Trump’s “Stanford” experiment The MAGA faithful, at long last, have not seen the light. That Road to Talledega moment, that flash of insight when the scales fall from their eyes and their political savior is revealed a bronzer-caked madman bent on the destruction of the red, white and blue nation they hold so dear? Never happened. What has happened since Donald Trump’s Veterans Day “vermin” speech is that the mainstream press and others have finally stopped giving him the benefit of the doubt. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Donald Trump is a fascist,” late-night host Stephen Colbert told his audience. Former Republican Tom Nichols declared Trump had “crossed one of the last remaining lines that separated his usual authoritarian bluster from recognizable fascism.” Even the New York Times this week broached the subject. But the answer to why the faithful have not wavered might be found in Philip Zimbardo’s 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment and its aftermath. Zimbardo famously set up a mock prison in Stanford University’s psychology department. He recruited students to play the roles of prisoners and prison guards for a study in human dynamics. The New Yorker recently summarized: According to the lore that’s grown up around the experiment, the guards, with little to no instruction, began humiliating and psychologically abusing the prisoners within twenty-four hours of the study’s start. The prisoners, in turn, became submissive and depersonalized, taking the abuse and saying little in protest. The behavior of all involved was so extreme that the…