Many Americans know exactly who Trump is, and they like it.
Yesterday, The Atlantic published another astonishing story by editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg about Trump’s hatred of the military. The reporting included, among other things, the retired general and former Trump chief of staff John Kelly confirming on the record that “Trump used the terms suckers and losers to describe soldiers who gave their lives in the defense of our country,” a fact that Goldberg had first reported in September 2020. (Team Trump, unsurprisingly, continues to deny the story.) Not long after the publication of yesterday’s article, The New York Times published excerpts from interviews with Kelly in which Kelly said—on tape, no less—that Trump fits the definition of a fascist.
Wrong. As New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu—one of the many former Trump critics now back on the Trump train—said today on CNN in response to a question about Kelly’s comments: “With a guy like [Trump], it’s kinda baked into the vote.”
The belief that at some point Trump voters will have finally had enough is an ordinary human response to seeing people you care about—in this case fellow citizens—associate with someone you know to be awful. Much like watching a friend in an unhealthy relationship, you think that each new outrage is going to be the one that provokes the final split, and yet it never does: Your friend, instead of breaking off the relationship, makes excuses. He didn’t mean it. You don’t understand him like I do.
But this analogy is wrong, because it’s based on the faulty assumption that one of the people in the relationship is unhappy. Maybe the better analogy is the friend you didn’t know very well in high school, someone who perhaps was quiet and not very popular, who shows up at your 20th reunion on the arm of a loudmouthed boor—think a cross between Herb Tarlek and David Duke—who tells offensive stories and racist jokes. She thinks he’s wonderful and laughs at everything he says.
But what she really enjoys, all these years after high school, is how uncomfortable he’s making you.
And this, in brief, is the problem for Kamala Harris in this election. She and others have likely hoped that, at some point, Trump will reveal himself as such an obvious, existential threat that even many Republican voters will walk away from him. (She delivered a short statement today emphasizing Kelly’s comments.) For millions of the GOP faithful, however, Trump’s daily attempts to breach new frontiers of hideousness are not offensive but reassuring. They want Trump to be awful—precisely because the people they view as their political foes will be so appalled if he wins. If Trump’s campaign was focused on handing out tax breaks and lowering gas prices, he’d be losing, because for his base, none of that yawn-inducing policy stuff is transgressive enough to be exciting.
