The two most recent Republican presidential nominees weren’t particular favorites of the party’s core voters. This time, suggests Slate’s Jamelle Bouie, if the GOP wants a candidate who excites its base, the choice is clear: Donald Trump, who boasts the “belligerence” and “bigotry” that “ugly and angry” right-wingers love.
Since Trump’s never held political office, observed Bouie in a Wednesday piece, he can say pretty much anything that’ll rev up righty activists, whereas even staunchly conservative officeholders “can appease the Republican base with harsh attacks on the other side, but they can’t endorse every crazy idea, lest they hurt their [legislative] goals and priorities.”
Bouie acknowledged that ultimately, Trump has no chance at the nomination and added, “Don’t be surprised if a more credible candidate—like [Scott] Walker, who can cloak his hard-right politics in suburban blandness—tries to bring Trump’s voters to his side.”
From Bouie’s article (bolding added):
There’s no world in which Donald Trump is a serious candidate for president. Republican elites don’t want him, Republican donors don’t want him, and if—through some cosmic fluke—he managed to win a major primary, every strategist and activist in the Republican Party would turn their aim toward him and his candidacy.
But…Trump is popular with Republican voters. A new CNN national poll puts him in second place in the GOP field at 12 percent support…
The obvious question…why does Trump have a hold on this thick slice of the members of the Republican base? The answer is, unlike the professional politicians in the race, Trump is—from his views on immigration to the “issue” of Obama's citizenship—one of them.
That’s not to say that more serious candidates like Ted Cruz or Bobby Jindal are insincere. They are reliable conservatives…But they’re also elected officials: They legislate, they build coalitions, and they compromise between what they want and what is possible (though this is more true of Jindal than Cruz). They can appease the Republican base with harsh attacks on the other side, but they can’t endorse every crazy idea, lest they hurt their goals and priorities.
…Trump doesn’t have this problem. He…says what he thinks.
…While Trump was out-of-bounds of mainstream conversation, he was well in the bounds of Republican Party politics and the kinds of rhetoric used there about Mexican and Latin American immigrants.
Trump also sounds like Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, who—in the last month of his 2014 campaign against Democrat Mark Pryor—warned that terrorists were working with cartels to send fighters into the United States.
All of these claims—from drugs and disease to ISIS—were insane. But they reflected (and encouraged) a climate of anti-immigrant hostility in the Republican Party…Earlier this year, the Pew Research Center asked Americans about the impact of immigrants on the United States. Sixty-two percent of Democrats and 57 percent of self-identified independents said that immigrants “strengthen the country through hard work and talents.” By contrast, 63 percent of Republicans said they “burden the country by taking jobs, housing, and health care.”
Trump doesn’t just represent the Republican base on immigration. He is the Republican base on immigration. His anxieties are their anxieties. And his rhetoric—a revanchist stew of foreign policy belligerence, small government ideology, anti-elite agitation, and raw bigotry—reflects and appeals to a meaningful part of the Republican electorate.
The good news is that this meaningful part is still a small minority of the Republican Party. The right-wing of American populism might be ugly and angry, but it’s not powerful. The bad news, on the other hand, is that you don’t have to be a majority to be influential. You just have to grab the right influence at the right time. Trump is a distraction, but don’t be surprised if a more credible candidate—like Walker, who can cloak his hard-right politics in suburban blandness—tries to bring Trump’s voters to his side.
