Maybe More Features on the Forgotten Trump Voter will Solve Our Problems?

The top story on Fox News.com is “Politico reporter: Trump base is ‘getting stronger’ since he left office, impeachment would only empower him” There are multiple motivations for posting this story. All of them cynical. First, it gets clicks. Second, the clicks seem derived from the sort of anti-elite, anti-media sentiment that Trump has harnassed. Third, it signals to Republicans wavering that they should not turn against Trump. These motivations make sense for an institution like FoxNews that has profited enormously on Trump, they do not make any sense for anyone who cares about the future of this country.

The top story on one of the most profitable media organizations is that a reporter for politico went on MSNBC to detail how trump voters in Wyoming still like Trump. The point of this article is how mainstream institutions like Politico and MSNBC shouldn’t ignore Trump voters. Those who click on that FoxNews post will be enraged at Politico and MSNBC for ignoring them. The broader question is, who cares if people who have a cult-like devotion to Donald Trump haven’t lost that cult-like devotion only weeks since he left center-stage. How is that the top story? Why are Politico and MSNBC sending this reporter to Wyoming? Is it solely because it makes them famous and rich?
If you are a wavering Republican, and you see polls that show Trump is still popular with his base, what should that signal to you? To most Republicans, this signals that you should continue to be even more spinelessly sycophantic to Trump. But none of you have Trump’s gift of getting on a microphone and extemporaneously making weird word-associations to the delight of tens of millions. Therefore, when you have a chance to stop him from running 2024, you really should consider it in your interest to defeat him. But Marco Rubio and Rob Portman and the rest are too cowardly to do any such thing.
Imagine if, after 9/11, we saw polls that showed a majority of Middle Eastern Muslims polled claiming that the hijackers were martyrs and treated them the way we do Trump voters? What would we think if we endlessly interviewed those who believed Osama bin Laden was a good leader because he was popular? Maybe we should have tried to understand them. But we should not have tried to mainstream the idea that the hijackers were martyrs. The popularity of Donald Trump must stop being the focus. The malicious behavior of his presidency and the harm it caused needs to be the focus.