Trump might be the most narcissistic person alive, but he's done a better job at making Republican voters feel engaged in his presidential campaign than his nearest rival, Ron DeSantis. Immediately after Trump's most recent indictment, he pinned a message to the top of his Truth Social feed: “THEY’RE NOT COMING AFTER ME, THEY’RE COMING AFTER YOU—I’M JUST STANDING IN THEIR WAY!” He said this in his first speech after the recent indictment. He also said it in March when his New York indictment was imminent. He said it when he was president:
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 19, 2019
There's no way someone as self-involved as Trump would think of saying this on his own. Someone must have fed him the line years ago. But it works, for reasons I'm sure Trump doesn't understand.
Part of the evil genius of Fox News and the rest of the right-wing media is personalization of the news. I don't mean in a realistic way -- I mean in a delusional way. The message of Fox and the rest of the right-wing media is THEY'RE COMING FOR YOU! In April of last year, The New York Times published an analysis of hundreds of Tucker Carlson broadcasts and noted that his go-to message was that "they" want to do bad things to "you."
To the right, the arrests and convictions that followed January 6 are proof of concept. People aren't being arrested and convicted because they're actually guilty of crimes -- they're being arrested and convicted because they're out to get you. This particular message didn't come from Trump -- it came from the right-wing misinformation machine, and Trump eventually picked it up. The misinformation machine (which includes many Republican members of Congress) offers other examples of them being out to get you, including the alleged Justice Department targeting of right-wingers for speaking out at school board meetings. (The Justice Department was actually concerned about violent threats in response to school issues.) Trump has barely focused on this, but the rest of the right is obsessed with this and other alleged examples of "weaponization of government."
This all has the effect of making ordinary voters feel as if they're just like Trump -- the evil Regime is targeting them just the way it's targeting him. The regime is targeting him because it fears them. They're fighting alongside their manly hero! And the Deep State fears them just as much!
Ron DeSantis doesn't give voters anything like this sence of vicarious persecution. In the DeSantis narrative, the good people of America are victimized by evil wokeism, but the solution is for the people to sit back and passively watch as Ron DeSantis clinically excises woke from American life. If you're on the right, that seems swell, which is why he's in second place in the polls -- but where's the fun? Or, more accurately, where's the delicious grievance? Where's the sense that you're fighting alongside a superhero?
In the Trump narrative, there's a first-person-shooter fantasy: You are the target of the most evil forces in the world, and you get to shoot at them. In the DeSantis narrative, he does all the killing, and he insists that he's already done most of the work, at least in Florida, so there's nothing participatory about what he's doing. The Trump narrative plus the Fox narrative encourages voters to believe that they're just like the heroic billionaire who takes incoming for Freedom.
No wonder Trump is beating DeSantis by more than two to one. For right-wing voters, the persecution fantasy is fun.
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