Former President Donald Trump has been romping his way to victory in primary after primary and looks all but guaranteed to win the nomination for the 2024 election — but that doesn’t actually mean his grip on voters is strong, argued conservative analyst Matt Lewis.
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Rather, he wrote in The Daily Beast on Tuesday, it conceals a fundamental weakness of Trump’s own making.
“For nearly nine years now, Trump has gone out of his way to create a cult-like movement of loyal fanatics, rather than a broad coalition of voters. And a necessary part of this process was purging anyone who wasn’t 100 percent pure,” wrote Lewis.
“Take, for example, Trump’s declaration that Haley supporters are ‘permanently barred from the MAGA camp. We don’t want them, and will not accept them.’ You won’t find that in Dale Carnegie’s ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People,’ but it’s classic Trump.”
This type of attack on voters in his own coalition, wrote Lewis, “is an ethos that has been internalized and repeated by Trump’s cheerleaders” — for example, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) who warned of “completely eradicating” any Republicans who aren’t completely loyal to the former president.
But this sort of strategy has already failed Republicans in critical elections, noted Lewis. Most notably, Kari Lake, who proclaimed that supporters of former Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) can “get the hell out” of the party, then lost the Arizona gubernatorial election and, now that she is running for Senate, is scrambling to make nice with the late McCain’s daughter, who proclaimed there will be “no peace” with her.
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