Richard Hanania, commentatore e autore conservatore americano analizza in un articolo su Substack le motivazioni dietro il forte consenso della base repubblicana per Donald Trump.

Secondo Hanania le motivazioni principali per il voto per Trump non sarebbero la “economic anxiety”, né questioni legate ai temi sociali, ma un generale senso di alienazione percepito dall’elettorato repubblicano nei confronti dell’establishment, unito alla preferenza per figure politicamente dominanti.

Conservative politics has been for decades shaped by larger-than-life alpha male personalities. Among talk radio and TV hosts, you have Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Tucker Carlson, Glenn Beck, Larry Elder, and Michael Savage. Further outside the mainstream, you’ve got Alex Jones. Except for perhaps Jones, and to a lesser extent Tucker, these figures are less known for representing different ideological currents than they are famous for simply being who they are. Mini-cults of personality also exist to a large extent among Evangelical Christians — think of the role of the televangelist in Red State culture.

The Republican voter is not attracted to ideas, but has a sense of alienation from elites and mainstream institutions, and simply wants someone loud and obnoxious enough to fight with them. And since he mostly just wants to grill and politics is a secondary concern in his life, he is not tuning in unless the show is particularly entertaining.

As the CBS writeup of a recent poll puts it, “There’s big demand for a candidate who says Trump won in 2020, who challenges woke ideas, who doesn’t criticize Trump and, for good measure, makes liberals angry. Trump leads in all of these areas.”

Questa sarebbe la motivazione principale dietro lo scarso consenso degli altri candidati repubblicani alle primarie, che spiegherebbe come mai il “trumpismo senza Trump”, adottato da De Santis, sarebbe una linea fallimentare. Infine questo sarebbe il motivo per il quale Trump ha deciso di continuare a seguire la narrativa delle elezioni rubate nel 2020.

When I note things that Trump has done right and DeSantis has done wrong, I don’t mean to imply that Trump has been consciously playing 4D chess every step of the way. Trump may not have an explicit model of what he’s doing at any point in time, any more than a spider weaving a web can visualize the end product that results from following its instincts. But at some level, he knew that getting everyone else to say that he was the actual winner in 2020 was important for maintaining his dominance over the party, and this was true even if it cost Republicans the Senate.