Trump: A killer steroid

By Christopher Tidmore
Contributing Columnist

When my progressive friends ask me, a Never Trump Republican, why my fellow members of the GOP continue to ardently support the president, I offer a very odd metaphor in reply: “Trump is like an anabolic steroid, which brought vigor and victory early on – and now brings craziness, defeat and ultimately death. That is, unless the athlete has the strength to quit. But most Republicans are hooked on the feeling, and cannot let it go. They like how ‘he fights’ and think if they cast Trump away, the party will lose. However, most Republicans ignore the fact that they have twice seen defeat of late, most particularly losing the Senate in Georgia because of Trump.”

Despite what a few Democrats suggest, most of Trump’s support does not emerge because rank-and-file Republicans are fundamentally racist. Many are, of course, but not the majority. Some members of the GOP are just proverbial sheep. These people, over the last few years have merely followed the crowd, a natural human instinct upon which many totalitarian regimes have depended. Chris Matthews once quipped about the psychological nature of the partisan rank-and-file, “Republicans fall in line; Democrats fall in love.”

Most of the GOP electorate, though, are not just followers. They would respond to the query that they remain loyal to Donald Trump because “he fights.” The president’s constant support has to do with the fact that he appears to battle Democrats, employing a vocal testosterone that the average Republican wished previous, establishment GOP presidents displayed more often. Because Trump proved so stunningly victorious in 2016, and partially in the U.S. Senate races in 2018, the Republican electorate has come to see Trump’s pugnaciousness to a key element to Republican success. Whilst most Independents and Democrats are repelled by his tweets and controversies, GOP voters see Trump’s aggressive attitude as a “willingness to do battle” and the only way that they can win – in a country that increasingly turns to the center-left. Trump’s macho outrageousness gets the white working class, some disaffected minorities, and the generally angry to come to the polls.

Whether the average member of the GOP realizes it or not, Trump is like some performance-enhancing steroid. The drug makes the athlete win more often and play more aggressively. That is until it makes you crazy, and ultimately kills you. That is what happened in Georgia. Last week, this column noted that JMC Analytics’ John Couvillon was the only pollster accurately to predict the narrow Democratic advantage in the Peach State U.S. Senate races. The Louisiana-based, normally Republican pollster, was the only analyst to call Georgia correctly, in part because he alone realized two facts. First, his polling of the 2015 and 2019 Louisiana gubernatorial races revealed that African American turnout did not measurably decrease from the primary to the runoff. In a pro-Democratic environment, especially one where a Black candidate like the Rev. Rapheal Warnock ran for the Senate, African-American enthusiasm would be very high.

Second, his data suggested that suburban Republicans who voted for David Perdue and Joe Biden in the primary, who cast a ballot for the GOP down-ticket and Democrat for president, might attempt to “send a message” of displeasure with Donald Trump by staying home on January 5, 2021.

As Couvillon explained in an interview with The Louisiana Weekly, if Donald Trump had conceded the presidential election a month before, and focused his energies on Georgia, the GOP Senate candidates likely would have emerged victorious.

Couvillon concluded that if Trump had not stayed focused on trying to overturn the electoral vote majority after December 14, 2020, the Georgia Senate races and GOP control of the U.S. Senate might have remained in the Republican column. “With just 10,000 votes separating the candidates, that’s a reasonable suspicion,” he concluded. Trump’s pugnaciousness, Trump’s unwillingness to know when to stop fighting, caused disaster for the GOP.

Many Republicans continue to believe that only Donald Trump’s macho bearing will keep Caucasian working class voters and a growing minority of Hispanics and African Americans in the GOP coalition. Certainly, like a steroid, the pugnaciousness caught the attention of these voters in 2016, yet increasingly dire economic circumstances merged a progressive disdain for the socially conservative beliefs that these constituencies hold might have more to do with Obama-Trump cross-electorates than any single candidate’s rhetoric. Therefore, as Trump alienates educated suburban GOP voters today, in a way that these voters were willing to overlook in 2016, his utility as an asset to the Republican Party has run its course. To lose the suburbs and gain the white working class is not a viable coalition. The GOP needs both. The once useful anabolic steroid now causes more damage to the GOP body politic than help.

This article originally published in the January 18, 2021 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.