The Two Kinds of Supporters of Donald Trump

I’ve come to think that there are, very broadly speaking, two categories of Americans who plan to vote for Donald Trump in November.

One group consists of those who I think of as being in the thrall of the man. They like him — in fact, they’re devoted him. They see him as pushing back on those who look down on them. They recognize that he’s a bully, but he’s their bully, the one who comes to their defense when bullies on the other side of town — liberals, atheists, academics — try to put them down.

The other category consists of those who have no particular affection for Trump himself — and may even roll their eyes at his tweets and self-serving pronouncements — but who see him as the candidate most likely to champion their favored policies. These voters point to Trump’s first 3½ years in office as evidence that he does his best to keep his campaign promises. They include people who are concerned about illegal immigration, opposed to abortion, in favor of deregulation and lower taxes . They applaud Trump’s appointment of conservative judges. And they may be alarmed by the violence and vandalism that has accompanied some of the recent social justice protests, and what they see as Democrats’ willingness to tolerate it. They are also inclined to credit Trump for the vigor of the U.S. economy prior to the emergence of the coronavirus, and they don’t blame him for the current recession, which they see as an unavoidable consequence of the pandemic.

As I said, these are very broad categories. The latter group includes people who are uncomfortable with some of Trump’s tactics and others who think they’re no big deal. But it’s likely that they would support the election of any Republican president whom they saw as enacting their policy priorities.

It’s easy for us who are revulsed by Donald Trump to lump all his supporters into the first category — the die-hard Trumpists — and assume that they’re all fact-denying jerks with racist tendencies. That presumption has a couple of consequences. First, we’re dismayed, if not horrified, by how many Americans appear to be in that camp; we look at Trump’s remarkably stable level of approval among voters and despair for the country we thought we knew. Second, we assume that since Americans have seen Trump in action for 3½ years, he can’t possibly win reelection. Surely, we think, a majority of voters can see by now what a venal, dishonest, would-be autocrat he is.

But that overlooks the millions of Americans who support Trump simply because he is a Republican president pursuing their preferred policy agenda. Yes, many of what used to be bedrock conservative principles — free trade, fiscal restraint, global leadership — have been cast aside by the Republican Party in the age of Trump. But arguably, those were priorities more for conservative intellectuals and political leaders than for the Republican rank and file. Trump doesn’t care what the American Enterprise Institute considers to be the core precepts of American conservatism. He has aligned himself with Republican voters. And most of them will be voting for him in November, just as they would be voting for Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, or Ted Cruz if one of them had won the presidency in 2016.

So in order to win in November, Joe Biden will need to defeat a coalition of voters that includes both Trump’s die-hard fans and those who will simply be voting for the candidate who has a demonstrated record of opposing abortion, lowering taxes, appointing conservative judges, and acting aggressively to suppress violence in the streets. Taken together, that’s a big group. Democrats need to hope that it’s not big enough to reelect the president.