The big story is that the Republican Party has become the Trump Party. Forget Reagan. Forget Bush. Forget Romney.
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| Trump is no Reagan |
Not quite everyone is on board. There is opposition within the Party. Some of them are speaking out.
Trump is supported by 91% of self identified Republicans. That is the reality reflected in the polls. Gallup also eports that only 2% of Democrats support Trump and 33% of Independents do. Click: Gallup
Trump has governed and messaged to win the support of his base and done so by attacking people not in the base. ("Sons of Bitches" NFL players; "Low IQ Maxine Walters"; "shit-hole countries"; "radical socialists") The presumption is that America is divided and that Republican voters feel themselves besieged by liberals at home and enemies from abroad and they want a fighter, not a unifier. It worked in 2016.
Trump has governed and messaged to win the support of his base and done so by attacking people not in the base. ("Sons of Bitches" NFL players; "Low IQ Maxine Walters"; "shit-hole countries"; "radical socialists") The presumption is that America is divided and that Republican voters feel themselves besieged by liberals at home and enemies from abroad and they want a fighter, not a unifier. It worked in 2016.
We saw this reality reflected on the ground, too, in the Republican primary campaigns of four credible candidates vying to be the Congressional nominee in the open seat of rural and agricultural Oregon 2nd District. Each candidate stressed how uncompromising they were, how they rejected bipartisanship, and how much they loved Trump. Even candidate Knute Buehler, who had a well defined reputation as a non-Trumpish moderate, a residue from when he ran statewide for Governor, was now a full-on Trumper. Even in a 4-person race, with the others scrambling to be the most Trump, no one sought the non-Trump niche, because it barely exists.
Every movement has stragglers and malcontents, including Trump's. Trump changed the ideology of the GOP. There are people who liked Reagan and his support for immigration, Bush and his internationalism and outreach to Latin America, Romney and his straight-arrow lifestyle.
These people feel left out of the Trump Party. Some are people prominent in prior Republican campaigns and administrations. They identify as Republicans. They are not Trump-apostate because they are moderates. They are anti-Trump because they consider themselves principled conservatives, real conservatives. They agree with Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole, both Bush presidents, and Mitt Romney. They support trade, American leadership in international organizations, low taxes, limited government, and ethical government. They oppose authoritarian, anti-democratic government. They are personally offended by Trump's words, behavior, and style. He is so self-centered, so dishonest, so vulgar.
Their tactic is to run ads. The Lincoln Project has become known to people. Their founder includes George Conway (husband of Kellyanne), and Rick Wilson, Steve Schmidt, and John Weaver all leading Republican campaign activists and managers. The Lincoln Project creates and runs ads on TV and social media that condemn Trump. Ones like this:
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| Click: Trump is not Well |
Or this:
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| Click: Trump Administration Criminal Enterprise |
Or this:
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| Click: Trump tweeted instead of leading |
Other groups have joined this effort. Republican Voters Against Trump created a series of ads showing archetypal Trump voters who say they simply cannot vote for Trump. Many of them are very simply produced, just real-life traditional Republican voters facing a camera and telling their story. These have hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube. Here is an example, Tom, a man from West Texas, who says "I've never voted for a Democrat in my life" but he is voting for Joe Biden because Donald Trump is so shameful, so wrong.
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| Click: Not Trump |
Or this one, which uses a Ronald Reagan speech about American values as the narration, but superimposes on it images of Trump doing the exact opposite:
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| Click: Republican Voters Against Trump group |
Will these anti-Trump ads make any electoral difference? Maybe some.
In this era of severe negative partisanship I suspect that one effect is to harden Republican support in favor ofTrump. In that sense, they backfire. The ads document the meme that Trump, and by analogy all White Republican Christian conservatives, is beset from all sides, now by people scorned as RINOs, Republicans in Name Only.
The ads may persuade independents to avoid Trump. In the next few months a billion dollars is scheduled to be spent by the GOP attacking Biden, showing him to be utterly unfit. By election day Biden will be understood as senile and corrupt, a tool of AOC and Bernie Sanders, and a supporter of mob rule. Count on this. We are in the early stages of an arms race of mutual destruction. Who is worse, Trump or Biden? In 2016 the undecided independent swing voters split in favor of Trump, not Hillary Clinton. These ads may change that.
There is a theory circulating around political punditry that the only real audience for the ads is just one person, Donald Trump personally. They will get under his skin and cause him to do self-destructive things. Trump tweeting nasty things has itself become an issue: Trump tweets while America sickens. An angry Trump is a Trump who attacks, and that turns off voters whose reservations on Trump include dislike for what they perceive to be his distraction and divisiveness. The ads are baiting Trump to be the person he is.
Trump is his own worst enemy, which is the point of these ads.
3 comments:
It's not about Trump anymore.
Think about it. His own party is on the verge of conceding the election. Whether he wins reelection or not is moot. Republicans are going to lose seats in November, mostly due to Trump, and if Democrats gain control of Congress he may have the distinction of being the first president to be impeached twice.
Trump is also our country's worst enemy since he is running a virtual "death cult" (and the Republicans were worried about "death panels?!) A friend just emailed me that he lost a loved one to suicide brought on by the isolation and uncertainty of the pandemic. There will be countless deaths like these related to the pandemic. Trump folks need to understand that these predatory fascists are using disaster capitalism to enrich themselves. That takes only a minimum of intelligence to connect the dots to their own suffering. But their embrace of egotistical individualism denies their own victimization, a concept they cannot embrace without a complete paradigm shift.
Andy Seles
"Trump is supported by 91% of self identified Republicans" If the theory that the real number in this group is growing smaller is true, then using it would be misleading as a marker of Trump's staying power.
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