I think part of the reason for his success is the lack of femininity in his character. As Richard has written about before, literally everything we have (from Star Wars to bud light) is being feminized because of the power of women tears in the market place of ideas. He openly rejects this and flaunts it. When questioned on his "grab em by the pussy" comments, a question that would have brought any politicians to their knees, he calmly responded that "this is locker room talk" and the accusation trickled off of him like water off a rain coat. Everything these days is being sanitized to avoid pissing of college educated women and effeminate men. Yet trump disregards all these social norms and conventions enforced by the neurotic types and it drives them crazy because he refuses to play by their rules. DeSantis, still plays by the rules. Trump does not, hence why people men and republicans in particular like him.
I think of Trump as a very effeminate person. Can you imagine him in a fight with anyone? I can't think of a single thing about his character that is especially manly. He doesn't care about political correctness, that's different than saying he is manly.
conspicuous consumption and bedding women decades younger are manly. it might not be your cup of tea, but it’s a high status form of manliness. not all emperors fight in the arena, and when emperors did enter the arena, it was rarely good for their reign.
That's not a contradiction. Plenty of high-status men have been effeminate. Andy Warhol had those around him wrapped around his finger. Michael Jackson treated everyone like his bitch while using a "childish" voice any actual child would be embarrassed to use.
My point is that he completely disregards the feminine ways of doing things that have been established in the last few decades. I am not saying trump himself is masculine, even though he does possess some masculine qualities like combativeness. Example, In the US, any solution to curb illegal immigration that is not, let's do nothing is considered fascism. You are only allowed to be empathetic towards illegal immigrants (letting them in with no recourse) and anything else is "your literally hitler". What did trump when they called him a racist for saying "they are not sending their best?" " I love hispanics, but the wall just got ten feet higher."
There is some truth in this, but it applies to the campaign and not to governance. Trump promised to drain the swamp but governed as a moderate and placed his trust in established GOP figures like Paul Ryan and John Bolton. That he whined about them after the fact is again closer to campaigning than it is to governing. In reality, Trump was small-c conservative and highly respectful of presidential norms when he was in office (gaffes such as "not starting a war" aside.)
Very good article. I think another way of putting it is that affect and body language provide honest signals of confidence and dominance that can’t be faked.
Desantis’ only chance is if he actually is a tough asshole to the core and can provide that type of appeal, combined with Trump being done in by legal problems.
I do think Trump would’ve been in a much better position, though, if he had never done the election denialism.
The difference is how one actually behaves when put in an unpleasant or dangerous situation. Look at that picture of Trump freaking out at the bald eagle and tell me he's actually tough.
I see your point. But the shooter was taken out by then and Trump probably figured that. It was very performative. But again the distinction between appearance and actuality of toughness, and how do you even define that? IDK.
Now if he'd insisted on finishing the speech while bleeding - as Teddy Roosevelt actually did after being shot - I'd certainly concede the point. But the Secret Service probably wouldn't have let him do that. Though I'm not totally clear on their legal ability to force the President to do things - he's an American citizen with the same rights as anyone else, yes?
Trump’s willingness in 2016 to say many brazen things (such as about McCain) and never back down definitely came across as a kind of toughness. Also, on the debate stage that year he was able to dominate everyone else. It’s not completely clear to me exactly how he does it, but he does it.
What's missing from this analysis is just how Trump himself single-handedly changed the Republican Party. Never-Trumper David French was literally a National Review writer who toed the party line for decades, yet he's now called a RINO even though his policies are basically the standard Republican policies before Trumpian populism. Nowadays the Republican Party is more American Affairs and less National Review. Right-wing populists make fun of National Review and "Con Inc." Tucker Carlson used to love corporations, now he rails against them. Trump changed the party on an ideological level and the Romney-Ryan big-business types are losing power fast.
While this is true, it doesn't address the fact that while Trump ran as something of an anti-Republican, he didn't really govern like one (with a few exceptions such as not starting any new wars.) Ann Coulter, one of the most nativist and socially-right-wing pundits close to the mainstream, got in a screaming match with Trump over the phone during his Presidency about immigration and "DREAMers" and said it was like talking to... Paul Ryan.
Trump's electoral instincts are fantastic. His governance isn't the same as those instincts.
Edit to add: One observer of the 2016 election marveled that this pseudo-realignment took place almost overnight and almost without comment, that many of the hardcore Republicans who were all about fiscal responsibility and free markets one minute morphed into protectionist spenders the next. That observer was Hillary Clinton, who chose to offer that insight not during the campaign but in her book, "What Happened", long after the fact. While she didn't press this issue much in her book (why would she? It's both interesting and not about her, so it's outside her wheelhouse) she could have built on this and said because this realignment was so fast, it is likely to be incomplete and superficial, and thus anyone looking to Trump for true protectionism or social spending is likely to be disappointed. Instead she called him a sexist, and he said "yeah, so?" and she lost. Sad!
Yeah. Trump managed to double-dip: he got a lot of working-class voters with his populist rhetoric, but when he actually came into office, he basically governed like a standard big-business Republican, which won him the support of the GOP's wealthy donors. Also, I don't think Trump really cares about abortion or LGBT issues, his views on those are likely just to get evangelical votes.
Basically, Trump cares about himself more than he cares about policy. He just wants to win.
Not really true. A big-business Republican wouldn't have started a trade war. They would have tried to cut entitlement spending, which Trump fought against Ryan on constantly. They wouldn't have tried to build a wall or banned Muslims. Trump may not have been *as* populist as his rhetoric, but no one thinks he acted like a normal Republican President.
