Trump's appeal is unique to him
Trump imitators are just that
David French is a very good columnist. He’s one of the few nationally syndicated columnists I read on a regular basis and look forward to reading each time. For those not familiar, he’s currently an opinion writer for The New York Times and has been for more than a year now. Prior to that, he wrote for several right-leaning publications and spent over 20 years working as a lawyer on behalf of socially conservative causes. His columns tend to focus on social, cultural and constitutional matters.
French is a conservative evangelical, but is an outlier in his group in that he has opposed Trump from the beginning. He will be voting for Kamala Harris in November. He has faced all kinds of attacks from the right since 2016 both online and in-person. One thing he’s very good at is chronicling the many episodes of political correctness and cancel culture on the right. That’s something that gets very little national media coverage compared to its counterpart on the left.
Most of those who write and talk about politics for a living live in either DC, New York, LA or the Bay Area. Almost all of the national media outlets are based in those areas and/or have a large presence there. Naturally, things that happen in those areas get a large amount of national attention. That can be warranted, but not always and it often gives national media consumers a very skewed sense of what is going on in the country. One of my selling points in writing this blog is because I live in Houston, I avoid falling into the trap many political writers fall into of thinking those four areas are the only places that exist.
French doesn’t live in DC, New York, LA or the Bay Area either. He lives in Tennessee, which is a blood red state. In the part of Tennessee where he lives, just outside of Nashville, it’s even redder than the state as a whole. Plenty of people live in places like that, but because there is little to no national media presence, things that happen there rarely get national attention. Often times, it’s from reading French’s columns that I find out about crazy, authoritarian and awful stuff on the right that’s going on in his state and elsewhere in red America.
I have been a reader of French’s for some time and was glad to see The New York Times add him as a columnist. He brings a valuable perspective on many issues and has educated me on many different subjects. While he is frequently critical of the GOP today, he’s hardly a leftist. I would call him center-right overall and, broadly speaking, fairly socially conservative and hawkish on foreign policy.
Trump is in a league of his own
In his latest column, French discusses a subject I have written about before many times. That is the phenomenon that is Trump and MAGA. Many questions have been asked about him and his appeal ever since he first became a force back in 2015. How did we wind up with him? How much of his appeal is rooted in economics? What does the GOP look like after Trump? Can his appeal be replicated or is it unique to him?
It’s the last question that French’s column discusses and I agree with his conclusion. The quick answer is that nobody else can do what Trump does. The fanatical following Trump has is about Trump the person, not the GOP, not policy ideas and not anything or anyone else. Many have tried to replicate his appeal, but none have succeeded.
As French points out and I have noted before, Trump has many advantages that his imitators lack. Long before he was running for president, Trump was universally famous. I knew who he was when I was in middle school. I remember The Apprentice being a big hit when I was in high school.
Trump created an image of himself as a highly successful businessman and a juggernaut in the real estate world. He had and still has skyscrapers with his name on them. True, it’s almost all bluster and lies. He barely built anything, stiffed contractors, lost money, filed for bankruptcy and got sued repeatedly. That hasn’t mattered much when he’s run for president. That’s because for those who aren’t familiar with the details of what he did (almost everyone), the only image they saw was him on TV. We live in a world of perceptions, not reality.
Celebrity and star power are something none of his imitators have. Prior to running for office, nobody had heard of Blake Masters, Doug Mastriano and Tudor Dixon. If you have no idea who they are that’s because they got crushed in 2022. Since they were unknown they needed to raise money. They were terrible at it while their opponents were drowning in cash. It was the worst of both worlds. They got pounded on the air for being like Trump, but weren’t able to replicate any of his appeal.
Kari Lake had fairly high name recognition for having been on TV before. Still, she didn’t have Trump’s star power and lost a race a normal Republican would have won. This year, she’s running for senator and is badly behind in fundraising and trailing in the polls. That comes despite the presidential race in Arizona being a toss-up.
Herschel Walker was well known in Georgia for his college football days, but he, too, lacked Trump’s star power. Another advantage Trump has is his ability to survive scandals that would sink anyone else. It’s not true that he’s invincible, but it is true that he doesn’t suffer nearly as much as anyone else would for the same bad acts. Walker didn’t have that ability and was dragged down by many personal scandals. Like Lake, he lost a race a normal Republican would have won.
