Why Is the GOP Sticking with Trump? – Quillette
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A primer for foreign observers and the otherwise perplexed.
For many months now, it has been clear to most politically attentive Americans that former-President Donald Trump will again be the Republican presidential nominee for the coming November 5 election. Although Trump is awash with scandal and prone to increasingly bizarre behavior, the Republican primaries of the past several weeks have been even more vacuous forms of political theatre than they otherwise would have been.
Some have been a bit slow to grasp their foregone conclusion: Senator Mitt Romney managed to catch the tailwind of the zeitgeist just after last month’s Iowa caucuses when he remarked: “I think a lot of people in this country are out of touch with reality and will accept anything Donald Trump tells them. You had a jury that said Donald Trump raped a woman, and that doesn’t seem to be moving the needle. There’re a lot of things about today’s electorate that I have a hard time understanding.” Do tell.
If a Republican senator is still struggling to wrap his mind around reality in what used to be the party he himself once led, how much harder must it be for many folks six, 12, and 16 times zones away from American shores. Hence this brief primer to offer some guidance.
Donald Trump was elected president fair and square in November 2016, and that conveys a very high status in American politics. Only two members of the federal government are elected on a nationwide basis: the president and the vice-president, and the vice-president doesn’t much count as long as the president is healthy. Having been president, Trump was able to use his office to confer status and benefits on others, those who worked for him and others besides. They all owe Trump, and he collects the debts in the form of political loyalty. That has enabled him to control most state party organizations. That matters.
The fact that Trump is an ex-president also makes the coming election unusual in American history: only twice before has an ex-president challenged an incumbent president running for re-election, once in 1892 and once in 1912—a long time ago, in other words. No one really knows how this factor will affect the outcome, assuming Trump wins the GOP nomination. The reason is that the advantages of incumbency are not what they once were. Indeed, the cost of ruling in times when electorates—and not just in the United States—are critical of the status quo can be very high. There is a lot of anti-establishment perfumery in the air. (Why that is invites other questions, but this isn’t the place to detail them.)
Legal fees have lately bitten deeply into his coffers, but his lawyers are not particularly well paid given their lowly professional status, and Trump has often used his legal problems successfully as a fund-raising tack. The key here is that his status as an ex-president makes him a national figure unlike any of his competitors, and the big money (the little money, too) tends to gravitate to candidates with the highest status and greatest likelihood of winning the nomination. It works like a corporate insurance policy in what has regrettably become a plutocracised pay-to-play political system.
In the case of Trump, too, given his legendary capacity to hold a grudge, any former donors who abandon him for a competitor will stir his wrath, and if he wins, he will direct his power to their disadvantage. Since the money flow in American politics more or less resembles a pay-to-play system, big donor policy interests would be at manifest risk should they abandon Trump. There have been exceptions, but not many.
In US politics, since the late 1960s/early 1970s, the primary process has been at once more open and far more ideological. Gone are the proverbial “smoked-filled rooms” but also gone is the shrewd sense of pragmatism that kept clowns with flamethrowers far away from public office.
The activists who dominate primary elections tend to be better-educated and more affluent—and far more ideological and abstract in the way they think—than typical voters. That is true for Democrats as well as Republicans. So the trick for candidates is to go to extremes to win the nomination and then tack hard to the center to win the election. A lot of logical and ideational crockery gets broken in the process, but that’s how it works.
Trump is a master at the simple, incendiary, sloganesque, shock-bar statement. He is an extremist’s extremist when he speaks to the party faithful. And it usually works with those at the core of primary contests. You can see how important this is because Vivek Ramaswamy has imitated and tried to outdo Trump in precisely this way, and by so doing, he has put his name on the Republican political map despite having zero political experience and pretty much no brains.
That doesn’t mean that Trump won in 2016 without positions on issues. He did have positions, most of which were given to him, and he never studied or really understood them, but that doesn’t matter. So now, when challengers try to gain ground on him, they find themselves doing it locked into his policy positions. With few exceptions, none has broken out of the mold. So, they all end up looking like imitators, and primary voters tend to reason, “Why go with an imitator when the original real thing is there in the ring?”
Also important here: losing political parties in mass-democratic polities tend to double down and become more extreme for the next time around. The Democrats lost in 1968 and nominated George McGovern in 1972. They had to lose even worse before finally figuring out that they needed to head toward the center to win. So in 1976, they nominated a Southern moderate—Jimmy Carter—and won.
Republicans lost in 2020, but their reaction was to double-down, become more extreme, and get behind Trump’s “Stolen Election” narrative. Trump is thus the preeminent symbol of the GOP’s post-2020 lurch toward the crazy surrealist Right. That is partly why he maintains his status as party leader: he justifies in the minds of MAGA ideologues that becoming more extreme was the right thing to do.