Yeah, it's worth remembering that the Great Awokening only happened in Obama's second term. The most mainstream of mainstream working class beer companies putting a transsexual on its leading product really was unthinkable, unimaginable 10 years ago. Trump didn't cause all of this.
I wish I could remember the specific observation -- I want to think it was from Yglesias but maybe Douthat or something -- that 10+ years ago, some NYT writer got in trouble for implying that all opponents of gay marriage were bigots. Obama's first term really was a different country.
Obama is the weirdest president we've ever had. Very decorous, very proper, very cautiously classical-liberal in so many ways... but also animated by a deep and burning hatred for this country and its founding stock. Hence in his second term it was half Davos and half madhouse.
The reasons given for rejecting the civil rights law hypothesis seem weak. It's possible that how civil rights laws were applied in practice caused institutional changes such that they no longer needed to "force" companies to be "woke", because everyone who would be against "wokeness" had already been removed from positions of power as a liability liability. Then the "woke" select against anti-"woke" in hiring and promotion, and the phenomenon persists even if civil rights law temporarily isn't backing it up.
Yep, I've been reading Darrel Paul and I think he's captured part of it. I also think the rise of passive investing is another component, as these players have no real reason to care about the financial performance of stocks they own. To what degree they're actively incentivized by pensions, etc. to care about ESG, and to what degree ESG is just filling a vacuum in the absence of anything else to care about, I'm not entirely sure.
EDIT: Was looking at this article again, and Paul mentions Blackrock, but I don't see him explicitly call out the structural change from active investors, who are incentivized to pressure company boards to improve financial performance, and passive investors, who have no such incentive.
You know, most major companies have an index fund now. There isn't much of a financial difference between Vanguard, Blackrock, and Fidelity as far as a total market fund or S&P 500 fund goes--the funds are designed to track an index. So getting the retail market to boycott Blackrock might have some effect. Heck, you could probably even pressure some of the pension funds to divest--should state funds in Alabama be given to a company that fights against Alabama values?
Agreed. The party loved Paul Ryan right up until Trump entered the fray. But for Trump it would be Ryan running in 2024, or more likely already elected in 2020. They didn't turn away from him because they started to crave different policies, or even because they saw Ryan as a nerdy wimp. They just loved Trump and that changed their view of Ryan.
Every poll of Republican voters prior to Trump disagrees with you. People changed their minds, that's different than saying they "never" loved him. The party is very confused about how to handle entitlement spending now. It will be interesting to see if it goes back to normal when Trump is gone.
I'm afraid that you're on-point here. The campaign may only be approaching the end of the first quarter, but Trump is already up by 30 points. Not an insurmountable lead, but it will take an epic collapse for the gap to be closed.
I don't completely agree with your strong man theory of the GOP (Gingrich was much more of an alpha male than Mitt Romney in 2012, and though he was a war hero, nothing about McCain in 2008 screamed alpha either), but I do think DeSantis is being exposed as a someone who can only be successful in a carefully crafted political space, whereas Trump can thrive in nearly any environment, and to a certain degree, needs that confrontational environment to support his message to the base.
The point, as I read it, isn't that Republicans always (or even often) elect the dominant guy. It's that dominance is a strategy that works in Republican politics.
As I write this, I'm coming to a depressing realization that this is a strategy that has been under-learned and under-tried in the past among Republicans, and the future probably holds more Trumps. Not fake Trumps like DeSantis, but real Trumps like Limbaugh. Could Limbaugh (maybe also O'Reilly) have made a credible attempt to be governor of a red state, or run for president on the Republican ticket? Maybe not 10-20 years ago, but today ... maybe so.
So ... what younger, actual dominant personality, actual alpha-male, total assholes are out there on the Republican talk circuit who have a chance to be president someday? Any nominations?
Can't be President, but COULD maybe be GOP candidate for President. A figure emerging from explicitly rightist media couldn't ever be President. Because structurally, too small a minority of the population is drawn to them.
Note that Trump came from the MSM. As, let's not forget, did Reagan. You'd need someone who's more nonpartisan or "Third Way". Think Joe Rogan -- probably not him per se, but someone more like him.
Trump is pushing 80!! He’s likely to look frail especially compared to his past self. I doubt he can keep up the physical performance of dominance when more people tune in and once there are debates.
Before 2016, campaigning was different. The guy who got the megadonors lined up could always win the Republican nomination regardless of "alpha maleness" or lack thereof, because campaigning meant TV and TV was expensive and just having name recognition put you ahead of the pack of would-be Presidents polling 5% each. Trump capitalized on the paradigm shift of the Internet: be outrageous enough to get the traditional media to point people to you on Twitter, and you can just signal "alpha maleness" on Twitter from there and have the early support that used to take a few tens of millions of TV ads to achieve.
Agreed, I don't think being an alpha male used to be very important, but the party has realigned and now has a bunch of low status males that used to vote for Dems. After Trump the party might go back to not craving alpha males, I really wonder to what extent this is a Trump-specofic dynamic.
I'm a ride-or-die Trump supporter and I don't see him winning, nor coming nearly as close as last time. The sky just hasn't fallen under Biden. What realignment there has been, electorally, is a net win for Democrats (women and the affluent turn up to vote; disaffected lower-income people and Hispanics do not.) I'm curious as to why you think he has a good shot at 2024, given that the incumbent - for his obvious frailties - is polling well, and unlike in 2016 the Democrats aren't stepping on every rake placed in front of them.
