AEI: Donald Trump and the Future of the GOP

This is excellent.

I feel vindicated by this survey.

Donald Trump won in 2016 by running as a moderate, a populist and a nationalist and away from “True Conservatism.” He won by leaning into the disaffected Center which is the reason why he electrified the Alt-Right. The so-called “far right” was the big block of White voters in the middle.

After winning the 2016 election, Donald Trump began to make a series of wrong moves all of which were pointed out on this website and discussed in detail at the time. The first big mistake was bringing clueless Manhattan socialites like Jared Kushner and Ivanka to Washington and empowering them in the White House. The second big mistake was selling out to the Republican donor class and dumping the Alt-Right which was dismissed as this small fringe group rather than a noisy online proxy for a larger block of Trump voters. The third big mistake was hiring Reince Preibus who filled his White House with Never Trump conservatives and blowing his political capital on advancing Paul Ryan’s wildly unpopular legislative agenda. Donald Trump inexplicably began to disassemble his own coalition and move to the Right and cater to the priorities of the donors who he had ran against and defeated in the primary.

As the Trump presidency unfolded between 2017 and 2020, Donald Trump began to alienate the White Independents and moderates who had been his original supporters and had driven him to victory in the primaries. It was this enormous swing of White Indies and the continued loss of suburbanites to Joe Biden that killed him in the 2020 election. He was running on the Platinum Plan, the tax cuts and moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. The three biggest mistakes of the Trump presidency were 1.) embracing Paul Ryan’s health care plan, 2.) using budget reconciliation to pass the tax cuts and 3.) the way he mishandled COVID. This is clearly reflected in the polls whereas Charlottesville didn’t even register because the White voters in the Center are more working class and have stronger racial attitudes.

This survey is encouraging because it only reflects Trump 2020 voters. It doesn’t include people like me who got fed up with him because he moved away from populism, embraced the stale conservative policy agenda and “monitored the situation” for four years as the elite cabal described by Molly Ball in her Time article wiped us all off the internet. Donald Trump’s terrible leadership is the reason why he lost White Independent voters who had voted for them first time when he ran as a populist. In spite of it all, it appears that most of his supporters stuck with him as the lesser of two evils. The people he lost were those who couldn’t take it anymore and were ready to move on and find new leadership. Most of the White Indies who peeled away were far more moderate on economics and couldn’t stand his “Socialism Sucks” Turning Point USA campaign and embrace of the Reaganism we thought we had defeated.

The solution to “adding” to the Republican coalition and turning it into a majority is clear. You have to find a candidate who can build out into the middle from the populist or moderate wing of the party. Donald Trump won 25% of the DLWC vote in the 2016 election and could have done much better.

As the panel notes, Trump voters are motivated by a sense of White grievance and feeling under siege. They are quite flexible on the policy agenda and voted for him anyway just to “own the libs” in spite of all his betrayals on that front. More than anything else, they want a champion who defends them against their enemies – the Democratic Leaning Independent Elites (DILEs) – who attack them for being White and working class. Unfortunately, Donald Trump never leveraged his personality cult to push a populist policy into the mainstream until he lost the election and embraced $2,000 stimulus checks.

The shifting politics of wealth redistribution show the way forward. There is now room for a Huey Long-style populist insurgent candidate to run well to the Left of Trump on that issue. It is conceivable that such a candidate could run on the destruction of the oligarchy, the redistribution of wealth in the United States and hammering Joe Biden on cultural issues like wokeness and open borders.

I can hear the 2024 campaign now!

Note: We need to find someone smarter, someone much more clever than Trump who can mobilize a populist majority. Donald Trump was a warm up act.

About Hunter Wallace 12379 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

12 Comments

  1. This time you did not mention the reason why so many intelligent White workers withdrew their support: because of his administration’s deliberate mishandling of the pandemic that could easily have easily been stopped and eradicated, without vaccines, using time-proven low-tech measures consistently and at the cost of a little of the Elites’ stolen treasure.

