I know I keep saying this, but it bears repeating: despite his awful and pathetic record when he had the job, he still got more votes than any sitting president in history in 2020.
J6 was horrific, and trump was directly responsible. By all rights he should be in jail for it. But voters have short memories, and the Repub spin machine has been hard at work downplaying it “it was just some trump fans on vacation who got a bit out of hand”.
despite daily news of trump’s myriad of crimes unfolding, his favorability ratings are rising again.
I guess one part of this whole process I don’t understand is how trump still has any Repub support at all. I’ve read all the arguments in this post, that the R party is just a bunch of venal, amoral crooks just like trump, the trump as “useful idiot” theory, et al. But it’s an open secret that trump is hated by most Rs in power, and they just support him because they have to. As I said in my OP, political capital is the very currency of politics, and I don’t see how trump has any left, having burned so many others who had any political association with him in his 4 years in office (and afterward).
There was a time directly after J6 where trump was getting publicly denounced by the McConnells and McCarthys and Grahams, and it looked like trump was well and truly finished. But here he comes roaring back into political relevance, with many of the Repubs who denounced him having walked back their denunciations and are back to praising him. And I understand the arguments like “pols like Lindsay Graham are too spineless to risk losing their political support by taking a stand against trump”. But, not that I’m any expert into how the inner circles of power work, but it seems like they could pay the bare minimum of lip service to trump, while secretly closing ranks against him behind the scenes. And maybe some of this is being done. trump is no good for anybody but trump. he’s too much of a loose cannon to be a useful idiot to anybody, except maybe Putin, who seems skilled at using a combination of flattery and leverage from the money trump owes to control trump.
I think the answer is that cage-fighting is effective, and Trump is the only person doing it right now.
First, look at the battle with DeSantis. Trump, and his PACs, have openly criticized DS on policy, on his record and on his personal mannerisms. Meanwhile DS won’t even call out Trump by name because he’s afraid of losing all the MAGAs.
However, that just makes him look weak, and the state of republican politics right now is that perceived weakness is pretty disqualifying on its own.
And the same is true with this polling between Trump and Biden, though to a lesser extent.
A lot of the country hears crap thrown about Biden and he doesn’t fight back forcefully enough. Actually, in his case, it’s more significant that the party and left-wing media doesn’t fight enough. The majority of Americans think the economy is doing dreadfully, which is completely at odds with reality, and have other views that the right wing can leverage, such as that New York and Chicago are the most dangerous places.
And, once you’re in the “I like the cut of Trump’s jib” camp, you can easily be sucked into the media ecosystem that will tell you every day that all the courts of the land + the FBI + the media are just engaging in a witchhunt against Trump.
If it helps, I’d say: don’t start off by thinking of him as a positive useful idiot; try thinking of him as a negative useful idiot. Think of him as someone who can say DON’T VOTE FOR THAT GUY, at which point tons of voters would say SIR YES SIR — and folks in office just want him to not say that.
Maybe he’s too much of a loose cannon when it comes to getting anything else out of him — but if you’d be out of office after he says DON’T VOTE FOR THAT GUY, and then you wouldn’t be able to do much else, could you count on him to not say that, and that’s it? And could that be enough?
Why should any of that matter if Trump is the one with all the juice when it comes to elections? Surely you are aware that he waltzed in in 2016 and they tried all the closing ranks stuff already, and he wiped the floor with all of them and then won an election that surely none of them could have won. He’s got the juice, and they don’t. That’s why they need him, and that’s why he’s a viable candidate.
In 2016 no GOP aspirant went at him to score hard hits when there was still a chance it would work, because all the yoyos were biding their time to when he would “inevitably have to drop out of his doomed run” so they could collect his voters.
Now no GOP aspirant will try to score any hits at him at all because now they don’t want, they need and most importantly fear his voters.
Both times around it just makes them look pathetic by comparison.
When a hefty fraction of the public thinks Tucker Carlson is a source of Truth, it’s hardly surprising that same hefty fraction totally thinks Trump is the ideal person to Make America Great Again. Especially white badly educated America.
For a very large fraction of the country we do not have politics about policies and priorities. Instead we have reality TV culture wars. And folks are voting for which reality TV character they want to win the culture war on their behalf.
This is what I just don’t understand. What is this juice that he has??
NOTE: That’s purely a rhetorical question. I’ve read so much about it, including reading most of the trump posts here and participating in many of them, but it still eludes me. I’ve heard all the theories and explanations. I can understand him being able to bamboozle just enough people to get elected in 2016. But to still be not only a viable candidate but very possibly the next President after all the incompetence and ugliness and backstabbing and criminal activity, I just can’t wrap my head around it.
IMHO it goes back to 2016 when he eviscerated the GOP primary competition. Once he started exchanging barbs with the establishment Republicans, getting all the attention, and having them drop out of the primary, as well as saying things out loud the MAGAts wanted to hear, the spell was cast, and the juice was squeezed. Now they want that same evisceration of the Dems, using the same tactics, and no one else can own the libs like TFG, so he’s their man.
I am apparently immune to Teump’s ‘charm’ such that it is, but I understand it. For low information voters, he’s the most recognizable face in the bunch, and they like him. They liked him firing people on the Apprentice. Trump has entertainer skills. His rallies are huge because the people who go to them have fun. They don’t get lectured, they get a comedic performance.
Another faction are the people who have come to despise Democrats after years of being called ‘deplorable’, dumb, redneck, racist, sexist, homophobe, etc. They will support anyone who fights back and mocks the other side, and Trump does that constantly.
