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Mehmet Oz and Donald Trump on "Dr. Oz," the television show on which Oz shared misleading and scientifically unfounded medical advice.
Liberal cable news commentators have recently been alerting their audiences that they don’t like talking about a certain former President’s ongoing influence within the Republican Party, but have no choice. This was particularly true when Trump-endorsed Alex Mooney beat fellow House incumbent David McKinley in West Virginia by painting McKinley as too moderate for supporting the widely popular bipartisan infrastructure bill that would bring resources to their own state.
Liberal media’s Trumpism fatigue is a reprise of their 2016 revulsion toward—and, more importantly, incomprehension of—Trump’s appeal to so many voters.
Trumpism, it would seem, can do fine even when Trump himself tries to shift an election the other way.
The denialism is happening again, and it will do just as little good this time as it did in 2016, because it is clear from the recent spate of primaries—from Ohio to Pennsylvania to Georgia—that Trumpism has evolved into a brand, even a coherent philosophy, quite independent of Trump himself. It is now a much more powerful force than it was a few years ago. And to dismiss it as the rantings and ravings of a few extremist far-right primary candidates, or to argue that it does not address real needs and desires among real people, would be a tremendous mistake.
Predictably, the media make too much out of Trumpist setbacks here and there, such as David Perdue—losing to Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and not convincingly extending the insinuation about the 2020 election to a broader “America First” agenda, as many of the successful Republican primary candidates have done. But rather than getting distracted by a loss or a victory in a certain race, which can sometimes depend on candidate quality or circumstances particular to a state like Georgia, we must keep the overall picture in mind.
Two of the most revealing recent primaries, where candidates ran away with Trumpism as it has evolved in the last seven years, are much better bellwethers of what’s to come.
J.D. Vance came from far behind to win convincingly in Ohio after Trump endorsed him, despite a prior history of Vance, particularly during the 2016 election, denigrating his now-adopted idol. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, which was released in the summer of 2016 but caught fire after the Trump victory, can be boiled down to a simple message: Join the military, believe in Christianity, and trust in technocratic education. But what’s really remarkable is not that Vance was able to climb the social ladder with a Yale Law School degree, but that he’s been able to overcome his early antipathy toward Trump to become a full-fledged America First club member.
Vance, like former Pennsylvania rivals Mehmet Oz and David McCormick, explicitly rejects immigration, free trade (particularly with China), and offshoring jobs—the three main components of “globalism.” Their America First nationalism rests on a return to a mythical era of shared prosperity and common values by way of Christianity, old-fashioned patriotism, and rejection of every element of what Newt Gingrich and Pat Robertson used to assail as “secular humanism.”
Even Trump’s attack on the results of the 2020 election has morphed into a much larger critique of protecting the sanctity of the electoral balance as it used to be rather than succumbing to “woke” political rearrangements.
Trumpism, it would seem, can do fine even when Trump himself tries to shift an election the other way.
A popular candidate named Kathy Barnette came out of the blue in Pennsylvania, without Trump’s endorsement, and managed to almost dethrone Oz as the favorite, cutting into the same base. But Trump was able to stop her momentum at the last minute by questioning the gaps in her background, and in the end Oz barely won.
Barnette argued that Trumpism didn’t belong to Trump, and that she was the true America First candidate. In the fraught moment just after the revelation of the leaked draft of Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, Barnette made a virtue out of being “a byproduct of rape,” explicitly rejecting that exception by way of personal testimony, and generally came across as more extreme than Trump.
Brad Raffensperger, who stood in the way of Trump when the defeated President asked the Georgia secretary of state to “find the votes” to help overturn the 2020 election, won handily against Jody Hice, a proponent of the “Big Lie” and Trump’s favored candidate. But while this would seem to be a rejection of the Trumpist creed that liberals regularly “steal” elections, it’s more reflective of a desire to move forward rather than to look backward, as Raffensperger is a fierce advocate of voter suppression.
Georgia football star Herschel Walker, who is pure America First, might well defeat incumbent Raphael Warnock in the U.S. Senate race, if galloping inflation and deteriorating economic conditions hold true for the rest of the year.
Likewise, if Trump doesn’t decide to run in 2024, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis could become a rising star within the Trump wing of the Republican party in his place. He is the most articulate America Firster out there, and it is notable that—though he is a founding member of the Freedom Caucus in the House—it was Trump who enabled him to refine his thought process. DeSantis, unlike Trump when he was President, has not hesitated to deploy the maximum powers of government in his state to oppose mask mandates and lockdowns, which is extremely popular among the America First crowd.
America First, it’s clear, will continue to grow as liberals continue to refuse to address the roots of populist nationalism: the longer economic inequality is ignored, the more empowered the far right will become to fill in the gap on its own.
Liberals continue to have blind faith in meritocracy, which manifests in technocratic expertise, cultural “wokeness,” and clear winners and losers in corporate globalization. But meritocracy’s tendency to rationalize inequality has at last found a powerful and rapidly evolving counter-critique in the America First agenda. Thus it is that Oz, McCormick, Vance, DeSantis—and no doubt future America First stars—are able to generate vast populist appeal despite their own elite training.
It is a mistake to continue focusing on Trump’s quirky personality; political reality has moved well beyond it.