Well, was it? It’s frankly ambiguous. The GOP lost ground in the Senate in the 2022 midterms, but it did achieve a slight majority in the House. It actually won the popular vote for House seats, 51 percent to 48 percent. A lot of moderate Republican politicians—“never-Trumpers” like Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney—were basically tossed from the party and a lot of others left and/or decided not to run for re-election, figuring they would get chewed up in the primaries by Trump-supported challengers. So Trump made the party more Trump-like by moving it further toward extreme positions. By getting rid of a lot of frictional opposition, he now enjoys… well, less frictional opposition. That’s an important reason why he’s ahead in the primary race.
The popularity of many Trump-branded political issues has led many Republicans to conclude that if he is nominated Trump will win—and winning is what they crave above all. Those issues are primarily border security and immigration issues, anti-woke/anti-DEI issues, crime, and the sense that lower socio-economic echelon voters have of economic duress and insecurity. This is despite the fact that macroeconomic data on employment, growth, and new job creation are very, very good under the Biden Administration. But those data do not align with the experience of less well-off people who are still dealing with the aftershocks of high inflation and ongoing cost disease in critical service sectors (healthcare and insurance costs, higher education, housing, transportation, and digital services) when their incomes have not kept pace. Trump’s ceaseless anti-elitist, anti-free trade, anti-globalist rhetoric works on them, and that translates into primary support.
The Ukraine-Russia war also plays in Trump’s favor. The Biden administration has been careful but forthright in supporting Ukraine, but most Americans think that spending money and taking risks in Eastern Europe is not in American interests. The MAGA constituency is isolationist on balance as well as xenophobic in spirit. Trump’s boast that Russia would never have dared invade Ukraine had he been (rightfully in his mendacious view) president plays very well to the core, and his claim that, if re-elected, the war would soon be over and so cost American taxpayers no more money is also very popular, even to non-MAGA Republicans and some independent voters. How would Trump end the war? By cutting off Ukraine and forcing it under duress to negotiate a surrender, neutering or possibly pulling the US out of NATO, and blessing the Russian annexation of seized Ukrainian territory.
Meanwhile, Trump has insulated himself on issues that bend toward the Democrats—especially the key culture-war issue of abortion. Trump couldn’t care less about this issue and has never been blood-on-the-saddle in opposing abortion. He didn’t need to be, since the Democrats were so volubly pro-choice that they chased all the pro-life types into Trump’s corner by default. Of all the Republican primary contestants, Trump has the best chance of finessing the abortion issue in the general election.
Trump talks like Archie Bunker from the old Norman Lear sitcom All in the Family. Trump voters come in basically four flavors—cultists who think he is the savior of all they hold dear; people who fear the (exaggerated) political clout of the illiberal Left (their real power is cultural, not political); people who vote the Republican brand by rote; and single-issue voters, as with the aforementioned pro-lifers. Of these four, the first is most critical to Trump, and the currency here is Trump’s ability to play the counter-humiliation card.
A lot of less well-educated Americans feel status-humiliated at a time when decent blue-collar jobs are scarcer than ever and higher education is the key to social mobility. They tend to fall for “deep state” and “QAnon” conspiracy theories more readily, and they tend to have low social capital in their personal lives: fewer friends, a higher rate of substance-abuse issues, broken families, and—for males especially—self-eviction from the job market. Trump is always tearing down the elites—political, economic, and cultural—so he appeals to those who think they have been humiliated by “the Man” (whoever or whatever they think that means). This is why Trump’s massive legal problems—his 91 indictments, the libel decisions, his payments of hush money to adult entertainers, his court antics that bring him gag orders, and so on—actually help him with this constituency. They simply conclude that he, like them, is a victim unfairly held down. Their sympathy and support thus overfloweth.
Aside from Ramaswamy and one or two other non-entities, all of the other contenders for the Republican nomination have had real government experience and educations more or less suitable for the job of legislating and governing. They are or were mostly governors of states (Haley, Christie, DeSantis, Hutchinson, Burgum, Pence) or senators or congressmen. Trump never did understand—and despite four years on the job, still doesn’t understand—the office of the president or how the federal government actually works.
He never cared to know. He never actually expected to be elected in 2016. The 2016 campaign was conceived as one massive infomercial for the Trump brand, mostly paid for by the craven broadcast media out to maximize market share. Thanks to the Reagan rhetoric of the 1980s, the activist ideologues in the Republican Party despise the federal government, and think—as Reagan said—that “government is not the solution, it’s the problem.” They would basically burn down the hated “administrative state” if they could. So anyone with genuine experience at governing is at a disadvantage relative to Trump as far as GOP party activists are concerned. This self-negating conception of government seems irrational for people seeking to hold high office. It is irrational, but it is also popular. It is, live and in living colour, Ortega y Gasset’s “reason of unreason” redux.
