Trump's Depravity Will Not Cost Him This Election

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

58% : This unfocused rage is an addiction fed by Trump and conservative media, and the MAGA base wants it stoked continuously.
47% : If Trump's campaign was focused on handing out tax breaks and lowering gas prices, he'd be losing, because for his base, none of that yawn-inducing policy stuff is transgressive enough to be exciting.
45% : For them, restoring Trump would be both vindication and vengeance.
40% : I hope that many of the people now supporting Trump will have an attack of conscience on their way to their polling station.
36% : She and others have likely hoped that, at some point, Trump will reveal himself as such an obvious, existential threat that even many Republican voters will walk away from him.
34% : These others must be punished or at least brought down to a common level of misery to balance the scales, and Trump is the guy to do it.
34% : Rather than reckoning with the greatest mistake they've ever made at the ballot box, they have decided that their only recourse is to put Trump back in the Oval Office.
30% : But plenty more want Trump to be terrifying and stomach-turning so that reelecting him will be a fully realized act of social revenge.
27% : If Trump were suddenly to become a sensible person who started talking coherently about trade policy and defense budgets, they would feel betrayed, like hard drinkers in a tavern who suspect that the bartender is watering down the high-proof stuff.
26% : As New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu -- one of the many former Trump critics now back on the Trump train -- said today on CNN in response to a question about Kelly's comments: "With a guy like [Trump], it's kinda baked into the vote.
24% : It would prove that 2016 was not a fluke, and horrify people both they and Trump hate.
19% : They want Trump to be awful -- precisely because the people they view as their political foes will be so appalled if he wins.
16% : (Yes, Trump said bad things, but what about Harris's position on gender-affirming medical care for federal prisoners, as if liberal policies are no different from, say, threats to use the military against American citizens.)
12% : The reporting included, among other things, the retired general and former Trump chief of staff John Kelly confirming on the record that "Trump used the terms suckers and losers to describe soldiers who gave their lives in the defense of our country," a fact that Goldberg had first reported in September 2020.
11% : I am also not sure that swing voters will really swing against Trump, but one ray of hope is that revelations from people like Kelly do seem to matter: A new analysis indicates that voters trust criticism from Trump's former colleagues and allies more than standard political zingers from the opposition.
10% : Not long after the publication of yesterday's article, The New York Times published excerpts from interviews with Kelly in which Kelly said -- on tape, no less -- that Trump fits the definition of a fascist.
10% : But as Trump's running mate, J. D. Vance, once wrote for The Atlantic, Trump is "cultural heroin," and the hard choice of civic virtue will never match the rush of racism, hatred, and revenge that Trump offers in its place.
6% : I am struck by how often Trump voters -- and I am speaking here of rank-and-file voters, not crass opportunists such as Sununu or wealthy wingmen such as Elon Musk -- are almost incapable of articulating support for Trump without reference to what Trump will do to other people or without descending into "whataboutism" about Harris.

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