    Incidentally, the inexpensive, conventional, Russian “Sputnik” vaccine may be the best in the world: https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/02/05/russian-covid-19-vaccine-vindicated-despite-western-pandemic-of-russophobia/ “Conventional” vaccines appear to be much more effective against new mutated strains than very expensive “state of the art” mRNA vaccines that are narrowly targeted.

    • You have to be desperate or plain ignorant to take that mRNA vaccine. I see a lot of old people can’t wait to take it.

      • @Powell,

        Yes, agreed.

        If masks work, why the six feet of “social distancing,” and if both are effective, why the rush to inoculate everyone with an experimental mRNA vaccine?

        Personally, I do not believe that 470,000 died due to COVID-19 in America. The true number of deaths that can be attributed to the WuFlu is not likely north of 50,000 tops.

        U.S. Deaths

        2017: 2,813,503

        2018: 2,839,205

        2019: 2,855,000

        2020: 2,902,664

        Deaths per 100K

        2017: 865

        2018: 868

        2019: 870

        2020: 878

        These numbers were from the CDC’s own tables and statistics.

  2. Blame it on the passage of the 1965 Immigration Reform Act….A monument to reprobate JFK from his younger reprobate brother Teddy Kennedy.

  3. “inexplicably” sez HW. Not really:

    fake-populist Drumpf always was a (((Wall Street))) Zionist stooge, and once in office,

    continued to be.

    and in 2024, BOHICA:

    another Republiscam fake-populist ZOG-stooge. In fact,

    Haxo can already predict his initials: “J.H.” And he

    also predicts that the ex-Trumpchump Whites

    will bend over again.

  4. “We need to find someone smarter, someone much more clever than Trump who can mobilize a populist majority. Donald Trump was a warm up act.”

    No kidding.

    I did see that Marjorie Taylor Greene used the word “white” and “identity” in the same… well, different sentences in the same tweet. On one level I have no time for the QAnon loons, but they’re also the ones brave and/or foolish enough to be the first to openly embrace white identity.

  5. I’m not a big fan of Trump, but on the other hand, if he isn’t the leader who is? Josh Hawley, Jim Jordan? I would like to see him start a third party movement. If nothing else a popular leader might find a way to rid us of the loathsome establishment Republicans. They don’t do anything much to help the white working class anyway, for my mind they don’t do anything much except cut taxes, fund the military industrial complex and teach us we must worship soldiers and the police.

    It isn’t that easy to start a third party, the whole system is rigged against it. Ross Perot found that out, Trump already has a big following and an organization.

  6. Unless some famous person runs as a third party, it seems like all this latent populist and nationalist energy is just going to go some GOP faker in 2024.

    Get ready for De Santis or Hawley to run as a fake-populist champion.

    The vast majority of the dissident right would support him already and they aren’t even exhausted by 4 years of Biden yet.

    Right wing “populists” never actually learned from their failure; they would be content with 4 more years of MIGA.

    And it doesn’t seem too hard for fake nationalism / fake populism to keep a lid on any kind of authentic nationalist / populist sentiment.

    • I’m sorry, but I don’t trust the “Christian” angle. I wouldn’t ever suspect an Odinist of worrying about sending more money overseas, or worshipping the land where Jesus walked.

  7. BMMRA2Z
    *
    TY ! TY HW !! a few days
    off point – Again – Apologies …

    There are several ‘ third ‘ parties
    out ‘there’ ; do any of them look
    viable for 2024 ; would ‘we’ ( wH
    People ! ) really benefit from DJT,
    part three ?

    Let’s think about skipping the top
    LiNE in 2024 ; it will be ” her ” time
    anyway ; KH is NOT HRC & the aW
    ( antiWhite ) crowd will warm to the
    new veeP soon –

    Meanwhile : there is the IVANKA
    / NIMRATA Show in 2024 !!
    This is our time to rest & devote
    some .. T I M E & Energy to the
    down ballot .. races ; Let’s go to
    some small town rallies .. and,
    ask ourselves again : do Elections
    work for ‘us’ > ANDREW A ! FREEDOM Above ALL Else <

    TO LIVE And Die IN DIXIE –

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