What do Republicans believe? Whatever Donald Trump tells them they should believe, it seems.

In survey after survey, self-described Republicans—admittedly a severely truncated demographic in the Trump era—are surrendering not just principle but common sense to whatever Trump needs them to say at the moment. The positions Republicans adopt to prop up the president are often so outside the American right’s traditional credo that it’s hard to believe they’re being honest.

According to a June Axios-sponsored SurveyMonkey poll, a whopping 92 percent of Republicans believe the conventional press deliberately runs with false or misleading stories. That’s not especially surprising. Republicans have a long-standing grievance with the mainstream media, and nearly three-quarters of all respondents in this survey agree with them. What is unique and, frankly, disturbing is the apparent resolve of GOP voters to do something about it.

A Quinnipiac University survey released last week showed that a majority of Republicans agree with the Trump White House’s determination that the press is the “enemy of the people.” An Ipsos poll released around the same time confirmed that close to a majority of GOP voters believe “the news media is the enemy of the American people.” That same poll showed that a significant plurality of GOP voters—43 to 36 percent—think Trump should have the expressly unconstitutional authority to shutter media outlets with which he disagrees. Or, rather, “news outlets engaged in bad behavior,” whatever that means.

The GOP base also seems generally unfazed by Donald Trump’s bizarre rhetorical deference to Russian President Vladimir Putin. An Economist-backed YouGov poll in early July showed 56 percent of the GOP said that “Donald Trump’s relationship with Vladimir Putin is mostly a good thing for the United States,” while only 40 percent said that the United States should remain a member of the NATO alliance. In 2014, only 22 percent of Republicans thought of Russia as friendly toward or allied with the United States. Today, via Gallup, that’s up to 40 percent of Republicans.

Given that, it’s no surprise that 70 percent of self-identified Republicans broke with the vast majority of the public and gave the president high marks for his press conference alongside Putin, in which he disparaged his own Cabinet and intelligence officials and heaped praise upon the autocrat in the Kremlin.

Donald Trump’s rhetorical servility toward Putin contrasts greatly with his administration’s admirably hawkish posture toward Moscow, but don’t ask Republican voters to reconcile these contradictions. A July Fox News poll found that 57 percent of GOP voters think that Trump’s toughness toward Russia is “about right.” So, which is it?

“An attack on law enforcement is an attack on all Americans,” Donald Trump said to the applause of Republicans as he accepted the party’s presidential nomination. Ever since, the president has occupied his time attacking law enforcement, and Republicans are with him all the way.

Seventy-five percent of Republicans in a recent poll agree with the president that the special counsel’s office established by a Trump-appointed deputy attorney general is conducting a “witch hunt” targeting him and his allies. This position concedes that the 12 Russian nationals, 13 Russian intelligence officers, and five Americans who pleaded guilty to various crimes as a result of Robert Mueller’s work retain the president’s full faith and confidence. But perhaps that conclusion takes the average Republican voter literally and not seriously.

More seriously, six in ten Republicans tell pollsters that they believe the FBI is actively trying to frame the President of the United States for a crime. Logically, then, it stands to reason that most in the GOP believe that law enforcement is a politicized institution that is waging an underhanded campaign to de-legitimize an election and carry out something akin to a coup. In February, Reuters/Ipsos found that 73 percent of Republicans believe just that. But if the coup narrative were true and an existential threat to the foundations of the Republic had been uncovered, would Republicans really behave as they are—placidly allowing Democrats to out-raise, out-organize, and out-campaign GOP candidates consistently for over 18 months?

Even in trifling matters in which the stakes are so low that they hardly merit the effort it takes to lie—like the president’s baseless claim that “between 3 million and 5 million people voted illegally in the 2016 presidential election,” thus robbing Trump of a popular vote victory in 2016—a majority of Republican voters are willing to compromise themselves. And only to spare the president from the shame of trivial embarrassment.

Some contend that these results are an outgrowth of the fact that voters have deciphered the pollster’s game. Respondents are savvy enough to know when survey-takers are genuinely trying to take the public’s temperature on an issue and when they are merely seeking to exacerbate tensions within the GOP camp. Thus, this line of reasoning goes, respondents who support Trump are more likely to answer questions in a way that demonstrates their fealty toward the president even if they don’t necessarily hold that position. In other words, these are all lies. Maybe that’s true, but it’s cold comfort. The lies we tell ourselves become our truth if we tell them often enough.