Anyone can declare themselves to be MAGA and Trumpy, but there is only one Trump. When he is running and is in the limelight, he sucks up all the oxygen. His imitators don’t have the ability to do that. If they do get attention, it’s usually for something that repels people. In North Carolina, the Republican nominee for governor is as Trumpy as anyone can be, but he’s not Trump. He’s lagged behind his opponent in fundraising and is behind in the polls even though, like in Arizona, the presidential race is a toss-up.
Ron DeSantis was supposed to be the answer to the riddle of how to replicate Trump’s appeal without driving away people. In the history of modern presidential primaries, I’m hard pressed to think of a candidate who was a bigger flop. From the moment he launched his campaign, it was all downhill. He wound up getting none of Trump’s supporters while driving away those primary voters who wanted to move on from him.
One thing Trump did is moderate on some key issues. All the way back in 2015, he said there should be no changes to Medicare or Social Security, which put him to the left of most Democrats. At the time, Paul Ryan and his economic agenda were all the rage among Republican donors, pundits and consultants. It was blasphemous to denounce the bulk of what he was pushing for. Jeb Bush was supposed to be the one to carry the Republican banter.
When Republican elites pictured their party’s voters, they thought of Ryan and Bush. They thought rank-and-file voters were eager to rip apart the federal government and fulfill Atlas Shrugged. Trump correctly saw that they didn’t care about the size of the government and wanted to fight against perceived enemies, including the GOP establishment.
On trade, Trump moved leftward by embracing protectionism. That’s not popular among Republican elites, but it is in the midwestern states and helped inoculate him against claims that he was a far-right extremist. The one issue Trump moved rightward on was immigration, which happened to be the one issue where the GOP establishment wanted to move leftward. As we all know, rank-and-file voters sided with Trump. He won the primary fairly easily while Bush went nowhere.
Moderating is something Trump’s imitators don’t do. In 2022, there were candidates in key races advocating for banning abortion nationally, chopping up the federal government and denying the 2020 election was legitimate. DeSantis ran to Trump’s right on every issue there is. On the rare occasion when he attacked Trump, it was from the right.
When it comes to fighting culture war battles, Trump tends to be smarter about it than many of his imitators. He spends plenty of time online and watching TV, but rarely uses buzzwords that are common in right-wing circles. For example, he almost never uses the word woke. When talking about culture war fights, he usually talks about things like crime and immigration, areas where Republicans often have an advantage.
His imitators are almost all weirdos and fully embrace jargon that’s understood only by those who are addicted to social media. Ron DeSantis, for example, says things like, “Woke is an existential threat to our society.” I’m very online and usually in the know about those kinds of things, but even I have no idea what that means. He likes to use phrases such as “the woke mind virus” and “the woke mob.” I have no idea what those are and can’t imagine any normal person would.
JD Vance is arguably the weirdest of them all. Every week, crazy stuff he’s said over the years comes out. His obsession with childless women is bizarre and reminds me of the woke crowd’s weird obsessions with peoples’ lifestyle choices. Like DeSantis, he also uses weird phrases and words that few people understand.
Beyond elected officials, as French points out, the MAGA-aligned media ecosystem is not just weird, but is malicious, scandalous and run by horrible people. Tucker Carlson is the best known figure in that world. He combines Charles Coughlin and Charles Lindbergh. His greatest hits include being an anti-vaxxer, touting the virtues of Orban’s Hungary and Putin’s Russia and, most recently, hosting a Hitler apologist on his show.
Last week, two people with Russia Today, a Russian government-run network, were indicted for having paid a right-wing media outlet in the US to spread Russian propaganda. The right-wing influencers employed by the outlet who were paid to do that are all cranks and grifters. Just listen to any of them for a minute and you’ll quickly discover they’re some of the most repulsive people on earth. This is not a crowd with broad electoral appeal. That’s fine for them because they only need a small fraction of the population to tune in to get ratings gold, but any candidate who acts like them is going to go down in flames outside of the reddest areas.
On personality, Trump has, in his own twisted way, a decent amount of charisma and charm and can even be funny at times. His imitators have none of those things. I again cite the examples of Blake Masters, Doug Mastriano and Tudor Dixon, but there are some more recent ones.
DeSantis and Vance are the two most recent Trump imitators to do faceplants. Neither have any charisma or charm. Neither are funny and are just angry and full of grievances. DeSantis has almost no political talent. When subject to serious scrutiny and having to go against Trump, he quickly disintegrated. While predicting the future is a fool’s errand, call me highly skeptical that he has any future after he’s no longer governor in 2026. For that to change, he’ll have to become a completely different person with at least a minimum amount of social skills.
