EVEN WHEN REPUBLICANS WERE VOTING FOR MAINSTREAM CANDIDATES, TRUMPISM IS WHAT THEY WANTED

Jonathan Chait tries to imagine a normal Trump presidency:

In an alternate reality, Trump’s 2024 victory paved the way for a traditionally successful presidency with broad popularity and concrete policy achievements. After the election, his polling numbers shot up, and numbed Democrats retreated into self-doubt; some of them concluded that their best path forward lay in working with the new president. Congress formed a bipartisan DOGE caucus of members eager to eliminate inefficiencies in government. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, at the time perhaps the Democratic Party’s best-positioned 2028 presidential contender, sent a letter to Trump offering cooperation.

Chait recognizes that Trump had no interest in that sort of presidency:

In the real world, despite the obvious opportunity, Trump never tested the possibilities for constructive engagement....

The available evidence suggests that Trump could never imagine supporting a piece of legislation proposed by a political opponent merely because it advanced some worthwhile policy goal. (That is why passing an infrastructure bill and bolstering domestic manufacturing of silicon chips ranked among Trump’s highest stated priorities, until President Joe Biden passed these ideas into law, at which point they became disasters to be repealed.) ...

Instead of working within the system, he set out to crush the opposition. He ... has used the threat of investigation, prosecution, and punitive defunding to extort media owners, law firms, and universities into compliance. He has attempted to establish, in his immigration-enforcement powers, the ability to disappear people who may or may not have committed crimes, and may or may not even reside in the country illegally, brushing aside court orders to stop.

And Chait knows that Trump has surrounded himself with like-minded people:

Trump’s allies do not recognize any legitimate place for democratic opposition. They have come to see all of progressivism as a false consciousness implanted in an unwitting populace by a handful of puppet masters in academia, philanthropy, media, and Hollywood. Their operating theory is that, by cutting off funds, they can uproot liberal ideology itself.

Chait says that "Trump and his inner circle have consciously patterned themselves after Viktor Orbán’s regime in Hungary." But Republicans were illiberal -- or at least opposed to treating the Democratic Party as legitimate -- long before they discovered Orbán.

Grover Norquist, the best-known anti-tax activist, said that "bipartisanship is another name for date rape" in 2003. That was during the George W. Bush presidency, which began with the pursuit of a bipartisan education bill but then moved on to highly partisan tax cuts and a post-9/11 national security strategy that relied on torture and legally dubious overseas prisons. Bush fired U.S. attorneys who wouldn't pursue cases invoving nonexistent Democratic electoral fraud (and, of course, he'd won the White House by means of a disputed vote count in the home state of his governor brother, a victory endorsed by the Bushes' party-mates on the Supreme Court).

Rank-and-file Republicans cheered that electoral victory and agreed with the allegations of voter fraud because even then they didn't believe that Democratic votes were legitimate. They believed that Democrats won elections because undocumented immigrants voted for the party or because Democratic voters are brainwashed by, as Chait puts it, "a handful of puppet masters in academia, philanthropy, media, and Hollywood." They've wanted to defund public broadcating since the early 1980s; Andrew Breitbart began quoting the aphorism "Politics is downstream from culture" as a means of explaining that alleged brainwashing during Barack Obama's first term.

In the pre-Trump years, even when Republican voters settled on Mitt Romney and John McCain as party standard-bearers, they craved more, perking up in 2008 only when the charismatic demagogue Sarah Palin joined the ticket and embracing would-be authoritarians Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum in 2012 before Mitt Romney's money sank their campaigns. Trump is the kind of president they've always wanted, the fantasy avenger from the QAnon posts so many of them binge-consumed during the height of the COVID pandemic.

That's why no Republican has had what Chait calls a "traditionally successful presidency" in decades. Playing well with others simply isn't "traditional" in the GOP. What's traditional is a craving for jackbooted thuggery.