“About a hundred years ago, H.L. Mencken wrote: “When I hear a man applauded by the mob I always feel a pang of pity for him. All he has to do to be hissed is to live long enough.” Mencken might once again prove to be as prophetic as he was witty. He did, after all, predict Trump’s White House waltz in the Baltimore Evening Star on July 25, 1920: “As democracy is perfected, the office of the President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and complete narcissistic moron.”’

“He knows that in a surrealist entertainment-mentality world facts don’t matter and “shiny object” slogans mean everything. He knows how to keep himself on top of the news cycle; every outrageous thing he says or does sends the broadcast media into paroxysms of greed trying to bottle and market the entertainment he provides. He knows that bad-guy publicity is better than no publicity. He has cultivated his public persona as a faux-mafiosa don and huge numbers of people find this wildly entertaining as they experience politics as mere bloodsport in which only personalities, not issues or rules, matter. And that’s enough nowadays to get elected.”

“Huge numbers of voters are addicted to distraction, have the attention spans of goldfish, and so cannot focus quality attention on anything. If they don’t read, they really don’t know how to think about public-policy issues or political ideas at all. That and only that can explain why so many Americans have understood that Trump does not respect the Constitution (he is probably the only President ever to swear an oath to defend a document he has never read and clearly doesn’t understand) and simply don’t care.”

“The Trump cult now consists of somewhere between 28 and 35 percent of Republican voters, sometimes defined in polls as people who would vote for Trump even if he runs at the head of a third-party ticket, and more recently even if he is a convicted felon doing jail time. That sums to between 45.2 and 56.5 million people out of a total of 161.42 million registered voters—not a trivial number. Not all of them are conspiracy-addled, adolescent-brained naïfs, but many do appear to fit the description.”

“This factor is related to the fifth. Trump’s base displays all the characteristics of a cult, religious as well as political. None of the other contenders for the Republican nomination has acquired this mystical aura.”

“Thanks to the Reagan rhetoric of the 1980s, the activist ideologues in the Republican Party despise the federal government, and think—as Reagan said—that “government is not the solution, it’s the problem.” They would basically burn down the hated “administrative state” if they could. So anyone with genuine experience at governing is at a disadvantage relative to Trump as far as GOP party activists are concerned.”

“A lot of less well-educated Americans feel status-humiliated at a time when decent blue-collar jobs are scarcer than ever and higher education is the key to social mobility. They tend to fall for “deep state” and “QAnon” conspiracy theories more readily, and they tend to have low social capital in their personal lives: fewer friends, a higher rate of substance-abuse issues, broken families, and—for males especially—self-eviction from the job market. Trump is always tearing down the elites—political, economic, and cultural—so he appeals to those who think they have been humiliated by “the Man” (whoever or whatever they think that means). This is why Trump’s massive legal problems—his 91 indictments, the libel decisions, his payments of hush money to adult entertainers, his court antics that bring him gag orders, and so on—actually help him with this constituency. They simply conclude that he, like them, is a victim unfairly held down. Their sympathy and support thus overfloweth.”

“Trump talks like Archie Bunker from the old Norman Lear sitcom All in the Family. Trump voters come in basically four flavors—cultists who think he is the savior of all they hold dear; people who fear the (exaggerated) political clout of the illiberal Left (their real power is cultural, not political); people who vote the Republican brand by rote; and single-issue voters, as with the aforementioned pro-lifers. Of these four, the first is most critical to Trump, and the currency here is Trump’s ability to play the counter-humiliation card.”

“Trump’s ceaseless anti-elitist, anti-free trade, anti-globalist rhetoric works on them, and that translates into primary support.”

“The popularity of many Trump-branded political issues has led many Republicans to conclude that if he is nominated Trump will win—and winning is what they crave above all.”

“Also important here: losing political parties in mass-democratic polities tend to double down and become more extreme for the next time around. The Democrats lost in 1968 and nominated George McGovern in 1972. They had to lose even worse before finally figuring out that they needed to head toward the center to win. So in 1976, they nominated a Southern moderate—Jimmy Carter—and won.

Republicans lost in 2020, but their reaction was to double-down, become more extreme, and get behind Trump’s “Stolen Election” narrative. Trump is thus the preeminent symbol of the GOP’s post-2020 lurch toward the crazy surrealist Right. That is partly why he maintains his status as party leader: he justifies in the minds of MAGA ideologues that becoming more extreme was the right thing to do.”

“That doesn’t mean that Trump won in 2016 without positions on issues. He did have positions, most of which were given to him, and he never studied or really understood them, but that doesn’t matter. So now, when challengers try to gain ground on him, they find themselves doing it locked into his policy positions. With few exceptions, none has broken out of the mold. So, they all end up looking like imitators, and primary voters tend to reason, “Why go with an imitator when the original real thing is there in the ring?”’