Trump exists in an environment where he is simultaneously a politician and an entertainer. He’s the Jon Stewart of Republican politics, mixing policy and politics with comedy and entertain,ent, and using that to deflect criticism. So if he mocks a disabled person, his fans go, “Hey, it was only comedy.” He gets a pass on behaviour that would be (and was) disqualifying if any traditional political candidate tried it. Ask Marco Rubio how his attempt to trade shots with Trump worked out for him.
Then there’s a third faction- reluctant Trump supporters who dearly wish there was another candidate, but who will stick with Trump if they have to. Some are currently DeSantis supporters, and others are on the sidelines waiting for someone better. But everyone knows they’ll come home to Trump when push cimea to shove.
Those are the ‘anyone but a Democrat’ people. There are Democrats like that as well, who would vote for an empty trash bag before they’d vote for any Republican.
Lots of these folks feel bullied by Life and by the Establishment. Trump promises to bully the Establishment on their behalf. That is music to their poor persecuted ears.
It really is no deeper than that. They are watching a Steven Segal or Sty Stallone movie. The tough guy they want to be is whacking the Bad Guys they want to hate. They’re loving watching it and loving pretending they were like their matinee idol.
The fact Trump isn’t really whacking anything, he’s just claiming he’s going to whack, then changes the subject to a different target before anything is done, eludes this crew completely. It’s all tough-guy threats, never an actual attack.
Except once in awhile when he suborned the FBI & DoJ, tariffed China into causing the beginnings of a US recession, and encouraged the Jan 6 mob to kill Pence & half of congress. Which the mob was fortunately too feckless to actually accomplish.
Yeah, I get everything you guys are saying. It makes sense. I get, to some extent, how he’s been able to get as far as he has. I just fail to see how his P.T. Barnum shtick has been so sustainable for so long, and continues to be. It’s like, the little man behind the curtain was revealed long ago and enough people shrugged and said, eh, I still enjoy the show. It’s just sad. SAD!
It took me a while to get it, but you have to appreciate the background.
To most Americans, politics is quite dull and difficult to follow. Politicians come across as quite fake, saying some focus-grouped slogan, and then when they get into power they always help the elites, not the little guy.
Plus generally the anti-intellectual vein in American culture.
With that background, we should really have expected a Trump character to emerge one day.
He’s not afraid to say the wrong thing. He dumbs down politics and says the kind of thing the next guy at the bar might say “build a wall!”. In fact, it’s pretty critical that he’s dumb in popular ways: the kinds of misconceptions he has (e.g. that China pays American import tariffs) are very common ones in the general population.
And he fights politicians, which most people wanted to see.
Note that I am barely talking about policy. His supporters barely do either.
He is the most popular conservative figure today because he embodies modern conservative ideals to a tee. He’s the apex of conservative thought and philosophy. Some people don’t want to believe that’s true, but it is.
Further, there is a strong symbiosis between RW propaganda media, Fox, QAnon, NewsMax, etc., and Trump. If those media outlets did not exist filling the susceptible public’s head with nonsense, Trump would not be nearly as successful.
A corollary is that to the degree those entities choose a different champion(s), Trump will struggle. Fox is obviously backing away from Trump a little. Although whether that’s a change in goal or a change in tactics in service of the same goal remains to be seen.
Trump is total catnip to the media of either persuasion. Keeping the spotlight on him and the volume at eleventy is what he does best. “Star power” is very attractive to a big subset of humanity.
Again this is not conventional politics, policies, and priorities. This is a reality TV gameshow where “Freedom good, taxes bad, non-whites worse” is as deep as the thinking gets. It’s all emotion, not logic.
Part of my inability to accept the continued viability of trump I think, is that I really hate to accept the fact that such a large swath of the American voting public can be so gullible, so often. trump is Lucy, always pulling away the football, and they are Charlie Brown, convinced this time will be different, and falling flat on their back.
One other thing: Trump keeps coming back because the media and the Democrats want him back, because they think they can beat him, and because with him as leader of the party they can continue attacking all Republicans as MAGA fools.
Trump was fading, and his candidates looked really shaky in the last election. DeSantis was growing in popularity. So suddenly lawsuits appear, Trump gets raided, etc. His popularity increases, because people see him as an underdog against a powerful state apparatus they hate. Democrats spent millions helping MAGA candidates get elected.
Trump was fading again when Alvin Bragg opened up his investigation, which spiked Trump’s popularity. And CNN just gave him a town hall stacked with his supporters.
The only people who want Trump to be the nominee more than the MAGA types are the news media and the Democrats. CNN in particular has been circling the drain since Trump left office. They are now getting beat in primetime by freaking NewsMax. They desperately want Trump to go all the way, and will help him get there - while claiming he’s a danger to the country.
Trump actually did achieve things, though. You may hate them, but Republicans don’t.
The Abraham accords were a major move forwards in Middle-East peace.
He got 3.2 trillion in tax cuts.
He beat his 2-for-1 cuts in regulation for every new law.
He withdrew from the TPP as promised (stupid move, but he promised to do it, and did it)
He actually did a lot of the trade restrictions he promised, renegotiating NAFTA, the trade agreements with Korea and China, etc. Again, I wouldn’t vote for that, but he promised it and delivered.
He did authorize the program for emergency development of mRNA vaccines for Covid. Remember when some Democrats said they’d never take the ‘Trump Vaccine’? And he bucked his own party and supported lockdowns and other interventions.
Here’s a list of ‘accomplishments’ directly from the Trump White House: Many of them are either bullshit or mundane stuff that would have happened under any president, and some of the ‘accomplishments’ are bad ideas, but there are some real ones in there: