In contrast to the hopes and expectations of the Democrats, the American Right did not turn its back on Donald Trump or his path in last week's election. Trump might have lost the race for the presidency, but it was an impressive loss by any standard.
Despite the best attempts by the establishment media for the last four years to highlight his flaws and failures as both a person and a president, starting with his alleged tax evasion, business failures, sexism and chauvinism, and through his scandalous handling of the COVID crisis, the outgoing president won close to 48% of the popular vote. Over 70 million Americans preferred another four years of him in the White House to the Democratic alternative.
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In this election, Trump won more votes among non-white voters (Latinos, Asians, and African Americans) than any other Republican candidate since 1960; according to the Pew Research Center, throughout his term Trump had an average voter approval rating among Republicans of 86-88%, a wonder rating that did not budge in the face of any problem or scandal. Despite his loss, in the battle for Republican voters he and his path won and are still winning unprecedented support.
Other things that can teach us about the support for Trump among the American Right. First, figures such as Sen. Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio (the latter two were leading contenders for the leadership of the party and were crushed by Trump) are standing behind him, even after his loss.
Secondly, anti-Trump Republicans are being sidelined, both congressional representatives and senators who aroused the ire of his base for their independent stances and found their careers coming to an end, and former presidents and presidential candidates like Mitt Romney and the Bush family, whose influence on the Right is shrinking. We also need to add the negligible influence that anti-Trump organizations, such as the Lincoln Project, had on Trump voters. Despite Trump opponents' best efforts, his support is breaking records.
Despite his election loss, Trumpism is still with us and will stay with us. We are witness a deep-seated change, one that will apparently continue, in the DNA of the Republican Party and the conservative movement as a whole. If in the past – under former President Ronald Reagan, for example – the Republican Party espoused values such as individual liberties, limited government, free markets, globalization, immigration, and an American foreign agenda, in many senses Trumpism is a retreat from those values and adopts a different political philosophy. It is a philosophy that centers on white American workers, economic protectionism, strict limits to immigration, and international isolationism.
Trumpism is a type of right-wing nationalism that pays lip service to conservatism, but is not a conservative phenomenon in the traditional sense of the term, as the US knew it in the days of William F. Buckley and Barry Goldwater. Trumpism without Trump is the future of the Republican Party.
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