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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.
I'm pretty sure a lot of it is "Hatred", but I'm not sure which direction the Hate Flows.
Most of my family comes from Mountain Stock. Up until about 2020, they've always been staunch conservatives who voted straight ticket Democrat 100% of the time. Since Biden took office, many of them have been direct targets of new regulatory stances that have completely fucked their livelihoods. I'll list a few below.
Since Biden got in office, there have been repeated attacks on the livelihoods of an entire class of blue collar people. I've watched entire branches of my extended family go from straight-ticket blue voters to people who are so furious about what Biden is doing that they will gladly vote for Trump just to see Biden lose in the most humiliating, soul-destroying, morale-breaking manner possible. They don't care that it might not be great for them either. They're rednecks; they're used to getting the shit-end of every trade. They're accustomed to being the target of America's hate for the last 30 years. All they know is that they think they can weather the disaster better than the Biden people can, and they'll gladly suffer that pain if it means they can watch their enemies hurt worse.
For years I've read about the many abuses of "navigable waterways". Clearly meant to protect actual rivers or bodies of water so large that boats could cross them. But commonly applied to any dry ditch that sometimes becomes a little stream in heavy rain. This and other examples of bureaucracies stretching limited narrow text into extremely broad powers is why I don't like the Chevron deference.
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