What the three types of Trump supporter really want

As Democrats’ colossal collective sigh of relief drives wind turbines even over in Britain, let’s not lose sight of the big story. However welcome, Joe Biden’s win was supposedly a dead cert. Even conservative commentators like Andrew Sullivan were hoping for a landslide. The real big story is that Donald Trump came within about 73,000 votes of winning the Electoral College. Democrats have celebrated the fact that their man got more votes than any other presidential candidate in history. But who got the second largest number of votes in history? Donald Trump. Of all people. And a 75 million vs 71 million popular vote gap is hardly yawning. Had a Libertarian candidate not ‘stolen’ votes from Trump in key swing states, he’d have sailed across the finish line with electoral votes to spare.

Much like the UK’s general election last year, America’s this year revealed a public that’s surprisingly conservative, even among minorities. Remember, too, that during the primaries Biden was a rare moderate who emerged from a crowd of wannabes who leaned hard left. (In hindsight, Trump would have hammered Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.) Even Democratic voters, then, prefer a centrist.

How many of those 71 million Americans who plumped for Trump voted because of Trump, and how many in spite of him? We can only suppose. Given the many star-struck vox pops, a fair chunk — a statistically imprecise unit, true — love Trump qua Trump. They quite fancy his braggadocio and vulgarity. They admire his showmanship and actively relish the fact that their guy breaks the rules.

I wager that another fair chunk finds Trump qua Trump distasteful. Though often driven to make strained excuses for the erratic monomaniac, they still cringed when he lied about the size of his visibly sparse inauguration crowd and shuddered when he commended injecting Cillit Bang to cure Covid.