Yes, Trump is a very, very long shot to actually win the Presidency now. You also don't mention that the electorate will be less white in 2024. I recall at one point the standard wisdom was that, in the absence of realignment, Republicans lose about 2% of the popular vote total every 4 years due to demographic change. Also, Millennials have shown a distinct leftward bent while aging, and as they grow as a share of the population, that benefits Democrats also.
Despite a bit of realignment, most Latinos still vote Democrat, and while maybe a new candidate could push them further towards the GOP, there's no reason to think that candidate is Trump -- I'd guess his Latino benefit is maxed out, which means you should probably look at Trump to get 44-45% of the popular vote. A little worse than McCain, though not a historic landslide. Best bet is he repeats his 2020 map except for losing NC.
In the end, despite claims to the contrary, the Emerging Democratic Majority came true: Republicans have won the popular vote one time in 30 years, and that was an incumbent President in wartime, and was itself 20 years ago.
The only share of the electorate that Trump didn't gain with - comparative to 2016 - was white males. You allude to this yourself. People make too much of demographic change and treat it as an inevitability. True, with Asians it is (they will always vote for the prestigious party) but Hispanics are not the win-elections-free card that Democrats think, particularly the working class male ones. With that said, they don't show up to vote, so Republicans don't gain much either. My point is that recent Democratic successes - both electorally and at the volunteer/donor level - owe much more to white (and Asian) educated suburbia than they do the browning of America. That's the real emerging majority, not Paco and Marisol.
Democrats have taken share among college whites, but lost it among non-college whites. Unfortunately, the latter group also doesn't have as high of turnout.
Still, while I don't like to take exit polls as an exact science, it seems Trump won around the same percentage of the white vote (58%) in 2020 as the last Republican incumbent, Bush, did in 2004, but Bush beat him by 4% on the popular vote -- the last time a Republican won. Bush also won more of the Hispanic vote (44% vs. 32%). Combined with the Hispanic increase in share of voters, that cost Trump about 1% of the popular vote relative to Bush.
The rest of the shift from 2004 to 2016 was due to growth in Asians and mixed race/other at the expense of whites, while Asians also shifted decidedly more Democrat after 2004. At least some of this is due to South Asians rising as a share of the US Asian population. I'm not sure what the breakdown of the mixed race/other population is or what's going on there, but they seem to vote roughly in line with Asians.
I think it's a good prediction Hispanics will still shift further right from where they are now, and maybe the GW Bush days will become closer to a baseline. But I find it unimaginable that they'll ever vote as right as whites do. Which means, even if they end up a 50/50 demographic (a very long ways from here), demographic change benefits Democrats.
Maybe. I think there's a great danger in trying to read too much into polling movement at this stage in the cycle. The race was basically stable until Trump got indicted, which probably drove a few potential DeSantis supporters to switch back to Trump out of not wanting to have their candidate chosen by the Manhattan DA's office. It probably will prove meaningless in the broader sweep of the campaign.
Yeah, elections are fickle things. There was a similar narrative about British politics in the past six months. Labour took a massive lead and the pundits were all writing about how it was going to be a wipeout for the Tories next year. But, well, that lead keeps closing.
Also: Brexit. At the start of the referendum process Remain was in the lead by iirc ~35 percentage points. A huge lead. They still lost.
The article feels correct in its diagnosis of what's going on, but it could also just be that it's kind of meaningless to say you'd support a candidate who hasn't even decided to run at all.
Everything in the article makes sense and may very well be true. I’m just trying to square this with the fact every person I’ve talked to who voted for Trump has said basically the same thing: “I don’t like the guy but he’s the only one who will say what needs to be said and stand up to the liberals etc etc”. They don’t seem particularly attached to him as a person.
Obviously I have a small sample and this is anecdote. Maybe in the heart of Trump country things are different. Maybe they are attached to him deeply and don’t recognize it or somehow unconsciously disavow it. I don’t know...
I’m curious about others’ experiences with this. Great article as always. Really made me think.
I live in the Midwest. There's a guy in my sub who's had a Trump yard-sign up since before the last election, with the "Pence" scribbled out in Sharpie. I think our HOA fines him every month for it.
Drive around other small towns in my state? Trump flags flying constantly on multiple houses per neighborhood or block, if you're in a white, middle class-ish area (plus or minus a bit).
Also anecdote, but I'm guessing those folks would be a bit more enthusiastic then the people you talked to.
Fair enough, clearly my sample is too limited. Will be interesting to see if they stick by him. For some reason my gut tells me his support will diminish greatly in the primaries when people see he isn't really electable anymore. But that could just be the same wishful thinking people have been saying for years about how "now he's done for!" but he somehow manages to stay relevant.
Unless Trump vs Biden polls change drastically, GOP should change the primary rules and screw over MAGA. Invent something like "superdelegates" or something.
GOP needs better control of the nomination process so they can eliminate bad candidates like the Dems did with Bernie. And I know Trump would and will attempt to screw over the eventual nominee if it isn't him. But RFKJr might provide a counter weight.
McConnel and the other establishment types missed their moment to pull this off. The result would have been GOP civil war and they were never willing to sacrifice an election or two to get control back for their party. They could easily do this by pointing out that Trump is an idiot who doesn't even believe in conservative values and is therefore not qualified to run as a Republican. The shepherd doesn't ask the sheep to decide which pasture they should eat in. If they told their own voters to accept it or fuck off they would lose some in the short term, but they would raise their status by proving they have balls, and the average GOP politician would gladly hop on board.
At this point they won't do that because Trump will run as a third party candidate and earn 20-30% of the Republican vote, ensuring a win for Biden.
