DAVID FRUM:
There's no mystery about this election. Trump's party talked itself into the idea that their guy led some mighty popular movement. In fact a voting majority of Americans have rejected Trump and Trumpism every chance they got since 2015. Now they're readying to do it again.
Trump lost the popular vote by 3 million in 2016. He lost the popular vote by 7 million in 2020. He was under 50% approval in every reputable poll every single damn day of his presidency.
Trump's party lost the House in 2018. Trump's party lost the US Senate in 2021, because Trump personally cost the GOP two Senate seats in Georgia. In 2022, Trump's party lost -1 in Senate, -2 governorships, -4 state chambers. An expected "red wave" in the House proved a trickle.
For Trump, Republicans repudiated their former political principles on everything from NATO to trade. For Trump, they acquiesced in a violent coup against the Constitution. For Trump, they jettisoned the family and sexual morality they supposedly cherished. All - to lose.
How to explain this self-deception? Some of the self-deceived lived in ideological ghettoes sealed from real-world information. Some were just eager to believe self-gratifying lies no matter how plainly false. But I think two other things entered it ...
1) Because Trump is himself so financially corrupt, he wrecked many of the formal and informal restraints against using politics as a vehicle for self-enrichment. Many grifters got a lot richer in the Trump era than they would have under other management.
2) Because Trump is such an all-around terrible person, his example gave permission to many people to explore and indulge the darkest parts of their own personalities. People who might once have struggled to be better delighted in being worse. Bad politics; potent psychology.
For the millions of people for whom politics is about self-validation rather than governance - Trump made life more fun, more fulfilling. *He* said it from the White House. *They* could say it on Facebook or at the PTA. That was worth losing a few state legislative chambers!
If this explanation of Trump's otherwise destructive hold on the GOP is correct, one more election loss may not change anything. A Harris presidency opens the door to four exciting years of trash-talking, if that's what you like to do. As we've learned, many people do like it.
An elite few in the GOP care about outcomes. Trump seemed to offer a mesmerizing opportunity: a way to convert 46% of the vote into control of the executive branch. Some racism, some corruption, some authoritarianism was (to them) well worth the prize.
