Trump amnesty day?

My friend Danny made an interesting suggestion:

One reason for the “teams” aspect of politics is social media.

In the past, you didn’t necessarily know anyone’s political beliefs or party affiliation. People didn’t talk about it, there was no Internet, no social media, etc. Now, people post their political beliefs all over the place. Human beings, by their nature, don’t like to admit that they are wrong. Some people are willing to do that, but fewer and fewer. In the past, you could change your mind, switch parties, vote for the other party, etc., and nobody would even know. Now, people are reluctant to change/switch, because there’s no much public/Internet history out there, and they don’t want to admit that they were wrong. I wish there were a “Trump Amnesty Day”, where GOP people could admit they were wrong, nobody would criticize them, and we could move on from him.

I believe there’s a lot to this. I do think that, in addition to the relative transparency regarding political affiliations and beliefs wrought by the Internet in general and social media in particular, the increasing extent to which partisan sorting has made political beliefs both more intense and more central to their identity for many people makes altering those beliefs/admitting mistakes more like a conversion experience than a more banal changing of one’s mind about some random subject or question.

For a lot of Trumpists, admitting that they were wrong about Trump would be too intimately connected to admitting that they were wrong about so many other things as well — basically the entire belief system pushed by right wing media, which is what made Trump possible in the first place.

Nevertheless, I do believe there are (a lot of?) people in America who on at least some level have come to regret their support for Trump, and would find it easier to renounce him if their support for him hadn’t gotten so entangled with all the other aspects of their political and personal identities. Obviously this doesn’t include the hardcore Trumpists, but a crucial question in American politics right now is, what is the proportion between Trump’s hardcore support and people who have voted for him out of some combination of tribal inertia/inattention/ignorance etc?

So I don’t think a Trump amnesty day would necessarily lead us to kill that calf and call the family round, but it’s a nice idea in a certain dream-like way.