Trump wouldn't go through the work to run as a 3rd party candidate, but he'd spend every waking minute holding rallies and railing that the nomination was stolen, thus getting 10+% of the base to stay home, like he did in GA in 2020.
Since we're talking about a third party, he'd need to actually reach out to party leaders to persuade them to make him the nominee. He can't just start the Trump Party in April 2024 and qualify to appear on ballots. Let's say he goes back to the Reform Party (in which he made a prior bid for president). Well, the people who are running the Reform Party put a lot of work into it - and they're somewhat eccentric to spend so much time and work on a party that never wins elections. They're not necessarily going to trip over themselves to hand the party over to a guy who just wants to use it for revenge.
Simultaneously, a lot of Trump campaign people who want to have a future in the GOP would be quitting rather than wanting to get on the bad side of GOP leaders. Sure, he'd have the usual hardcore loyalists sticking around, but would people like Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita want to run a Trump Reform Party campaign after he lost the GOP nomination? I doubt it. So that would be more work for him.
I think you're right. It's hard to picture him actually putting effort into that, but it's also impossible for me to imagine him sitting on the sidelines and giving up. He would definitely do something to screw over the GOP, just not sure what.
I like the general thrust of the article, but I strongly disagree with your generalization that Republicans, “... don’t believe in ideas...” all the Republicans I know are all about ideas. They are not non-specifically angry at the “elites” as much as they are frustrated that their political opponents tend to refuse to discuss ideas, as opposed to pushing various narratives.
Let me make this very clear to pepole that still don't seem to get it.
Trump is effective because he isn't a neo-con/neo-lib. PERIOD. Just like Bernie Sanders (sort of) rose to popularity with the left, because he wasn't the establishment, warmongering sell-out. Ed: yes, he had to kiss the ring from time to time, but you gotta drain the swamp slowly, at first. Remember he was fighting both parties at the same time, often.
As soon as DeSantis was caught being fluffed by the Pub establishment, when it became common news (amongst those who cared to know), that's when he cratered.
Trumpism, imo, started with the TEA Party, anti-forever war of the mid-late 2000s. It is a modified Libertarianism, that promotes American workers over the free marketers in that party. Trumpism people are small FEDERAL government, anti-interventionalists with teeth (see Iran bomb and NKorea detante).
Trump is not a globalist, this is what the intelligencia seemingly cannot even begin to grasp. The foundation for the country is the small to large: Individual, family, community, state, nation - the priority is in that order. this is the polar opposite of the mainstream, swamp creatures, the CIA talking heads in the msm, and the overly-educated who believe they know what is best for everyone.
Wow, so another six years of Democrats I guess. Trump is the ONLY candidate Biden can beat. Its not about fairness, it's about actually winning. The Dems are desperate for Trump.
Another banger of an article, though if you had wanted to enrage and polarize people more you could have pumped up the focus on the skill Trump has at doing this, and simultaneously also the gullibility of the people who vote for him. Both those elements are there, but they're not as emphatic as in some of your more provocative work.
I absolutely love Trump -- he is the greatest entertainer alive, and arguably the GOAT. I don't support him politically. Politics are a joke nowadays, though, and he's a hell of a jokester.
That's downstream from the actual problem, which is that conservatives are losing and will continue to do so. Might as well be entertained. The GOP is the Washington Redskins of politics, and I for one would rather watch a quarterback who at least has entertaining antics while he loses the game.
All of the GOP candidate seem terrified of attacking Trump. I wish the third or fourth tier GOP candidate were brave enough to just go nuts on him. It's not like you have that much to lose and it's a good way to stand out from the pack and it conveys authenticity.
And not just schoolyard insults a la Rubio, but attacks that really get at Trump's authenticity. I mean, the lines write themselves:
"De Santis is too much of a coward to stand up to Trump, and Trump was too weak, maybe just too old, to stand up for his supporters on January 6. Or maybe he's just full of shit.
My name is <Candidate> and I will not bullshit you."
I'm sure that'll piss people off. But sometimes the only way to win respect is to just keep punching. Basically the political equivalent of Rocky and Drago.
Back in the 2016 primary, Trump was by far the candidate with the highest approvals on economy, the budget deficit, and immigration among Republican voters. His personality was the biggest reason voters shied away from him.
I think part of the reason for his success is the lack of femininity in his character. As Richard has written about before, literally everything we have (from Star Wars to bud light) is being feminized because of the power of women tears in the market place of ideas. He openly rejects this and flaunts it. When questioned on his "grab em by the pussy" comments, a question that would have brought any politicians to their knees, he calmly responded that "this is locker room talk" and the accusation trickled off of him like water off a rain coat. Everything these days is being sanitized to avoid pissing of college educated women and effeminate men. Yet trump disregards all these social norms and conventions enforced by the neurotic types and it drives them crazy because he refuses to play by their rules. DeSantis, still plays by the rules. Trump does not, hence why people men and republicans in particular like him.
I think of Trump as a very effeminate person. Can you imagine him in a fight with anyone? I can't think of a single thing about his character that is especially manly. He doesn't care about political correctness, that's different than saying he is manly.
conspicuous consumption and bedding women decades younger are manly. it might not be your cup of tea, but it’s a high status form of manliness. not all emperors fight in the arena, and when emperors did enter the arena, it was rarely good for their reign.
Any male celebrity billionaire, even if extremely effeminate, can bed women decades younger than them.
High status men do not fight, they get other men to fight for them.
That's not a contradiction. Plenty of high-status men have been effeminate. Andy Warhol had those around him wrapped around his finger. Michael Jackson treated everyone like his bitch while using a "childish" voice any actual child would be embarrassed to use.