Vance might be the least likeable person there is. He can’t even order donuts without making people cringe. He’s C3PO if he was an obnoxious ass. They’re probably made out of the same materials.
He’s also a right-wing extremist who has advocated for banning abortion nationally, firing the bulk of the federal workforce and ignoring court orders and using the federal government to go after people and things he doesn’t like. It won’t matter much for November, but his favorable numbers are awful. That is highly unusual for a VP nominee.
As far as political talent goes, he has none. He only won his primary because Trump endorsed him and only got one-third of the vote. The only general election he has run in he came close to losing despite running in a red-leaning state and other Republicans there winning handily. Even with Ohio’s political leanings and 2022 being a decent year for Republicans, he still may have lost had Republican outside groups not spent tens of millions of dollars propping up his non-existent campaign. Unlike DeSantis, he could remain in politics for a while if Trump loses, but it’s hard to see him going any further than where he is now. Like DeSantis, he’ll have to become a completely different person for that to change.
A point of disagreement
Where I think French is wrong is when he discusses Trump’s future. French seems confident that if Trump loses, it will be the last we hear of him, at least as a candidate. If Trump loses, despite the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling over the summer, he will face a world of legal trouble. His trials in Florida, DC and Georgia will finally happen. He has relied on courts to delay his trials past the election in the hope that he will win and make them go away.
If Trump loses, he won’t be able to delay his trials any longer and will have to face justice. The only trial he’s faced so far has been the least serious of the indictments. The trials he’s facing in Georgia and DC are the most serious and could lead to him going to jail if he’s convicted. Whether he’s guilty will be up to juries to decide. He’s entitled to the presumption of innocence and the rights all criminal defendants have, which are things he would happily deny anyone else.
Absent death or serious health issues, he will run again in 2028. There is nothing preventing him from doing that. Yes, even if he’s in jail, he can still run. The US constitution only says someone must have been born in the US or on US territory and must be at least 35 years old. That’s literally it.
Why do I think Trump would run again? This is Trump we’re talking about, folks. He cares about himself and nothing else. He doesn’t believe in any ideas or causes that don’t revolve around him. He couldn’t care any less about the Republican Party, loves being in the limelight and hates anyone else being the center of attention. That doesn’t sound like someone who will voluntarily go away.
If he loses in November, the odds that he concedes are zero. There is nobody on earth who thinks there is any chance of that. He’s used his false stolen election claims as a basis for running this year and there’s no reason to think he won’t do it again. It doesn’t matter if he loses by a little or by a lot, he will say it was stolen just the same. If you think his supporters won’t believe him a second time, I have a degree from Trump University to sell you.
You might think (or hope) after a second loss, enough Republican voters might see Trump as the loser he is to break his hold on the party. Maybe that happens, but based on everything we know now, I’m highly doubtful of it. He not only lost in 2020, he has screwed Republicans over in crucial elections since then. He arguably cost them the Senate in 2021 by casting doubt on the validity of the vote in Georgia, which probably led to a small, but significant decrease in turnout in red areas in the runoffs. In the midterms, he endorsed one toxic candidate after another in nearly every key race who went on to lose the general election. I hope every Democrat sent him the nicest thank you note ever written.
Trump was badly wounded after the midterms, but he healed fast. Despite helping promote toxic candidates in many key races and keeping Republican wins to a minimum, their voters wouldn’t quit him. I don’t know that they will ever feel differently as long as he is part of the political scene.
While Trump could run if he was in jail, would it really work? It would certainly be awkward. He couldn’t do rallies, at least not in person. His convention speech would have to be broadcast from his jail cell. As outlandish as that sounds, it could happen and nobody should be surprised if it does. Maybe he would give up and not run, but then he wouldn’t be in the spotlight like he is now. Another Republican would be at the center of attention and he won’t like that one bit.
Ultimately, I do agree with French that MAGA is unlikely to have a future without Trump. Steve Bannon and his ilk may intend for it to be a movement beyond just Trump, but there is no obvious successor who could take his place after he leaves. The wishes of some notwithstanding, MAGA is not a movement about ideas that transcend individuals. It’s a personality cult centered around one man. What the GOP will look like after Trump leaves the scene is anyone’s guess. There are many possibilities, but that’s something to worry about later.