Trumpism will continue without Trump -- but its leader is running on borrowed time

[marmar]

Trumpism will continue without Trump — but its leader is running on borrowed time
George W. Bush was far more popular than Trump has ever dreamed of becoming — until suddenly it all went away

By HEATHER DIGBY PARTON
DECEMBER 7, 2020 1:30PM


(Salon) One version of conventional wisdom holds that if the Republican establishment had tried harder to control Donald Trump, his supporters might have started to question him and he would have lost his stranglehold on the Republican base. We fondly recall those Republican leaders, led by the right-wing senator and former presidential nominee Barry Goldwater, going up to the White House to tell Richard Nixon it was over, or the Senate's vote to censure red-baiting Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy, as events that broke the fever and brought their rabid followers back to reality.

As far as Nixon is concerned, I don't think any of us should be soothed by that example. It was only six years later that the conservative movement that had been turbocharged by Goldwater's 1964 defeat reached the pinnacle of national power with the election of Ronald Reagan. The fever didn't break. It got stronger.

And according to an article in the Washington Post by Yale historian Beverly Gage, we might recall McCarthy as the most hated man in America, but he maintained the support of a third of the country even after he was driven out of politics in disgrace. I wrote last week about the GOP's reluctance to confront McCarthy (and Trump), out of both fear and opportunism. But Gage points out that out of that ignominious defeat, a new generation of right-wing activists was born. And she adds, ominously:

Something similar is likely to happen as Trump departs the Oval Office warning of elite conspiracies and rigged ballots, encouraging his base to see themselves as noble warriors against an illegitimate political order. While the Trump presidency will soon be over, the history of Trumpism is just beginning.

....(snip)....

If you think Trump's rallies are filled with ecstatic followers, you don't remember the Bush events in 2004 in which he would land on the field on Marine One to the thundering strains of "The Natural" theme. By the way, Bush actually won his re-election campaign, unlike Donald Trump. And guess what happened after that? Within three years, his war was a train wreck, the economy was in free fall and he had bungled the horrific disaster of Hurricane Katrina. Then the global economy imploded and Bush became monumentally unpopular, seeing his approval rating sink as low as 25% by October 2008, just before the election of Barack Obama.

Will Trump's followers go the way the Bush-loving base once went? I don't know, but it's certainly possible. As I said, for all their grievances and feelings of victimization, Republicans don't like losers. And Donald Trump is most definitely a colossal, historic failure, whose pathetic attempts to pretend otherwise have sealed his legacy as the sorest loser in recent human history. ................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2020/12/07/trumpism-will-continue-without-trump--but-its-leader-is-running-on-borrowed-time/

[dalton99a]

1. Trump is a cultural icon and will have enduring appeal

to racist trash, conspiracy nuts, fascist bootlickers, women-hating losers, and a wide assortment of crazies