A partial understanding of the Trump cult effect
The political space within the GOP for a course independent of Trump appears to be widening.
If Donald Trump’s political influence weren’t so destructive and dangerous, he would be a preposterous public figure.
Virtually everything Trump says is preposterous. Preposterousness and pomposity are his native language.
Trump’s current narrative is that he won the 2020 election and it was stolen from him. And if he were still in office, none of the maladies afflicting the nation and the world would be happening.
The preposterousness of Trump’s claim to have won the 2020 election has been exhaustively documented and litigated. Among the maladies Trump claims wouldn’t exist if he were still president is inflation, the most salient issue of this election. The preposterousness of that claim is worth noting.
Today’s economy-wide inflation is the result primarily of excessive monetary stimulus and secondarily of excessive fiscal stimulus. Trump was a fierce advocate of the former, persistently jawboning the Fed to reduce interest rates even below its excessively stimulative levels. Trump was the principal architect of the latter. Most of the excessive Covid-relief spending occurred when he was president, not Joe Biden. And he left office advocating even more.
Despite his preposterousness, Trump attracted a crowd of well over 5,000 to his recent Arizona rally on behalf of his endorsed candidates, who sat through a hour and forty minutes of Trump prattling on about everything and nothing.
No other American politician could come close to pulling something like that off. Why Trump? I think this is at least a partial answer.
Trump has moved beyond being a politician and is now, to many of his followers, a cultural symbol. Exhibiting support for him is a form of defiance against the attempted imposition of cultural norms that traffic under various rubrics: political correctness, identity and grievance politics, wokeness.
This, I think, was a vastly underestimated contribution to Trump’s 2016 victory. The moral condescension captured by Barack Obama’s remark about bitter people clinging to guns and religion, and by Hillary Clinton’s basket of deplorables, was palpable to what became the Trump blue collar voters.
Trump was looked down upon by the same cultural elites who looked down on them. And contrary to most Republican politicians in those days, Trump gave it back as good as he got. More so, in fact.
Since then, identity and grievance politics has become even more pervasive in virtually all American institutions. The political kickback is growing and opposition to it is now characteristic of virtually all Republican candidates. Other factors – such as inflation, progressive overreach, and a general sense that Biden isn’t up to the job – are more responsible for this shaping up as a favorable political year for Republicans. But rejection of identity and grievance politics is part of it.
That rejection is widely felt among Republicans and a broad swath of independents, not just the Trump cult voters. But for many Trump cult voters, supporting him is more than just expressing a preference for Trump over other politicians. It is a personal statement of defiance. They are practicing their own form of identity and grievance politics.
There is evidence that Trump’s hold on Republican primary voters is starting to slip. I’ve always felt that the behavior of politicians was a better barometer of political sentiment than the polls. That’s particularly true these days, when pollsters are having an increasingly hard time getting respondents to participate.
The political space to chart a course independent of Trump in GOP politics appears to be widening. That was true in the Virginia governor’s race. It was true in the Georgia governor and secretary of state races.
And it is true in Arizona’s governor’s race, as Gov. Doug Ducey and Mike Pence, Trump’s VP, rallied in support of Karrin Taylor Robson, the opponent of Trump’s endorsed candidate, Kari Lake.
Robson began the campaign proclaiming what a staunch Trump supporter she was and casting shade on the integrity of the 2020 election. In the final drive, there’s not much, if any, of that in her messaging. And Ducey, as a surrogate, has even used Lake’s phony claims about the 2020 election against her.
This would seem to indicate a belief that the Trump cult vote is shrinking. That would be a healthy development for the Republican Party, the state, the nation, and the future of American democracy.
Reach Robb at robtrobb@gmail.com.