PHOENIX — Kari Lake likes to tell a story about how she told her campaign consultants to go to hell.
“I say to them, ‘Put down Hunter’s crack pipe right now!’ ” she told an audience on Sunday night, with the former president standing onstage right beside her. After pausing for the crowd to cheer the put-down, she continued, one hand over her heart.
“Wouldn’t it be horrible? What would it say about my character if I stepped away from my friends? If I step away from my friends, that means I would step away from you, and I will never step away from the people of Arizona.
“And so for those know-nothing consultants and the media,” she finished, “I want to show you what it looks like when I step away from President Trump.” With that, she stepped back, gave Trump a hug and exited the stage to an exultant crowd chanting her name.
It’s such a fascinating moment, and not just because it so neatly encapsulates the evolution of Republican politics in the Trump era. It also suggests a reason for why that politics is so effective — and why mainstream Washington’s frantic attempts to anathematize the Trumpian style might paradoxically have increased its appeal.
I was part of those mainstream efforts; I spent years arguing that Trump’s impulsivity and his savage attacks on everyone from Gold Star parents to those with physical disabilities ought to have disqualified him from high office. Like most of my colleagues in the media, I was astonished to find that this only made his voters love him more. Many observers concluded that this must be because Trump’s voters were simply awful bigots who loved meanness for its own sake. (“The cruelty is the point,” Adam Serwer wrote in 2018 for the Atlantic.)
Presumably, they’re right in some cases; there are bad apples in any large political movement. But as I’ve watched Trumpy candidates and spoken to Trumpy voters, I’ve begun to wonder whether there isn’t another point that we’ve been missing.
Trump voters are famously convinced that establishment Republicans sold them out — and there is a grain of truth to their belief. As political consultant David Shor noted in March, the median voter is center-left on entitlements but right-wing on immigration, yet for years an “ideological cartel” of educated journalists and political professionals kept that combination off the table for either party.
Trump got elected by promising to break up the cartel. But many politicians make such promises — almost all of them, in fact. Then they get to Washington and turn into boringly normal politicians.
There are structural reasons for that — Washington is too big and complicated for any one person to reform, so delivering for your voters inevitably means accommodating yourself to dysfunctional bureaucracy and uninspiring compromise. But to the voters, it looked as though their fiery outsiders had been seduced into betraying their promises by the infamous lure of the Georgetown cocktail-party circuit.
Though Trump voters had grown cynical about such promises, they trusted Trump to follow through. In part that’s because he was a billionaire, which meant, they thought, that he didn’t need to sell out for a plush lobbying job. But looking back, it seems that Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric was also serving as a kind of insurance policy for those voters: Having made himself a pariah with the establishment, Trump couldn’t sell out even if he had wanted to.
Trump’s norm violations functioned as what game theorists call a “credible commitment,” enabling voters to trust him even if he wasn’t particularly trustworthy. And ironically, the establishment boosted that signal by proving that we considered him utterly anathema, absolutely beyond the pale. We thought we were helping to minimize the threats Trump posed to the system, but the very vehemence of our rejection might actually have increased his power.
Now, Trump himself is serving as a similar commitment mechanism for Republican candidates: Because embracing Trump’s outrages makes you persona non grata in many circles, it’s a very good way to signal undying loyalty to the Republican base. Lake’s story takes this one step further by making the subtext into text: In refusing to walk away from Trump, I am proving conclusively that I will never — can never — turn my back on you.
Optimistically, this might suggest that the former president’s supporters aren’t invested in his norm-breaking for its own sake; any other credible signal of loyalty would do as well. Pessimistically, there might be little hope of a Trumpian populism without Trumpian savagery and Trumpian attacks on core democratic institutions because, by definition, the only way to signal the kind of loyalty his voters are demanding is to do something his opponents will consider completely unforgiveable.
