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What Do Trump Supporters Even Want?
Do they have any idea?

It’s pretty easy to carve out a time of death for the Republican Party’s tombstone. Maybe not down to the minute, but the year is obvious. It was in 2020 when the GOP agreed to cancel their primaries in favor of the Orange Nightmare and adopt no official platform. How can anyone take a political party, a candidate, or their supporters seriously if they don’t even pretend to have policies? A religion with no creed, but that worships the leader is just a cult.
Ideas evolve over time, as do populations, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Take any issue facing us today; there’s a classic Democratic position (with a range for acceptable debate from the centrists to the progressives), a classic Republican position, similarly spread but on the right, and a more-or-less consensus position that the United States has operated under for seventy years. Broadly speaking, growth-based capitalism with socialist elements, democracy with (slowly) expanding civil liberties, rule of law, and a muscular, internationalist foreign policy.
Then, completely separated from morality, reason, and tradition, there is the slapdash, ass-crack, fever dream, Trump position on seemingly everything that actually has nothing to do with traditional American conservatism. I know many readers may look at that and give me a…