“According to Axios, in 2016 ‘20% off Trump’s voters told exit pollsters they didn’t like him,’” Mark Thiessen wrote Friday in the Washington Post. “These reluctant Trump voters put Trump in the White House and are critical to his keeping it in 2020.”
The problem for Trump, Thiessen says, is that he has done nothing at all to cement their affections. A Democrat who isn’t Hillary Clinton could yet win them — or perhaps another candidate from within their own party, who voices what are their concerns.
The problem with the Never-Trumpers, who claim they don’t care who wins as long as Trump loses, is that they aren’t trying to look for a candidate who might appeal to disappointed Trump voters, but for someone they’d vote for themselves.
Hence their ability to see saviors in every Trump skeptic around — in the hapless Jeff Flake, in gadfly John Kasich, even in Mark Sanford, the governor who stunned, shocked, and mortified his party, his state, and his wife and four children when he deserted them all for a femme fatale from the Pampas. And having inflicted the maximum strain, pain, and grief on all his connections, Sanford walked out on her, too.
But nothing says “odd” more than their latest dark horses. One is William Weld, epitome of the out-of-touch and exhausted establishment. The other is Joe Walsh, epitome of the forces the Welds of the world find most repugnant, who now claims to be seeing the light.
Weld, governor of Massachusetts back in the mid-1990s but now a professional dilettante twenty-three years out of office, is the epitome of the forces against whom Trump was rebelling. He is the last person living to whom a struggling worker somewhere in the Rust Belt would look to for help or support. He held his fund-raising debut at an actual party in Georgetown, and his entire life’s experience has been within the top .01% of the population. He grew up on a 600-acre estate on Long Island. He wrote his senior thesis at Harvard on how “the commonly accepted Latin text of passages by elegiac poet Sextus Propertius was wrong because of mistranscription by scribes.”
Weld’s political profile — extreme fiscal austerity, coupled with extreme contempt for the social conservatives — is at the opposite end of the pole from that of Trump and his backers. One could say the Welds of the world helped create the Trump moment.
They also helped create Joe Walsh, the Tea Partier. In a pre-Trump world, he was a crude, sometimes racist member of Congress, who became a crude, sometime-racist radio host when he lost an election. He has lately become a vocal Trump critic after deciding, for undisclosed reasons, that Trump went too far.
After a brief pause — ”He fights!” — Walsh was turned down by the anti-Trump movement, which realized in time he would tarnish its moral credentials. Both the Walsh and Weld temptations, to become Trump, or to despise and ignore his supporters, must be resisted.
Trump won in 2016, not because of racists, but because one-fourth of the country was in a depression which no one else seemed to notice, and millions more feared their religious convictions were in danger of being outlawed. If the never-Trumpers want to succeed, they must resist embracing the likes of Weld or Walsh, and instead find and speak to this group of voters.