My point is that he completely disregards the feminine ways of doing things that have been established in the last few decades. I am not saying trump himself is masculine, even though he does possess some masculine qualities like combativeness. Example, In the US, any solution to curb illegal immigration that is not, let's do nothing is considered fascism. You are only allowed to be empathetic towards illegal immigrants (letting them in with no recourse) and anything else is "your literally hitler". What did trump when they called him a racist for saying "they are not sending their best?" " I love hispanics, but the wall just got ten feet higher."
You're right, but both things can be true. Trump does have that dichotomy going on.
Feminizing Bud Light sounds like setting fire to the sun.
I dunno, is horse piss gendered?
There is some truth in this, but it applies to the campaign and not to governance. Trump promised to drain the swamp but governed as a moderate and placed his trust in established GOP figures like Paul Ryan and John Bolton. That he whined about them after the fact is again closer to campaigning than it is to governing. In reality, Trump was small-c conservative and highly respectful of presidential norms when he was in office (gaffes such as "not starting a war" aside.)
Yeah no disagreement here. I think it's inline with Richards Point, It is his personality that draws them in, not his politics.
Certainly in my case that's true. I'll forgive him his inability to govern because he fights, and because his instincts are more often right than not.
Very good article. I think another way of putting it is that affect and body language provide honest signals of confidence and dominance that can’t be faked.
Desantis’ only chance is if he actually is a tough asshole to the core and can provide that type of appeal, combined with Trump being done in by legal problems.
I do think Trump would’ve been in a much better position, though, if he had never done the election denialism.
Trump isn't "tough". He just believes his own lie that he is, and so is very good at projecting that he is.
Is there a difference?
The difference is how one actually behaves when put in an unpleasant or dangerous situation. Look at that picture of Trump freaking out at the bald eagle and tell me he's actually tough.
Raptors are absolutely terrifying.
That comment aged incredibly poorly.
I see your point. But the shooter was taken out by then and Trump probably figured that. It was very performative. But again the distinction between appearance and actuality of toughness, and how do you even define that? IDK.
Now if he'd insisted on finishing the speech while bleeding - as Teddy Roosevelt actually did after being shot - I'd certainly concede the point. But the Secret Service probably wouldn't have let him do that. Though I'm not totally clear on their legal ability to force the President to do things - he's an American citizen with the same rights as anyone else, yes?
Trump’s willingness in 2016 to say many brazen things (such as about McCain) and never back down definitely came across as a kind of toughness. Also, on the debate stage that year he was able to dominate everyone else. It’s not completely clear to me exactly how he does it, but he does it.
What's missing from this analysis is just how Trump himself single-handedly changed the Republican Party. Never-Trumper David French was literally a National Review writer who toed the party line for decades, yet he's now called a RINO even though his policies are basically the standard Republican policies before Trumpian populism. Nowadays the Republican Party is more American Affairs and less National Review. Right-wing populists make fun of National Review and "Con Inc." Tucker Carlson used to love corporations, now he rails against them. Trump changed the party on an ideological level and the Romney-Ryan big-business types are losing power fast.
While this is true, it doesn't address the fact that while Trump ran as something of an anti-Republican, he didn't really govern like one (with a few exceptions such as not starting any new wars.) Ann Coulter, one of the most nativist and socially-right-wing pundits close to the mainstream, got in a screaming match with Trump over the phone during his Presidency about immigration and "DREAMers" and said it was like talking to... Paul Ryan.
Trump's electoral instincts are fantastic. His governance isn't the same as those instincts.
Edit to add: One observer of the 2016 election marveled that this pseudo-realignment took place almost overnight and almost without comment, that many of the hardcore Republicans who were all about fiscal responsibility and free markets one minute morphed into protectionist spenders the next. That observer was Hillary Clinton, who chose to offer that insight not during the campaign but in her book, "What Happened", long after the fact. While she didn't press this issue much in her book (why would she? It's both interesting and not about her, so it's outside her wheelhouse) she could have built on this and said because this realignment was so fast, it is likely to be incomplete and superficial, and thus anyone looking to Trump for true protectionism or social spending is likely to be disappointed. Instead she called him a sexist, and he said "yeah, so?" and she lost. Sad!
Yeah. Trump managed to double-dip: he got a lot of working-class voters with his populist rhetoric, but when he actually came into office, he basically governed like a standard big-business Republican, which won him the support of the GOP's wealthy donors. Also, I don't think Trump really cares about abortion or LGBT issues, his views on those are likely just to get evangelical votes.
Basically, Trump cares about himself more than he cares about policy. He just wants to win.
Not really true. A big-business Republican wouldn't have started a trade war. They would have tried to cut entitlement spending, which Trump fought against Ryan on constantly. They wouldn't have tried to build a wall or banned Muslims. Trump may not have been *as* populist as his rhetoric, but no one thinks he acted like a normal Republican President.
Presumably Carlson now dislikes corporations due to woke capitalism?
Yeah, it's worth remembering that the Great Awokening only happened in Obama's second term. The most mainstream of mainstream working class beer companies putting a transsexual on its leading product really was unthinkable, unimaginable 10 years ago. Trump didn't cause all of this.
I wish I could remember the specific observation -- I want to think it was from Yglesias but maybe Douthat or something -- that 10+ years ago, some NYT writer got in trouble for implying that all opponents of gay marriage were bigots. Obama's first term really was a different country.
Obama is the weirdest president we've ever had. Very decorous, very proper, very cautiously classical-liberal in so many ways... but also animated by a deep and burning hatred for this country and its founding stock. Hence in his second term it was half Davos and half madhouse.
