catching up to Trump in some very real ways. Besides Iran, their belief system has led them to some failures. MAGAs believe that people on the left are shrinking violets, and well, that didn’t work out very well in Minneapolis. They also failed to anticipate people coming out in droves to protest harming and deporting immigrants because they just can’t fathom anyone caring about others. They also did not predict the massive pushback on gerrymandering, nor did they believe that Trump could ever become this unpopular, because polls are fake news. They never need any evidence or hard testing of their ideals because their beliefs are true based on the fact that they come from “better” people, i.e., white Christians.

Sometimes this thinking leaks into the mainstream and infects the general public, like the disparaging term “virtue signaling,” which started on the right and, to our society’s shame, became way too common. The reason why the right wing created this term was based on the idea that no one really cares about other people, so how can it be real? Those of us who are non-MAGA probably should strike this term from our vocabulary.

In any event, this combination of delusion, stupidity, and narcissism might be what saves us in the end. We still have a lot of work to do to rid ourselves of the disease of Trumpism, but this gives me a bit of hope.

The last word goes to Blur.