> It's not uncommon to see people on this very forum defending many of his policies
From what I've seen on the wider internet, the support for Trump is mostly a personality cult. The policies are getting support because they are his policies. They are on the Good Side, and the woke leftists are on the Bad Side. If Trump changes his views, most of his voter base will change with him.
The big question is: what's going to happen when Trump isn't in power anymore? Will he be able to motivate his voter base into a JD Vance presidency? Don Jr.? He's not getting any younger either - what if he dies?
With Trump off the stage the Republican party will almost certainly fall into a state of crisis. The traditional conservatives have been decimated, and the fringe extremists won't be able to rally the moderates. The entire Republican electorate will be up for grabs, and it won't be pretty.
> From what I've seen on the wider internet, the support for Trump is mostly a personality cult.
I agree with you but the point I'm trying to get across is that a disturbing amount of seemingly right minded people actually support him now on a policy level. Maybe they always did and feel comfortable to say it out loud now? I don't know.
But the deportations, skipping due process, defunding science, excluding foreign students, dismantling aid programs, cutting ties with Europe and Canada, stripping trans people of their rights, pulling support from Ukraine, not following the Paris Climate Accords, etc. etc. It's all stuff I've seen people here genuinely argue for.
> Maybe they always did and feel comfortable to say it out loud now? I don't know.
They always supported it. Lee Atwater put it best:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “N***, N***, N***.” By 1968 you can’t say “N***”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N***, N***.”
Atwater was a political consultant for the Republicans, he was an adviser to Reagan and H. W. Bush, and chairman of the RNC. Not some nobody with an opinion that doesn't reflect core conservative strategy. He laid it out for us right there. They pushed the racism down and then they abstracted it to make it more palatable to people. But racism was still always the animus. It was his "Southern Strategy" which courted disaffected Southern whites which formed the basis of the modern Republican party. One of the reasons that today's Republicans claiming the mantle of Lincoln is so absurd.
That was how conservatives thought until about 2008. Then all of a sudden someone (Obama) came along that really opened the flood gates when it came to big conservative racist feelings. You'd still have groups like the Tea Party who would frame their views as fiscal, but then someone else (Trump) started saying the quiet part out loud, when he ran with the whole "birther" movement, an explicitly and overtly racist idea.
This set up a real ideological battle in 2015-2016. You had the neocons represented in Jeb Bush, who were happy to keep the quiet part quiet. But the foil was Trump, who came down his golden escalator shouting the quiet part: "Mexicans are rapists and drug dealers and we need to build a wall to keep them out". That message resonated deeply with Republican voters. Jeb, Rubio, and Cruz ultimately lost in 2016 because they weren't willing to say the quiet part, and after Obama, Republicans really wanted to hear it.
Since then, it's been a constant drum beat of conservatives attempting to undo all of the social progress of the last 50 years.
Now, this is not to say that everyone who supports Trump does so for the quiet part. But, MAGA is an explicit quiet part movement, so for those who don't, you have to figure out your exit ramp. The 2021 insurrection was a good and obvious one, but if you're right minded and still on board today, you better figure out your exit soon, because whatever fiscal policy you think you're voting for, you're not going to get it; this road leads to apartheid, genocide, and no where good.
Never underestimate the ferocity with which a cornered and dying animal fights.
The demographic writing is on the wall for the GOP, and they know it. Basically everything they do, from gerrymandering to trying to dictate who is and is not an American citizen, should be read in that light.
It is not just that. He works on support of the whole ecosystem - from heritage foundation through tech leaders to fox news. The ecosystem will keep existing and will find a new preacher. The same people who use their talking points now will keep voting for the same set of policies. Just about only exception are tariffs in their current implementation - those are genuinely the Trump thing. But everything else is Trump executing long known conservative goals that are accepted by conservative voters.
> With Trump off the stage the Republican party will almost certainly fall into a state of crisis. The traditional conservatives have been decimated, and the fringe extremists won't be able to rally the moderates. The entire Republican electorate will be up for grabs, and it won't be pretty.
Trump represents traditional conservatives. With exception of tariffs, he is doing exactly what they wanted for years. Likewise, republican moderates never disagreed or opposed Trump policies, they just wanted someone more presentable for it.
From what I've seen on the wider internet, the support for Trump is mostly a personality cult. The policies are getting support because they are his policies. They are on the Good Side, and the woke leftists are on the Bad Side. If Trump changes his views, most of his voter base will change with him.
The big question is: what's going to happen when Trump isn't in power anymore? Will he be able to motivate his voter base into a JD Vance presidency? Don Jr.? He's not getting any younger either - what if he dies?
With Trump off the stage the Republican party will almost certainly fall into a state of crisis. The traditional conservatives have been decimated, and the fringe extremists won't be able to rally the moderates. The entire Republican electorate will be up for grabs, and it won't be pretty.