The Seductive Charm of Being a Boring Republican

Politics

The Seductive Charm of Being a Boring Republican

The question is not whether Trump will lose his base; it’s whether he’ll turn off everyone else.

Credit: Kin Cheung/Getty Images

George W. Bush’s final approval rating was 34 percent. That’s quite bad—indeed, one of the worst ever. But that still means that some people, many millions, in fact, whether out of red–blue team sports spirit or genuine conviction, thought Bush was doing a good job and probably would have pulled the lever for him a third time if given the chance. 

So this is what you have to keep in mind when you see perfervid considerations of whether Trump is “alienating the base,” whether “MAGA is being torn apart,” and so on. Yes, it looks like Trump is becoming a Boring Republican, perhaps because the fresh stuff he said he’d do is proving to be difficult. (Plus ça change—this happened in his first term, too.) The newly muscular Middle East policy, the indefinite suspension of real trade policy, the dog’s breakfast of Big Beautiful Bill spending, the Epstein circus—for all the frenetic style, this is Boring Republican behavior. This is what Jeb Bush would have done. Some people who voted for Trump and are identified closely with his signature policies are disgruntled about all this.

But that’s not the base. “The base,” rightly understood, would vote for a yellow dog wearing an R button, especially if that dog had a history of winning. That is the base. They don’t actually care much about war or trade, they think entitlement cuts sound pretty dandy, and so on—what they like about Trump is that he is the leader of the GOP and that he wins elections. What they didn’t like about Bush (and not all of them came around to not liking Bush) was that he set up the Republicans for defeat and embarrassment. Bomb Iran, don’t bomb Iran, whatever—just make sure you’re winning, son! That is the hard core of Trump’s support.

And the base is not what made Trump a valuable candidate. It was Trump’s ability to appeal beyond the base that made him a valuable candidate; it was the game of inches among low-propensity white voters, among minorities, among union members who were not necessarily going to chew through concrete for Trump but were willing to support a Republican candidate who seemed to have some fresh or at least different ideas, who didn’t seem like a cutout for the Chamber of Commerce, and who articulated the national malaise of the post–Great Recession era. Trump wasn’t a winning candidate because of his fringe appeal; it was because of his broad appeal, because more and different kinds of people would vote for him than for Willard Romney. (It is worth mentioning, as always, that he was also a winning candidate because of his remarkable luck—Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris were both bad candidates who ran world-historically bad campaigns.)

Our good Jack Hunter wrote this week about the split between “MAGA”—which is “the base” as I’ve articulated it here—and “Ultra-MAGA,” which is the rabble of disaffected Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan voters who actually believe the stuff Trump said about war and trade and federal spending and immigration. (Obviously, there’s a Venn diagram dividing the issues between those two broad groups.) They are the ones who made him the candidate, sure, but in the general election their effect is much smaller than the base and the non-partisan voters Trump was able to draw into the coalition. 

So what if he turns on Ultra-MAGA and transforms into a Boring Republican? 

He’s already got the main thing he needed from them; what are they going to do? Trump has been the singular, if imperfect, vehicle for their policies. There is no alternative. Their position towards him is analogous to pro-lifers’ position towards the Republican Party—the GOP is the only dealer in town, so, if they betray you, what’s your recourse? There’s nowhere else to go. MAGA—the base—will always support him. For Trump, the incentive is to do the easy things, those default Republican policies, and be cheered for doing them, rather than trying to do the hard things he said he’d do and be booed if it doesn’t look like they’re panning out. The $64,000 question is whether governing as a Boring Republican will turn off the non-partisan voters who actually squeaked out the victories in 2016 and especially 2024.

And, all joking aside, Trump is not running again, so he may not in fact care very much about that—unless, perhaps, he thinks keeping the GOP in power is the only way to stay out of jail. And, in that case, if he thinks a Boring Republican is the strongest horse, I think that’s where he’ll put his money down. The question is whether that kind of candidate can win a general election anymore.

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