Most Americans can be excused for not paying close to attention to everything that goes on in Washington DC, but that’s less true for Marylanders because many of them live in the DC media market and a huge number of them actually work for the federal government. They have a front-seat view of the chaos and dysfunction, and if they aren’t following along on television or at work, they can learn about it from their neighbors. When it comes to being a Terrapin State supporter of Donald Trump, ignorance is not a defense.
Trump is heavily disliked in Maryland. The voters there went for Hillary Clinton by a 60-34 percent margin. They currently give the president a 39 percent approval rating. But they like their own Republican governor. Larry Hogan has a 76 percent approval rating, which is impressive enough that he’s being encouraged in some quarters to launch a challenge to Trump for the 2020 Republican presidential nomination.
There’s no question that Hogan would do better than Trump as a general election candidate in Maryland, although it’s highly unlikely that he could carry the state against the eventual Democratic nominee. It’s probable that Hogan would do better than Trump in a lot of states, including many of the states that could actually swing one way or the other.
On the other hand, the data suggest that Hogan would get slaughtered by the president in a primary, including in his home State.
If Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan mounted a primary challenge against President Trump, Republican voters in his home state would back the president by a more than 2-to-1 margin, a new poll has found.
Hogan (R) remains just as popular as Trump among Maryland Republicans, according to a survey released Thursday by Gonzales Research & Media Services, but that popularity does not translate to support for a primary campaign.
About 24 percent of GOP voters would support Hogan in a primary fight, while 68 percent would vote for Trump, the survey said.
Maryland Republicans are fond of their governor and they have the unique advantage of being able to compare his style and performance to the president’s record, and yet they still overwhelmingly prefer that Trump be their party’s 2020 nominee.
Whenever I think about Trump’s persistent popularity with Republican voters, I immediately reach for metaphors of illness. It’s like a brain virus or perhaps a prion disease. There’s clearly a widespread mental disturbance involved here. Whatever combination of factors explains it, it is most definitely not healthy. My inclination is to look as much for a psychological cure as a political solution.
Yet, it doesn’t seem like a problem that can be cured from outside the Republican Party. I’d like to be proven wrong about that, and maybe there are some slow policy cures that could work over time. There are Republicans (and former Republicans) who are trying. William Weld has announced he’ll challenge Trump for the nomination. Perhaps Larry Hogan will, as well. The more the merrier, and it could be that having some folks team up to challenge him would break the spell Trump has cast over conservative Americans.
It’s frustrating to watch Republican lawmakers fall in line for Trump, but they are representatives and their strongest supporters want them to have the president’s back. I don’t think most of them actually like the kind of pressure this create for them, but they like their careers more than their country.
Having an alternative to Trump is certainly a good starting point. But even if Trump is reelected he will eventually be a former president. Will his spell continue to work its evil even after he’s gone?
We can point the finger at Trump all we want, but the Americans who support him are what maintains him in power. We need to discover what is wrong with them and develop some theory on how they can be cured.
No. They. Can’t.
Charlie Pierce has been using the prion’s disease analogy about the modern Republican party for some time now. It’s appropriate.
It does seem to be a wasting disease.
It’s rabies- they foam at the mouth, bite anything that moves, and it’s highly infectious.
4.5
You have two forces at work here.
The first is that it’s very difficult for people to admit they are wrong. They may suspect it, they may have misgivings, but admitting fault is something that is very hard for people to do.
Secondly, you’d be surprised at how many people I’ve seen succumb to sunk-cost fallacy or double-down syndrome. I’m sure that there are people that believe that Trump is on the right track and could be more successful if only we would stop hindering him. So they support more Trumpism, not less. America is failing because we’re not Trumping at full speed.
Admit they was wrong? Never. Gonna. Happen.
My wife and I went to a county GOP meeting here in the Portland suburban town of King City last night. What we saw was a meeting of broken, mostly old people, upset that the country of the 1950’s was disappearing. “Transgender people weren’t around back then” kind of stuff. You name it, and they these people were lamenting it. There was a strong wish for a more authoritarian approach with the youth – “discipline” – and a perverse fascination with sexuality where transgender youth would have rights to shower in the locker room of their choice or use the bathroom of their choice. They believe LGBTQ people were trying to convert their youth over. They think the move away from phonics education to whole-word education was designed to dumb down the population so that the evil of socialism/communism could take hold. The meeting was opened with a prayer and “Christian” -by default – was pervasive in everything they spoke of. They denied Climate Change — “termites create more CO2 than humans”. There was one sovereign citizen vet type there. Talk of changing things now before there was a need to take up arms – came towards the end. It was thoroughly disturbing and at the same time pathetic. My wife at one point turned to me and said these people will be easy to beat politically. In looking around – with only a few lost youth among a crowd and mostly feeble, old, pot-bellied or overly skinny old folk — an unhealthy crowd not long for this world….I felt sorry for them and yet alarmed. I was alarmed that after going to this meeting in hopes of having a chance to humanize ourselves (progressives) with them (conservatives), we might have some amazing opportunities to get past their fears and see a glimpse of each other’s humanity….the gulf was really an unbridgeable chasm.
