Editor’s note ~ This is a fantastic opinion piece, and actually examines Trump’s pragmatic political style with a lot of nuance and insight. It may not change anything for the readers of the NYT, but it might help them understand why Trump supporters think as they do.
by Matthew Schmitz, December 18, 2023
https://tinyurl.com/mtbv8wu4
If the presidential election were held today, Donald Trump could very well win it. Polling from several organizations shows him gaining ground on Joe Biden, winning five of six swing states and drawing the support of about 20 percent of Black and roughly 40 percent of Hispanic voters in those states.
For some liberal observers, Mr. Trump’s resilience confirms that many Americans aren’t wedded to democracy and are tempted by extreme ideologies. Hillary Clinton has described Mr. Trump as a “threat” to democracy, and Mr. Biden has called him “one of the most racist presidents we’ve had in modern history.”
In a different spirit, some on the right also take Mr. Trump’s success as a sign that Americans are open to more radical forms of politics. After Mr. Trump’s win in 2016, the Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin crowed that the American people had “started the revolution” against political liberalism itself. Richard Spencer declared himself and his fellow white nationalists “the new Trumpian vanguard.”
But both sides consistently misread Mr. Trump’s success. He isn’t edging ahead of Mr. Biden in swing states because Americans are eager to submit to authoritarianism, and he isn’t attracting the backing of significant numbers of Black and Hispanic voters because they support white supremacy. His success is not a sign that America is prepared to embrace the ideas of the extreme right. Mr. Trump enjoys enduring support because he is perceived by many voters — often with good reason — as a pragmatic if unpredictable kind of moderate.
But it is worth remembering that during his presidency, Mr. Trump’s often intemperate rhetoric and erratic behavior ended up accompanying a host of moderate policies. On matters ranging from health care and entitlements to foreign policy and trade, Mr. Trump routinely rejected the most unpopular ideas of both political parties. Voters seem to have noticed this reality: When asked whether Mr. Trump was too conservative, not conservative enough or “not too far either way,” 57 percent of voters in a recent poll picked “not too far either way.” Only 27 percent of voters regarded him as too conservative.
Such characterizations may baffle Mr. Trump’s detractors. But even his most provocative comments since leaving the White House — that he would be a “dictator” for the first day of his second term; that Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, deserves to be executed for “a treasonous act” — likely matter less to many voters than how he governed while in office. Inured to his braggadocio, they see him now as he was then: less an ideological warrior than a flexible-minded businessman who favors negotiation and compromise.
This understanding of Mr. Trump, more than any other factor, may explain why so many voters have stuck with him, and why, a year from now, [I’m betting sooner] we may be looking ahead to a second Trump administration.
Likewise with Mr. Trump. Start with his stance on health care, which defies Democratic and Republican positions alike. When asked in 2015 whether he supported universal health care, he said, “Everybody’s got to be covered” and “The government’s going to pay for it.” In office, he proposed an alternative to Obamacare that conservative congressmen denounced as a “Republican welfare entitlement.” Last month, when he again attacked Obamacare, he emphasized that he didn’t want to “terminate” the program but rather “replace it with much better health care.”
Mr. Trump’s views on Medicare and Social Security have a similar middle-of-the-road quality. “He and I fought about Medicare and entitlement reform all the time,” the former Republican House speaker Paul Ryan complained last year. “It became clear to me there was no way he wanted to embrace that.” In the current Republican primary race, Mr. Trump has attacked Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, as a “wheelchair-over-the-cliff kind of guy,” citing votes that Mr. DeSantis cast as a congressman for proposals to replace Medicare with vouchers for private insurance and to raise the eligibility age for Social Security.
On trade, Mr. Trump broke with the free-market orthodoxy popular among Democratic and Republican elites — but out of favor with much of Middle America. Accusing China of unfair trade practices, he placed tariffs on more than $300 billion worth of Chinese goods. Mr. Biden has maintained these tariffs, lending Mr. Trump’s act bipartisan legitimacy. Mr. Trump also pulled the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the free-trade agreement supported by the Obama administration. Mr. Trump’s economic record is now his main selling point in 2024. Voters may regard his businessman’s instincts as preferable to the formal training of economists, especially in the face of inflationary pressures that many economists understated.
On foreign policy Mr. Trump displayed a prudence and a willingness to negotiate that was at odds with the strident post-Sept. 11 tendencies of both parties. In 2019, for example, he defied hawks such as Mike Pompeo, his secretary of state, and John Bolton, his national security adviser, by calling off a planned missile strike in response to Iran’s destruction of a U.S. drone. Mr. Trump argued that an attack that could kill 150 people wasn’t “proportionate to shooting down an unmanned drone.”
On social issues, Mr. Trump has also positioned himself as a kind of moderate. Though he championed the overturning of Roe v. Wade and has charged Democrats with supporting laws that make it legal to “rip the baby out of the womb” in the ninth month of pregnancy, he has also broken with abortion opponents. After Mr. DeSantis signed Florida’s ban on abortions after six weeks, Mr. Trump called the move “a terrible mistake.” Mr. Trump’s critics on the right often accuse him of being insufficiently committed to conservative social views. That may be true — but it is hardly an electoral liability. By criticizing both late-term abortions and the most comprehensive restrictions on access, Mr. Trump has managed to reflect the muddled views held by much of the electorate.