What about Obama shows a "deep and burning hatred for this country and its founding stock"?
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2022/08/the-puzzle-of-woke-capital/
This article is my go-to to explain how "woke capitalism" rose to prominence. It's about the people that now get corporate jobs imposing their views.
The reasons given for rejecting the civil rights law hypothesis seem weak. It's possible that how civil rights laws were applied in practice caused institutional changes such that they no longer needed to "force" companies to be "woke", because everyone who would be against "wokeness" had already been removed from positions of power as a liability liability. Then the "woke" select against anti-"woke" in hiring and promotion, and the phenomenon persists even if civil rights law temporarily isn't backing it up.
Yep, I've been reading Darrel Paul and I think he's captured part of it. I also think the rise of passive investing is another component, as these players have no real reason to care about the financial performance of stocks they own. To what degree they're actively incentivized by pensions, etc. to care about ESG, and to what degree ESG is just filling a vacuum in the absence of anything else to care about, I'm not entirely sure.
EDIT: Was looking at this article again, and Paul mentions Blackrock, but I don't see him explicitly call out the structural change from active investors, who are incentivized to pressure company boards to improve financial performance, and passive investors, who have no such incentive.
You know, most major companies have an index fund now. There isn't much of a financial difference between Vanguard, Blackrock, and Fidelity as far as a total market fund or S&P 500 fund goes--the funds are designed to track an index. So getting the retail market to boycott Blackrock might have some effect. Heck, you could probably even pressure some of the pension funds to divest--should state funds in Alabama be given to a company that fights against Alabama values?
Agreed. The party loved Paul Ryan right up until Trump entered the fray. But for Trump it would be Ryan running in 2024, or more likely already elected in 2020. They didn't turn away from him because they started to crave different policies, or even because they saw Ryan as a nerdy wimp. They just loved Trump and that changed their view of Ryan.
Yep. A lot of the GOP base aren't big on free markets. Trump choosing to move leftward on economic issues helped a lot.
https://www.niskanencenter.org/wp-content/uploads/old_uploads/2017/06/Karl1.png
Every poll of Republican voters prior to Trump disagrees with you. People changed their minds, that's different than saying they "never" loved him. The party is very confused about how to handle entitlement spending now. It will be interesting to see if it goes back to normal when Trump is gone.
I'm afraid that you're on-point here. The campaign may only be approaching the end of the first quarter, but Trump is already up by 30 points. Not an insurmountable lead, but it will take an epic collapse for the gap to be closed.
I don't completely agree with your strong man theory of the GOP (Gingrich was much more of an alpha male than Mitt Romney in 2012, and though he was a war hero, nothing about McCain in 2008 screamed alpha either), but I do think DeSantis is being exposed as a someone who can only be successful in a carefully crafted political space, whereas Trump can thrive in nearly any environment, and to a certain degree, needs that confrontational environment to support his message to the base.
The point, as I read it, isn't that Republicans always (or even often) elect the dominant guy. It's that dominance is a strategy that works in Republican politics.
As I write this, I'm coming to a depressing realization that this is a strategy that has been under-learned and under-tried in the past among Republicans, and the future probably holds more Trumps. Not fake Trumps like DeSantis, but real Trumps like Limbaugh. Could Limbaugh (maybe also O'Reilly) have made a credible attempt to be governor of a red state, or run for president on the Republican ticket? Maybe not 10-20 years ago, but today ... maybe so.
So ... what younger, actual dominant personality, actual alpha-male, total assholes are out there on the Republican talk circuit who have a chance to be president someday? Any nominations?
Tucker?
Can't be President, but COULD maybe be GOP candidate for President. A figure emerging from explicitly rightist media couldn't ever be President. Because structurally, too small a minority of the population is drawn to them.
Note that Trump came from the MSM. As, let's not forget, did Reagan. You'd need someone who's more nonpartisan or "Third Way". Think Joe Rogan -- probably not him per se, but someone more like him.
Trump is pushing 80!! He’s likely to look frail especially compared to his past self. I doubt he can keep up the physical performance of dominance when more people tune in and once there are debates.
I'd say so too, but he's likely to be up against Biden.
Before 2016, campaigning was different. The guy who got the megadonors lined up could always win the Republican nomination regardless of "alpha maleness" or lack thereof, because campaigning meant TV and TV was expensive and just having name recognition put you ahead of the pack of would-be Presidents polling 5% each. Trump capitalized on the paradigm shift of the Internet: be outrageous enough to get the traditional media to point people to you on Twitter, and you can just signal "alpha maleness" on Twitter from there and have the early support that used to take a few tens of millions of TV ads to achieve.
Fun fact, Hillary Clinton was up by 30 points on Obama in October of [edited - 2007].
Maybe you mean Oct of 2007?
Agreed, I don't think being an alpha male used to be very important, but the party has realigned and now has a bunch of low status males that used to vote for Dems. After Trump the party might go back to not craving alpha males, I really wonder to what extent this is a Trump-specofic dynamic.
"Amazing how it looks like a South American politician."
Very perceptive!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jh7YV4HaBhE
This liberal Venezuelan-American lady said as much back in 2017.
Annoying millennial video editing, but I think she had a point.
I wish this were not so perceptive and correct, as I do not want him to be our president again.
I'm a ride-or-die Trump supporter and I don't see him winning, nor coming nearly as close as last time. The sky just hasn't fallen under Biden. What realignment there has been, electorally, is a net win for Democrats (women and the affluent turn up to vote; disaffected lower-income people and Hispanics do not.) I'm curious as to why you think he has a good shot at 2024, given that the incumbent - for his obvious frailties - is polling well, and unlike in 2016 the Democrats aren't stepping on every rake placed in front of them.
