THEY JUST WANT A STRONGMAN. THEY DON'T CARE IF IT'S TRUMP.

This exchange took place on Twitter yesterday:

🤔

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 6, 2024

In case you don't know what inspired this:

Actress Gina Carano announced Tuesday she was suing Disney and Lucasfilm for discrimination and wrongful termination ... alleging she was fired for “exercising (her) right to free speech”—and the lawsuit is funded by X and Elon Musk....

Carano said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, that she was fired from “The Mandalorian” by Lucasfilm and Disney after “20 years of building a career from scratch” after she posted things on the platform that were not “in line with the acceptable narrative of the time.”

... Carano said her posts—one of which likened being a Republican in today’s political climate to being Jewish during the Holocaust—were “consistently twisted to demonize & dehumanize me as an alt right wing extremist” ...

There's a widespread belief that the Republican Party is a Donald Trump personality cult. I don't see it that way. Conservatives today flock to anyone they feel can seize power and wield it against the hated pronoun-spewing vaccinated woke cultural-Marxist libs. In electoral politics at the presidential level, that's Trump. But they're happy to follow anyone else who seems able to use clout and muscle to hurt their enemies, especially if they also find that would-be strongman entertaining. If Musk were American-born and thus constitutionally eligible to run for president, I think he could pose a more serious challenge to Trump in the primaries than any of the candidates who actually ran against Trump.

What will Republicans do when Trump is gone? They'll probably shift their allegiance to someone who's a less charismatic authoritarian. I still believe we're underestimating Ron DeSantis's appeal to post-Trump Republican voters, even though he's an unpleasant dullard. As an individual, Greg Abbott is no fun either, but his border stunts infuriate liberals, so maybe GOP voters will flock to him.

Republicans want a strongman who'll simply get stuff done. Trump's base believes that he'll be that strongman if he wins again. (Most liberals also believe this. In liberal America, it's seen as certain that Trump not only will seek to dismantle the institutional guardrails that prevent tyranny in America, but will actually dismantle them. He might, but he might also get distracted by his own desire to save himself from lawsuits and criminal cases, or he might hire guardrail dismantlers as ineptly as he hires lawyers.)

Republicans want a strongman at a time when their "governing wing" can neither govern nor effectively grandstand in Congress. The vote to impeach homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas failed yesterday. The effort to impeachment President Biden seems to be foundering. Republicans misjudged Democrats' willingness to compromise on the border, so their attempt to create a poison-pill border bill linked to Ukraine aid failed -- Democrats didn't think the pill was poison. And Republicans couldn't pass a standalone bill providing aid to Israel.

I wish all this meant that voters will abandon the GOP altogether in November. Maybe it will. But as Daniel Drezner says, "Despite all this GOP dysfunction there are polls showing that Americans believe Donald Trump will be more competent than Joe Biden at running the country." Republicans are ineffective at using the legislative process to either govern or own the libs, so ... let's vote for a Republican who doesn't care about the niceties of the governing process!

They'll transfer their allegiance when Trump is gone, but they'll still be looking for a lib-owning dictator.