I’ve said it before, and I still believe it today. The only sin Trump could commit that would cause him to lose support would be to begin supporting liberal causes.
Sadly, this is true.
He may have imagined that these institutions “should” be craving someone like him to rally behind. So, rather than cultivate or groom these instruments of power, when they failed to just fall to his feet at once in personal fealty, he tried to bully them into it.
He could not be patient because he knew that absent something radical when his time came to leave after 4 or 8 years those organizations would just snap to and say “yes, sir!” to whoever came next.
Thing is, his hissy-fit-and-public-humiliation strategy may work with some of the “weak losers” he’s used to run into in business or that the Republican Party is mostly composed of, but not here. You don’t try to leash the military or intel community by putting on a BS show of being tough and mean. Their everyday is handling real tough and mean guys.
The competent tyrant will be someone those organizations can respect.
(That of course feeds into his whole “Deep State” notion, he can’t conceive of that members and leaders of this sort of institution may feel it should be, well, institutional about how it does its thing.)
And they would not need to reinvent the wheel. Follow the model of the old Dixiecrats, they’ve intentionally taken over that space since the “Southern Strategy”
As I’ve said before, we’ll know the conservative movement has finally abandoned Trump when they start referring to him as “longtime Democrat Donald Trump”.
But that won’t happen until they find a new version of Trump who they think will be even more popular with their voters.
I’ve seen a number of discussions on Reddit where people have asked Trumpeteers what it would take for them to stop supporting him.
Of course it is very hard to get a straight answer because most Trumpeteers have difficulty expressing themselves coherently and also tend to resent the question. However, what few serious answers I have seen have all accorded broadly with what you say, although more specifically they said they would stop supporting Trump if he stopped upsetting liberals (rather than if he began supporting liberal causes).
As @JRDelirious says I actually think that a large part of the reason he failed was, thankfully, the Deep State. The deep state exists and it truly did oppose Trump, and his allegations to the contrary were (unusually for Trump) actually not paranoia.
However, it opposed him quite properly and for good reason because while it is the role of the various US governmental institutions to (broadly speaking) implement the president’s policy, it is not their role to help him to undermine the system of government, or become his personal tools, and so they rightly refused to do so.
Which leads me to this - in addition to the matters you raise, Trump made the mistake of “parachuting” his people into top positions, but they were significantly stymied by the bulk of good people comprising senior management. And because Trump is childish and impatient, when “his” people didn’t achieve exactly what he wanted immediately, he did the only thing that he knows to do which was to sack them (the beginning and the end of his so-called executive skills). Which of course just meant that he had to start again by parachuting another of his people into the top position, rinse, lather, repeat.
I suspect that, from their perspective, they were taking power, not giving it away. They were Republicans, attempting to take away the power to vote from Democrats. It’s not like they actually control how their state votes, so that’s not really power for them.
Plus they expect that the Republicans in Congress would only have contested an election that a Democrat won, not a Republican. So they’d still have the power to elect a Republican.
Why do you think they’re all about limiting the votes in their states now? It’s the same thing. I’m not even sure it mattered that it was Trump who floated the idea of election fraud. I think it just mattered that he was a Republican who could get a lot of their base to believe it.
Though those attempts are directly what is fueling the puth for HR1 and nerfing the filibuster. If Republicans are that scared that they can’t win without screwing up the votes, then that makes the idea a Republican controlled Congress abusing the process a lot less threatening.
I actually have an idea that they could likely sell as not actually removing the procedural filibuster, but that’s a topic for another thread. (And I don’t mean making a talk-only fillibuster.)
The issue there is that the rules for congressional elections and presidential elections are different. States do control their presidential elections. They don’t control congressional elections.
Article II, Section 1, Clauses 2 and 3 state
Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress; but no Senator or Representative, or person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States shall be appointed an Elector.
The Congress may determine the Time of chusing the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their Votes; which Day shall be the same throughout the United States.
The issue is that we tend to have both at the same time, using the same ballots.