Yes, Trump is a very, very long shot to actually win the Presidency now. You also don't mention that the electorate will be less white in 2024. I recall at one point the standard wisdom was that, in the absence of realignment, Republicans lose about 2% of the popular vote total every 4 years due to demographic change. Also, Millennials have shown a distinct leftward bent while aging, and as they grow as a share of the population, that benefits Democrats also.
Despite a bit of realignment, most Latinos still vote Democrat, and while maybe a new candidate could push them further towards the GOP, there's no reason to think that candidate is Trump -- I'd guess his Latino benefit is maxed out, which means you should probably look at Trump to get 44-45% of the popular vote. A little worse than McCain, though not a historic landslide. Best bet is he repeats his 2020 map except for losing NC.
In the end, despite claims to the contrary, the Emerging Democratic Majority came true: Republicans have won the popular vote one time in 30 years, and that was an incumbent President in wartime, and was itself 20 years ago.
The only share of the electorate that Trump didn't gain with - comparative to 2016 - was white males. You allude to this yourself. People make too much of demographic change and treat it as an inevitability. True, with Asians it is (they will always vote for the prestigious party) but Hispanics are not the win-elections-free card that Democrats think, particularly the working class male ones. With that said, they don't show up to vote, so Republicans don't gain much either. My point is that recent Democratic successes - both electorally and at the volunteer/donor level - owe much more to white (and Asian) educated suburbia than they do the browning of America. That's the real emerging majority, not Paco and Marisol.
Democrats have taken share among college whites, but lost it among non-college whites. Unfortunately, the latter group also doesn't have as high of turnout.
Still, while I don't like to take exit polls as an exact science, it seems Trump won around the same percentage of the white vote (58%) in 2020 as the last Republican incumbent, Bush, did in 2004, but Bush beat him by 4% on the popular vote -- the last time a Republican won. Bush also won more of the Hispanic vote (44% vs. 32%). Combined with the Hispanic increase in share of voters, that cost Trump about 1% of the popular vote relative to Bush.
The rest of the shift from 2004 to 2016 was due to growth in Asians and mixed race/other at the expense of whites, while Asians also shifted decidedly more Democrat after 2004. At least some of this is due to South Asians rising as a share of the US Asian population. I'm not sure what the breakdown of the mixed race/other population is or what's going on there, but they seem to vote roughly in line with Asians.
I think it's a good prediction Hispanics will still shift further right from where they are now, and maybe the GW Bush days will become closer to a baseline. But I find it unimaginable that they'll ever vote as right as whites do. Which means, even if they end up a 50/50 demographic (a very long ways from here), demographic change benefits Democrats.
Maybe. I think there's a great danger in trying to read too much into polling movement at this stage in the cycle. The race was basically stable until Trump got indicted, which probably drove a few potential DeSantis supporters to switch back to Trump out of not wanting to have their candidate chosen by the Manhattan DA's office. It probably will prove meaningless in the broader sweep of the campaign.
Yeah, elections are fickle things. There was a similar narrative about British politics in the past six months. Labour took a massive lead and the pundits were all writing about how it was going to be a wipeout for the Tories next year. But, well, that lead keeps closing.
Also: Brexit. At the start of the referendum process Remain was in the lead by iirc ~35 percentage points. A huge lead. They still lost.
The article feels correct in its diagnosis of what's going on, but it could also just be that it's kind of meaningless to say you'd support a candidate who hasn't even decided to run at all.
Everything in the article makes sense and may very well be true. I’m just trying to square this with the fact every person I’ve talked to who voted for Trump has said basically the same thing: “I don’t like the guy but he’s the only one who will say what needs to be said and stand up to the liberals etc etc”. They don’t seem particularly attached to him as a person.
Obviously I have a small sample and this is anecdote. Maybe in the heart of Trump country things are different. Maybe they are attached to him deeply and don’t recognize it or somehow unconsciously disavow it. I don’t know...
I’m curious about others’ experiences with this. Great article as always. Really made me think.
Every non-college Trump supporter I talk to simply loves the man. Successful professionals do the thing you talk about.
I live in the Midwest. There's a guy in my sub who's had a Trump yard-sign up since before the last election, with the "Pence" scribbled out in Sharpie. I think our HOA fines him every month for it.
Drive around other small towns in my state? Trump flags flying constantly on multiple houses per neighborhood or block, if you're in a white, middle class-ish area (plus or minus a bit).
Also anecdote, but I'm guessing those folks would be a bit more enthusiastic then the people you talked to.
Fair enough, clearly my sample is too limited. Will be interesting to see if they stick by him. For some reason my gut tells me his support will diminish greatly in the primaries when people see he isn't really electable anymore. But that could just be the same wishful thinking people have been saying for years about how "now he's done for!" but he somehow manages to stay relevant.
Unless Trump vs Biden polls change drastically, GOP should change the primary rules and screw over MAGA. Invent something like "superdelegates" or something.
GOP needs better control of the nomination process so they can eliminate bad candidates like the Dems did with Bernie. And I know Trump would and will attempt to screw over the eventual nominee if it isn't him. But RFKJr might provide a counter weight.
The Republican base is far too mistrustful of their leadership (not without reason) for this to work.
They want to rally around a loser victim whiner like Trump no matter what happens. Just go ahead and give them what they want.
"GOP should change the primary rules and screw over MAGA. Invent something like "superdelegates" or something."
Pretty hard to imagine that happening when Ronna Romney McDaniel only held onto the RNC chair with Trump's endorsement.