Consider, too, controversies over gender and sexuality. Mr. Trump did not hesitate to approve limits on transgender people in the military. But no one mistakes him for a Bible-believing evangelical or Midwestern moralist. His irreverent demeanor and promises to “protect our L.G.B.T.Q. citizens” are a reminder that life in New York’s real-estate and media worlds taught him a rough form of tolerance, however politically incorrect he may be. (Senator Ted Cruz of Texas was pointing to this reality in 2016 when he accused Mr. Trump of embodying “New York values.”) In this way, Mr. Trump represents a conservatism that has come to terms with the fact of diversity, even as it resists the left’s understanding of everything “diversity” should mean.
The campaign has boasted of Mr. DeSantis’s uncompromising conservatism and sought to deploy the quasi-ironic aesthetic radicalism of the online right. One video it created this year criticized Mr. Trump for promising to protect L.G.B.T.Q. people, and bragged that Mr. DeSantis had signed “extreme” and “draconian” laws. Another video made by a campaign aide superimposed a sonnenrad, a symbol associated with neo-Nazis, over Mr. DeSantis’s face. Mr. DeSantis’s subsequent slide in the polls reflects a host of factors, including his reserved personality, but his dead-on-arrival attempt to channel the energy of the online right suggests that its “meme magic” isn’t the reason for Mr. Trump’s success.
To be sure, Mr. Trump has had contacts with members of the bizarre right-wing fringe, most famously in a dinner last year to which the performer Kanye West (now known as Ye) brought Nick Fuentes, an outspoken racist and antisemite. But Mr. Trump differs in significant ways from the extremists with whom he is sometimes identified. For example, he has pushed for criminal justice reform, signing the First Step Act — a bipartisan measure denounced by Mr. DeSantis as a “jailbreak bill” — and explicitly promoting it as part of his outreach to Black Americans.
More recently, Mr. Trump shared on social media the results of a Reuters investigation that found he was the only living American president who wasn’t descended from slaveholders. (“I hope that every African American in our country is reading this right now,” he wrote. “Remember!”) In the eyes of some conservative critics, Mr. Trump had lent credence to the case for reparations. It is well known that the left objects to Mr. Trump’s record on race, but — more quietly — so does the right. This underappreciated fact may help to explain why Mr. Trump has increased his support among Black voters.
Of course, Mr. Trump has not been moderate at every moment or on every issue. Looking ahead to a second term, he and his policy team promise to use the U.S. military to attack drug cartels in Mexico and overhaul civil-service rules to allow him to aggressively reshape the federal bureaucracy. His vow to appoint “a real special prosecutor to go after” Mr. Biden should prompt a more serious consideration of the arguments some have made that special prosecutors are inconsistent with our legal traditions.
Claims from Trump campaign officials that some of the most ambitious of these proposals are “purely speculative” and “merely suggestions” may be an attempt to obscure the full extent of Mr. Trump’s ambitions. Or perhaps those proposals reflect his longstanding negotiating strategy of talking big before making more modest deals. A second Trump term may indeed be more radical and less pragmatic than the first; it’s a possibility voters can’t dismiss, but also one that his first term gives them reason to discount.
Perhaps that disparity reflects a lack of knowledge about the extent of Mr. Trump’s plans. Or it may indicate widespread dissatisfaction with the present state of affairs. In October, staff members from Customs and Border Protection interacted with more than 240,000 people who attempted to enter the United States along the southern border, and between October 2022 and September of this year, 169 people whose names matched those on the terrorist watch list were arrested while trying to cross.
Indeed, it is easy to overstate how radical Mr. Trump’s record is on immigration. Mr. Biden kept in place Title 42, a Covid-era measure that Mr. Trump had used to speed deportations, and expanded its use before ending it this year. In 2021, Mr. Biden declared that “building a 
It is also worth considering that many voters may not consider Mr. Trump’s excesses to be as unusual as his opponents do. They may regard the events of Jan. 6, for example, as comparable to the violence that occurred after the death of George Floyd (when protests outside the White House resulted in the injury of more than 60 Secret Service agents and more than 50 members of the U.S. Park Police).
They may regard Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election results as not altogether unlike Mrs. Clinton’s statement that she “would not” rule out questioning the legitimacy of the 2016 election over claims of Russian collusion. Whether or not such equivalences are warranted, they are available to voters who remain angry that Mr. Trump’s opponents, including elected officials, challenged the legitimacy of his presidency even before he first took office — and seem no less committed to the project today.
If support for Mr. Trump really did indicate an incipient radicalism in the American electorate, such legal actions would be more understandable. Their political costs, however grave, would be easier to justify. But even those who think that some of the indictments of Mr. Trump are well grounded might conclude that the costs of prosecution, given the possible appearance of a partisan motive, are too high — that they pose the sort of threat to democratic norms that they purport to guard against.