This is not surprising but it is sad.
Never feel sorry for right-wing authoritarians. These are the people who, if given the chance, would murder you and your family.
No. I am not kidding.
Can’t say I disagree with them about whole language vs. phonics situation 🙂 Actually, it’s that very group I plan to convert for 2020. They are right on meat eating vs vegetarianism too. That will be another nice group to convert. One by one, little by little…
Hey, I don’t disagree with them about phonics either, except I’m not sure the dumbing down works to the benefit of the communists/socialists.
“But even if Trump is reelected he will eventually be a former president. Will his spell continue to work its evil even after he’s gone?”
The disease analogy is a good one. But it’s not Trump’s disease, or his spell. Trump is a symptom of the disease, not the disease itself. Name it what you want, its a toxic swamp of bigotry/fundamentalism/anti-intellectualism/just-plain-stupid-and-proud-of-it-ism. Its taken over the brains of 1/3 of the country. You can bet that in the next election cycles there will be R candidates who are even crazier than Trump, hard to imagine as that is, and that the disease will continue to worsen until either the patient dies or we break the fever somehow. Maybe through a massive electoral defeat of the R’s, on the scale of FDR’s? Even then, the poison in the american bloodstream will take decades to drain, if we can ever find a treatment that works, and will persist in pockets of the country for decades longer. And thats the BEST we can hope for.
It certainly is psychological illness, by any standard clinical definition. Deeply disconnected from reality? Check. Resolute refusal to adjust an inaccurate worldview in the face of incontrovertible evidence? Check. Projection run amok? Check. Etc. etc.
Faux Noise probably has a lot to do with it. The psychopathology of evangelical culture probably has a lot to do with it. Which is to say, the people who are making sh!tloads of money from this idiocy have a lot invested in keeping it going.
It is not something that reasoned, reasonable argument can begin to touch.
I do not know how to go about trying to fix this.
And then there’s this.
I imagine that they’re indignantly proud of their ignorance.
What can one possibly do with that?
“We can point the finger at Trump all we want, but the Americans who support him are what maintains him in power.”
I have tried to make that point, but non-supporters mostly want to blame Trump, not his supporters. It is the supporters that matter; they would support any other candidate who appealed to them in the same way. Trump is just guilty of seizing the opportunity.
The saying goes “it’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.” Once you are a Fox News fan, it is going to be hard to recognize what it is and give it up.
I really don’t understand your Maryland Republicans. If I am reading the numbers right, there are some who disapprove of Trump, approve of Hogan, yet would support Trump over Hogan in a primary. Cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance among Republicans? That wins the Claude Rains Memorial Gambling Awareness Award for the week. 🙂
2.5
Times are just too good. Jobs everywhere and all the good folks are working. And grandpa done got the stock market working for him this time around – weren’t for the Chinese. But Trump went and fixed it today. The only way out of this is a good ole’ fashioned depression to kind of focus some folks mind. Yeah the bugs done got ’em.
National Trumpalists will be “cured” of their love of Der Trumper precisely like National Socialists were “cured” of their love of Herr Hitler: when national Gotterdammerung is brought down around their heads and the wages of unreason come due for the society as a whole. They are irreconcilable with modern America at this point, and operate politically solely on principles of bad faith; hence compromise, let alone agreement, is impossible.
National Trumpalists approve of Trumper’s “norm-busting” because Dems cannot be permitted political power (however democratically legitimate), and since white Trumpalists hanker after the demographic make-up of 1948, they revel in his kiddie concentration camps and sadistic abuse of undocumented Latinos. They certainly approve of braindead militarism and pouring trillions down that rat hole. They revel in destruction of the environment and stable climate. You could talk to a National Trumpalist for hours on end and not find a point of agreement.
Old Uncle Joe can conjure up his imaginary world of bipartisanship and “Good Repubs” all he wants, but one might as well have appealed to the good faith of Heinrich Himmler. This was a dead ideal even by the 1990s, when the Biden do-nut was already turning stale.
I fear that Trump will remain a malign force in republican politics until he dies, whether he wins in 2020 or not. There is no way he will stop hogging the spotlight, there is no way he will go quietly into the night. He is the leader of a cult. Pence secured the fundamentalist block for him, and they largely see Trump as a savior.
Trump is heavily disliked in Maryland. The voters there went for Hillary Clinton by a 60-34 percent margin. They currently give the president a 39 percent approval rating. But they like their own Republican governor. Larry Hogan has a 76 percent approval rating, which is impressive enough that he’s being encouraged in some quarters to launch a challenge to Trump for the 2020 Republican presidential nomination.
Hogan sucks. Have you talked to any Maryland Democrats re: the reason Hogan has such high approvals? How about Charlie Baker in Massachusetts? I’ll tell you part of the reason. Because the Democratic super-majorities in both states play footsie with them instead of wanting to override any of their vetoes. They don’t attack Hogan or Baker regardless of the fact that both are Trump-loving goons.