A lot of those mad Bernie supporters voted Trump. So it's a risky strategy for the RNC to do it.
McConnel and the other establishment types missed their moment to pull this off. The result would have been GOP civil war and they were never willing to sacrifice an election or two to get control back for their party. They could easily do this by pointing out that Trump is an idiot who doesn't even believe in conservative values and is therefore not qualified to run as a Republican. The shepherd doesn't ask the sheep to decide which pasture they should eat in. If they told their own voters to accept it or fuck off they would lose some in the short term, but they would raise their status by proving they have balls, and the average GOP politician would gladly hop on board.
At this point they won't do that because Trump will run as a third party candidate and earn 20-30% of the Republican vote, ensuring a win for Biden.
Trump wouldn't go through the work to run as a 3rd party candidate, but he'd spend every waking minute holding rallies and railing that the nomination was stolen, thus getting 10+% of the base to stay home, like he did in GA in 2020.
What work? I'm sure he could find someone willing to go to the trouble of doing all the filing and administrative stuff. All he has to do is talk.
Since we're talking about a third party, he'd need to actually reach out to party leaders to persuade them to make him the nominee. He can't just start the Trump Party in April 2024 and qualify to appear on ballots. Let's say he goes back to the Reform Party (in which he made a prior bid for president). Well, the people who are running the Reform Party put a lot of work into it - and they're somewhat eccentric to spend so much time and work on a party that never wins elections. They're not necessarily going to trip over themselves to hand the party over to a guy who just wants to use it for revenge.
Simultaneously, a lot of Trump campaign people who want to have a future in the GOP would be quitting rather than wanting to get on the bad side of GOP leaders. Sure, he'd have the usual hardcore loyalists sticking around, but would people like Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita want to run a Trump Reform Party campaign after he lost the GOP nomination? I doubt it. So that would be more work for him.
I think you're right. It's hard to picture him actually putting effort into that, but it's also impossible for me to imagine him sitting on the sidelines and giving up. He would definitely do something to screw over the GOP, just not sure what.
Competent people don't believe the things Trump does. No such person exists.
I like the general thrust of the article, but I strongly disagree with your generalization that Republicans, “... don’t believe in ideas...” all the Republicans I know are all about ideas. They are not non-specifically angry at the “elites” as much as they are frustrated that their political opponents tend to refuse to discuss ideas, as opposed to pushing various narratives.
Seriously?
Let me make this very clear to pepole that still don't seem to get it.
Trump is effective because he isn't a neo-con/neo-lib. PERIOD. Just like Bernie Sanders (sort of) rose to popularity with the left, because he wasn't the establishment, warmongering sell-out. Ed: yes, he had to kiss the ring from time to time, but you gotta drain the swamp slowly, at first. Remember he was fighting both parties at the same time, often.
As soon as DeSantis was caught being fluffed by the Pub establishment, when it became common news (amongst those who cared to know), that's when he cratered.
Trumpism, imo, started with the TEA Party, anti-forever war of the mid-late 2000s. It is a modified Libertarianism, that promotes American workers over the free marketers in that party. Trumpism people are small FEDERAL government, anti-interventionalists with teeth (see Iran bomb and NKorea detante).
Trump is not a globalist, this is what the intelligencia seemingly cannot even begin to grasp. The foundation for the country is the small to large: Individual, family, community, state, nation - the priority is in that order. this is the polar opposite of the mainstream, swamp creatures, the CIA talking heads in the msm, and the overly-educated who believe they know what is best for everyone.
That's it.
Wow, so another six years of Democrats I guess. Trump is the ONLY candidate Biden can beat. Its not about fairness, it's about actually winning. The Dems are desperate for Trump.
Biden will beat the others too, unfortunately
I think DeSantis would mop the floor with him, but that remains to be seen. If the GOP is smart enough to run him.
Another banger of an article, though if you had wanted to enrage and polarize people more you could have pumped up the focus on the skill Trump has at doing this, and simultaneously also the gullibility of the people who vote for him. Both those elements are there, but they're not as emphatic as in some of your more provocative work.
I absolutely love Trump -- he is the greatest entertainer alive, and arguably the GOAT. I don't support him politically. Politics are a joke nowadays, though, and he's a hell of a jokester.
That's downstream from the actual problem, which is that conservatives are losing and will continue to do so. Might as well be entertained. The GOP is the Washington Redskins of politics, and I for one would rather watch a quarterback who at least has entertaining antics while he loses the game.
At the risk of inflating your head more, damn, why do you have to be correct?
All of the GOP candidate seem terrified of attacking Trump. I wish the third or fourth tier GOP candidate were brave enough to just go nuts on him. It's not like you have that much to lose and it's a good way to stand out from the pack and it conveys authenticity.
And not just schoolyard insults a la Rubio, but attacks that really get at Trump's authenticity. I mean, the lines write themselves:
"De Santis is too much of a coward to stand up to Trump, and Trump was too weak, maybe just too old, to stand up for his supporters on January 6. Or maybe he's just full of shit.
My name is <Candidate> and I will not bullshit you."
I'm sure that'll piss people off. But sometimes the only way to win respect is to just keep punching. Basically the political equivalent of Rocky and Drago.
This is a pretty good essay, unfortunately.
Back in the 2016 primary, Trump was by far the candidate with the highest approvals on economy, the budget deficit, and immigration among Republican voters. His personality was the biggest reason voters shied away from him.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/184166/trump-stronger-economy-foreign-affairs-immigration.aspx
https://news.gallup.com/poll/189731/economic-issues-trump-strong-suit-among-republicans.aspx