I've been wrestling with this and I think it's more than just "Fuck you got mine," because you'd see growth in similar places for traditional Republicans like Mitt Romney and that didn't happen. I've noticed this phenomenon among acquaintances of mine who are against traditional republicans like, say, George W. Bush, Romney, McCain, or others, but liked Trump, or defended Trump, or thought there was a conspiracy against Trump, or slowly became radicalized into a Trumpian-view of American politics. I noticed it with guys who I played basketball with and bar flies at a divey bar I used to go to pre-COVID.
At this bar I go used to go to pre-COVID, there's a lot of Albanian, Greek, and former Eastern European / Slavic / Baltic immigrants (or first-gen American) that go there, and these are people who have no interest in traditional Republican politics, but there was/is this sort of ... Hero worship of the myth of Trump, a generally higher acceptance of conspiracy theories than the public at large. We used to get into the conspiracy theory stuff years ago when I'd be at the bar late, shooting the shit, and they'd be like "Seriously Albatross you don't think someone is pulling the strings...?" Illuminati type stuff. I came up with an unprofessional theory that a lot of these people were first gen Americans or immigrated to the US from nearly failed states or states torn apart by sectarian strife and corruption in the aftermath of the Soviet Union, and the reason they have such high degrees of conspiracy thinking was because in the states they came from, there
was deep corruption like that ... That to get a business started you
had to bribe the police captain, who was also the head of the mob, who was also connected to the local governor or representative. These guys who, during better times, I would drink with and shoot the shit with late at night didn't trust the establishment, they liked Obama at first, they liked Bernie Sanders, and then they were completely taken up by Donald Trump and hated Hillary Clinton (the weird irony being that a lot of these guys/their families were granted refugee status to the United States during the Clinton Administration... but w/e). But, basically to a tee they all believe in the myth of Trump: "America needs a business man to run the country!" and they believed in this "Art of the Deal" version of Donald Trump, the myth of Trump... and it was unshakeable, "There's no bull shit with Trump," "He's a man," type things. Trump fed into this idea for them that there was a conspiracy of elites trying to take what they worked for -- Democrats, Hillary Clinton, and so on. I think they were open to the conspiracies and when a wanna-be strongman like Trump, with his 40+ year myth of success, steps in there's a vacuum that he fills.
I think we've [largely liberal Democratic base] wrongly thought of immigrant groups as monolithic at least as a voting bloc, and while it's still mostly true (like, Hispanics still voted for Biden more than Trump, but just less so Clinton than Trump, and much less so Obama than Romney or McCain), there is a culturally conservative bloc of immigrants who largely have conservative cultural values... attend church services more regularly, pray more regularly, believe in a generally paternalistic traditional family structure, and so on, and then combined with this myth of who Donald Trump pretends to be -- rich, successful, cuts through bull shit, tells it like it is, manly, confident, etc -- that can appeal strongly to people who are predisposed to that more so than the rest of a white Democratic voting demographic.
I just wonder whether there's anybody that's *not Trump* who can step in and fill that void similarly in the Republican party, and I don't think there is. Like, the Trumpiest of Trumpy republicans -- Tom Cotton, Matt Gaetz, or some of the others -- there is no "Myth of Tom Cotton" and so while he might get up and say the same shit that TRump does, I don't think that Cotton (or someone else) might have that same resonance in immigrant communities that Trump has, and the things that Cotton also stands for: white supremacy, ICE evictions, and so on (whiich Trump also stands for) will be more resonant than "the myth." I think it's wrong to look at gains that Trump made into Hispanic communities in 2020 and think that this is going to be reflective of gains that a Republican who shares all of Trump's political views would also make in 2024.
JElani Cobb,
interviewed on Stay Tuned With Preet, made a point recently about the appeal of Donald Trump in hypermasculine communities.
Trump is, of course, the anti-man. If you have a traditional, conservative sense of masculinity, you might think of Gary Cooper, as Tony Soprano puts it over and over, "Whatever happened to Gary Cooper...? Y'know, the strong, silent type." And the hilarity of this is challenged by, I think, Sylvio, who says something like "Y'know... Tony... Gary Coopers an actor..." And Tony says "I know I know..." and he waxes rhapsodical about the essence of Cooper: Punch up not down, stick up for bullies, strong, silent, speak softly and carry a big stick sort of thing. Trump is the opposite of the masculine ideal: He only punches down, he cheats, he lies, he endlessly whines and cries and complains about "presidential harassment" And how unfair it all is for him. And yet, if you divorce Trump from The Myth of Trump, people think he is manly, the 'last man standing,' sort of thing. I think this plays as well in white conservative politics as it does in culturally conservative politics in non-white communities... and I think we (speaking me, white liberal) have a blindspot to it.