This factor is related to the fifth. Trump’s base displays all the characteristics of a cult, religious as well as political. None of the other contenders for the Republican nomination has acquired this mystical aura. Trump resembles the classic “magnifico”—the ostentatious, irreverent, free-spending, larger-than-life type that first emerged in the Italian Renaissance. This figure has been on display in American politics and culture numerous times: Huey “Kingfish” Long, “Big Jim” Folsum, William Randolph Hearst, J.P. Morgan, and of course P.T. Barnum. The only other US President who was cultic in a populist mode was Andrew Jackson, but unlike Trump, Jackson had real military and political experience and could at least read and think. Obviously, too, Jackson operated in a media/communications world that dramatically differed from that of the 21st century.
The Trump cult now consists of somewhere between 28 and 35 percent of Republican voters, sometimes defined in polls as people who would vote for Trump even if he runs at the head of a third-party ticket, and more recently even if he is a convicted felon doing jail time. That sums to between 45.2 and 56.5 million people out of a total of 161.42 million registered voters—not a trivial number. Not all of them are conspiracy-addled, adolescent-brained naïfs, but many do appear to fit the description.
America’s entertainment culture has been made possible by unprecedented affluence and technological novelty. It is characterized by an “attention economy,” in the words of Nobel economics laureate (1987) Herbert Simon, and a sharp and relatively sudden decline in deep literacy. Large number of Americans—easily 40 percent of American adults, maybe more—are addicted to screens of one sort or another, and this is a neurocognitive statement, not a mere metaphor. The process of discounting three-dimensional reality into a torrent of mediated two-dimensional images—most of them fictive and many of them fantastical in nature—has had a dramatic but underappreciated shadow effect on the basic mentality of the nation. Huge numbers of voters are addicted to distraction, have the attention spans of goldfish, and so cannot focus quality attention on anything. If they don’t read, they really don’t know how to think about public-policy issues or political ideas at all. That and only that can explain why so many Americans have understood that Trump does not respect the Constitution (he is probably the only President ever to swear an oath to defend a document he has never read and clearly doesn’t understand) and simply don’t care.
Most Americans today want more than anything else to be entertained, and they insist on being part of the entertainment. They live life as if they are stars of their own shows. They despise boredom—the sense that there is nothing fun to do—more than anything else. They see the whole real world as if it were a reality-television show that never ends. They therefore cannot wrap their heads around any account of real-world problems that is more complicated than a TV drama. They comprise, as former Republican Senator Benjamin Sasse put it, the “vanishing American adult”—intellectually trapped in a para-Hollywood adolescence all the way to the grave.
Donald Trump entered the consciousness of the American public first as a World Wrestling Federation shill, and then as a reality-TV star. He has name recognition out the wazoo compared to all his challengers, even apart from the fact that he actually got elected President. He knows that in a surrealist entertainment-mentality world facts don’t matter and “shiny object” slogans mean everything. He knows how to keep himself on top of the news cycle; every outrageous thing he says or does sends the broadcast media into paroxysms of greed trying to bottle and market the entertainment he provides. He knows that bad-guy publicity is better than no publicity. He has cultivated his public persona as a faux-mafiosa don and huge numbers of people find this wildly entertaining as they experience politics as mere bloodsport in which only personalities, not issues or rules, matter. And that’s enough nowadays to get elected President.
Or is it? Trump has always led the GOP pack but for a brief moment things looked to be changing. Nikki Haley closed the gap in New Hampshire to just a few points. The key donor defector, the Koch Brothers, threw their money at Haley and it has been working, as wads of money usually do in American politics. It’s partly why, after New Hampshire, she was the only opposition to Trump left standing.
More important, it is in the nature of an entertainment-addled mind to be fickle and impatient—just like the typical adolescent mind is. Trump could well be wearing out his welcome. He’s old news. He has to strain harder every day to dominate the news cycle despite the feckless, irresponsible help the broadcast media still give him. About a hundred years ago, H.L. Mencken wrote: “When I hear a man applauded by the mob I always feel a pang of pity for him. All he has to do to be hissed is to live long enough.” Mencken might once again prove to be as prophetic as he was witty. He did, after all, predict Trump’s White House waltz in the Baltimore Evening Star on July 25, 1920: “As democracy is perfected, the office of the President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and complete narcissistic moron.”
It is still about nine months to November 5, 2024. We will see how long Trump can keep up his act before enough people tire of it to doom his prospects. It remains a very open question which way this tilts.
Adam Garfinkle is founding editor of The American Interest, and served during 2003–05 as principal speechwriter to the US Secretary of State while attached to the Policy Planning Staff.
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