The big mystery is not so much the dyed-in-the-wool MAGA types, Hillary Clinton's "deplorables". Those people have always been unreachable. No, the big mystery is the so-called "moderate" Republicans, who for some reason have still decided that Trump is preferable to Biden, despite his character, all his lies, his narcissism and the rest; maybe tribe is more important than principles?
One mystery that remains is who you think these so-called moderates are.
Here, a reminder: Bill Kristol is the least bad of the never-trumpers; it might be a bit subtle, from half a world away, to feel the punch of the moment when my daughter was explaining how people in her social media feed were in a trend of answering the nostalgic with Reagan:
¿What ever happened to the days when you could …? ¡You elected Reagan! But, yeah, that's the world Kristol wants. Y'know, all the racism and religious supremacism, but just on the down-low. The Reagan years, when the economy went wrong because voodoo economics were just to dazzling. It's one thing if the song says, "You quoted Ecclesiastes, and brought all our hopes to their knees," but, yeah, the least bad of the so-called moderates want to go back and do the breaking of hope all over again.
One of the more mainstream nevertrumpers is an old Republican campaign hand named Rick Wilson. And it's true, he's funny because he's a foul-mouthed rat bastard who speaks a lost dialect. But he's also a rat bastard, the guy who went after Cleland, like that. Rick Wilson has his place in the history of how excrementally low the conservative conscience is willing to go. It's an intersting thought that Donald Trump is somehow a bridge too far, but it's not a matter of morality.
Similarly, Nikki Haley's dissent only means so much outside conservative circles. She's a former governor of South Carolina who can't deal with the Civil War, and wants to be counted among Nazi sympathizers.
It's kind of been this way for a long time. Atwater may have brought the Southern Strategy to the Reagan years, but it reaches back to Nixon. Over fifty years later, the conservative playbook hasn't really changed; the hardliners just aren't capable of actually doing it right, these days. The so-called moderates among Republicans, these days, are simply the folks who understand there is a quiet part they're not supposed to say out loud.
Meanwhile, what will Trump do to his detractors? I don't know, they would probably have to rely on Democrats to save them. But that's the thing: Haley's whole point has been to posture herself to run in 2028.
In recent days, though, there has also been chatter about Republican voter enthusiasm. Look at the election, or look what happens afterward. That is, if the so-called moderates turn out to elect Trump, we have our answer, that they weren't really moderates. And if Trump loses, well, not only look in the detail of which voters abandoned him and how, but also watch what happens
after the election, because it doesn't seem like Republicans will be coming away from this stuff so much as trying to go back to the old way of pretending that's not what they're on about.
