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What is the steelman for voting for Trump in the primaries?
He's not a true outsider anymore. He's not an unknown quantity. We know his temperament. We know his governance style. What does he provide over Desantis/Haley/Ramaswamy? He didn't build the wall the first time, why would he do it now?
I have some ideas, but they're all terrible once you think about them for ten seconds. I am willing to believe that the median voter is unable to think clearly for ten seconds before being hijacked by monkey-brain, but I'd like to make sure I'm not missing something obvious.
1. Personal Loyalty: This is close to the Richard Hanania theory. Personal loyalty would make sense if Trump was loyal in turn to his supporters, but he isn't. How many of his lawyers have gone to jail? How many orange-blooded Trump fans lost their jobs or got arrested for believing in him too hard on January 6? He could have pardoned these people, but he didn't. Orange Man good because Orange Man good.
2. Perceived Injustice: Yes, Trump has been treated unfairly by the media and the Washington establishment. Lots of people have been. I can understand why this would be seen as a necessary condition (e.g. "nobody liked by the 'elites' could ever be a good president"), but why would this be a sufficient condition? Surely electability and general competence matter more than an extra standard-deviation worth of grievances against the media.
3. Hatred: I'm not talking about "Hate™". I'm talking about a genuine desire to see one's political enemies suffer. It's not even clear to me that Trump would be better at this than other Republican candidates, but I feel I would be missing something if I didn't put it on the list.
If you look at what his supporters are saying, they trust him more than any other candidate to do the things they think they want him to do. That this requires a huge suspension of disbelief is just part of the process.
MBD of National Review told a story recently of asking his driver why he supports Trump. The driver said he thinks military experience is important and Trump went to a military style school for a while. MBD asked him if he knew that DeSantis actually served in the Navy for six years (as a lawyer) and the driver admitted that he knew this. He just counted Trump's boarding school experience as more relevant than active duty service.
He starts from the premise that Trump is his guy and any evidence is weighted to support that conclusion. Somehow, Trump has convinced a huge segment of the population that he's "their guy." It baffles me, too, but it seems that that's all there is to it.
I can't remember who said this, I think it may have been one of the podcast bro's back in 2016, but part of Trump's attractiveness - as a born-into-wealth billionaire - to working class people is that he looks, sounds, and acts like they think they would if they were billionaires.
boughtmarried an exotic european supermodelThis feeds into a comfortable narrative for working class southerners and midwesterners. Sure, he's a plutocrat, but, unlike Mitt Romney, I can envision him tearing into a Big Mac because I have seen him tear into a big mac a bunch of times.
One thing to point out: Trump gladly and gleefully wears MAGA ballcaps a lot. In $5000 suits. And it somehow looks ... normal? Most other politicians would never make the fashion faux pas of mixing a ballcap with a suit and, even if they did for some sort of folksy photo-op, it would seem about as natural as Hillary's southern drawl. Trump thinks his MAGA ballcap looks fucking awesome and so wears it with confidence, arrogance, and pinache. Double for the dick-length red ties.
Trump is, in fact, a real estate huckster. And if you're a working class dude or chick, you know a lot of real estate hucksters, or used car salesmen, or plumbers who do bad work and overcharge, or house painters who use lead paint still, or an electrician who's been electrocuted on more jobs than he hasn't...you're probably related to one or more of these people. So, Trump Is. Your. Guy.
(Side note: This is why Ramaswamay failed. He may be just as much of a huckster as DJT, but ... a biotech huckster? Not going to work)
Some of these reasons sound like just-so stories. When Ron Paul would routinely wear an oversized suit I could say something like, "That's relatable, it's like your cousin Joe who has that one imperfect suit he wears for special occasions!"
But RP went nowhere with most.
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I remember all the snobbishness about Trump first time round (ugh, he eats his steak with ketchup!) and that, coming from the Party of the Little Guy, Minorities, and Totally Not College Grad White Professionals, really sounded even worse than it needed to be. If you're sneering so hard that your eyes are permanently crossed looking down your nose at 'what a low-class bum' his mannerisms are, then how the hell are you going to appeal to those same lower class voters who might eat burgers with ketchup and steak with ketchup and what's wrong with ketchup anyways?
Hillary did herself no favours with the "basket of deplorables" and it's really hard to believe the other side that "no, we really care about you and want to make your lives better" when you know they think of you as a deplorable. Why are the working class blue-collar whites voting against their economic interests instead of voting Democrat? Well, why are the Democrats doing all they can to sound like their fondest dream is to be able to piss on working class blue-collar whites?
I do think that's it. He's relatable in a way any of the others, Republican or Democrat, aren't (maybe Joe Manchin, but he gets more stick from his own party than the opposition precisely because he represents rural/industrial Virginia, knows it, knows what his constituents want, and gets it for them to the best of his ability). Think of that book about Hillary, which I can't really blame Hillary for since she had nothing to do with it, but oh man. Cringe-inducing (remember the illustration implying that Jackie Robinson and others had it so much easier in life than a middle-class white girl in the 60s?). Imagine a version about Trump instead, it would be awesome because it would be so over the top!
EDIT: Those illos are even creepier than I remembered, what is with giving Little Girl Hillary those staring, painfully wide-open, serial-killer eyes?
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Has Ramaswamay failed? He's a rich guy, sure, but he's also 38 years old, had zero political experience, and just got 7% in Iowa. If I were rating that effort on a scale 1-10 scale, I'd probably call it about a 9. He's plausibly in position to be in Trump's good graces and get a cabinet position if he wants it, setting him up for further federal political opportunities in the future, if that's a goal. That he beat the breaks off multiple Republican governors, including a tech billionaire governor, would make this a success from any perspective other than a pure pass/fail grade that requires beating Trump.
There is no sugarcoating that 4th place, tied for last, is a failure. It felt like his campaign was DOA . Dropping out in last is what I expected from him. He had not built the necessary connections or exposure to have any hope. You cannot just ride in from the private sector and proclaim "I am really smart and competent vote for me". It does not work like that.
There are many things where finishing 4th place isn't failure. I don't understand why you would say otherwise. If some random amateur shows up to the Boston Marathon and finishes 4th, he didn't fail. Beating a bunch of governors with pre-existing institutional support is an impressive achievement.
4th out of 30,000 runners And losing by such a large margin to Haley , too.
also the typical runner does not have a multi-millions dollar media campaign. Given all the media coverage he got, for whatever reason it failed to resonate. His performance would be like a runner on PEDs getting last place against other runners on PEDs but he beat the runners who were not on PEDs.
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I'd agree. He is in a decent position for some kind of future position, if he wants it. He almost certainly knows his chances of winning the nomination were close to zero. So that probably was not his motivation.
I agree with you that Ramaswamay was running to profile himself and make him an obvious candidate for some kind of position in a Trump administration, but I don't think it has worked for him.
Given how Trump thinks, Ramaswamay needed to pull out before Iowa to get a consolation prize out of Trump. My read of Trump's social media rantings is that he thinks Ramaswamay continuing to contest the nomination for as long as he did to be disloyal behaviour.
Nah. He dropped out and endorsed Trump, It's all good now.
I can't speak for Trump personally, but "people like that" hold onto grudges, particularly where there is a sense of betrayal.
There are a lot of people who Trump could appoint to administration positions who didn't run against him in a primary.
He's since had a rally with Trump.
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