Recently, writing about Trump supporters, I said: They, like creatures who live miles beneath the surface of the ocean, have developed marvelous mechanisms for survival. These mechanisms usually involve either dismissal or denial. Sometimes both.

Unfortunately, that was an understatement. They have since added justification. Even in the face of Trump admitting that he lied to us about the severity of COVID-19, true Trumpers were lauding his leadership through the pandemic and falling back on dismissal and denial when that was challenged. It shouldn’t be surprising, though. At every step down into the septic system that is the Trump presidency, I’ve kept saying, “Well, this should convince them.” And it didn’t.

There’s no real news in the Woodward revelation that Trump had been told about the severity of the virus. Peter Navarro gave him a memo in January. However, given Trump’s resistance to reading, I figured he hadn’t read it, just as he didn’t read the daily security briefings. But the Woodward tapes have been released, and now we know that—however he got the information—Trump did know and chose to lie.

He said that he downplayed it so that it wouldn’t cause a panic. That’s yet another lie. This is a man who has been inciting violence since his first campaign. Most recently, he’s been telling white suburban housewives that they won’t be safe in their own homes. I’m betting that the only panic he was concerned with was the stock market (something that affects fewer than half our citizens).

And yet, the true Trumper is still behind him, showing a remarkable capacity to see and embrace evil.

But this latest is just one more in the parade of actions that should have caused any thinking person to turn away from him.

Not long ago, there was Goldberg’s story about Trump’s comments on the military dead. Goldberg is an experienced journalist, and he says he has sources who heard Trump disparage those in the cemeteries. Trump denies he said it. I say it doesn’t matter. We have all seen the video of him talking about John McCain and about a family who had lost their son. We also know that he stood in front of an audience of soldiers and lied to them about a pay raise. And delivered misinformation about pay increases they already had.

We know that Trump has private conversations with Putin. In at least one, there was only a translator present, and Trump ordered him to destroy his notes. That’s—to use an overused word—unprecedented.

We know that Trump called for violence at his rallies and mocked a reporter with disabilities. (However, the Catholics for Trump website posted a long article denying that he was mocking the reporter for his disabilities and that he had mocked several other people, including some generals and Ted Cruz, the same way. If I were a Catholic, I don’t think I’d want to be in the same cohort with someone who denies mocking by citing other instances of mocking.)

And we know that he lies to us about every time he opens his mouth.

Yet the true Trumper will continue to defend him, will repeat his lies, and—God forbid!—may vote him in for a second term.

A couple of days ago, someone wrote that anyone who stills supports Trump has given up any claim to morality or honor. Sadly, I don’t think that bothers the true Trumper. They’re busy defending their ideology against the straw men that Trump and Fox have created. Immigrant hordes. Post-birth abortion. Socialism. They see us falling further and further behind every other industrialized nation and claim that it doesn’t matter.

We are now a nation that is far behind the pack in medical outcomes, medical costs, life expectancy, and education. We have a rotting infrastructure that nobody seems to worry about, and our middle class is becoming more hollowed out by the day. Trump has publically proclaimed that he’ll go after the few safety nets that are in place, and when he says that, we are afraid that, for once, he’s not lying.

I have, for the most part, quit engaging with true Trumpers. They look at 200,000 Coronavirus dead and claim that that’s the best that could be done, ignoring other countries that dealt with the crisis much better. They listen to his lies and try to justify them, or they just deny that he said them. They accuse Biden of some sort of dementia when, to me, he makes far more sense than Trump with or without a teleprompter. And they continue to claim that Trump saved the economy from the “terrible Obama years,” a claim that only the mathematically challenged can accept.

Our only salvation, I believe, is to become as fervent and single-minded as the true Trumpers. The only consolation I have in making that statement is that we won’t have to swallow as many lies as they do.