THE TRUMP SUPPORTERS WHO DON'T REALLY SEEM TO SUPPORT TRUMPISM

I keep thinking about a short piece that just appeared in The Wall Street Jornal under the headline "America Watches One Shooting and Comes to Two Different Conclusions" (free to read here).

The headline is misleading: the story is based on a series of person-in-the-street interviews, but they're not just about the murder of Renee Good, and the interviewees' responses don't show the public sorting itself neatly into two ideological camps.

Most of the interviewees are Trump supporters, and they're not entirely at ease with everything the administration has done this year.

To Lori Lutz, a Trump voter in Fort Wayne, Ind., the killing was the consequence of presidential overreach....

Lutz, 56, a former retail pharmacy manager, said she wanted Trump to remove undocumented immigrants who she said were taking factory jobs in her state. But when she saw the video of the Minneapolis shooting, she thought, “Here we are overreaching again. It was an abuse of power...This storm trooper house-by-house stuff—everyone is scared about it.”

And there's this man:

Good’s shooting “was like two days ago, and Venezuela was like two days before that,” said Anthonny Gutierrez, 23, a Trump voter near Sacramento, referring to the capture of Venezuela’s now-former leader by U.S. forces. “We don’t know what’s going to come tomorrow.” ...

Gutierrez said the Minneapolis shooting looked to him as if it was a case of “force that shouldn’t have been used” and that Trump’s approach to immigration enforcement has been too sweeping.

“I do agree with them getting the people that deserve it, who may have criminal records and aren’t cooperating with the law,” said Gutierrez, who works for a roofing company and is of Mexican heritage. “But if people aren’t doing bad to the country or they’re working and doing nothing wrong—those people should have a chance to stay, maybe.”

And this woman:

Michelle Adkisson-Redwine, a three-time Trump voter in Richmond, Ind., said she is largely happy with Trump’s performance in his second term. But the 36-year-old accounting firm owner is conflicted about some aspects of his policies, including the mass deportation effort.

“I’m OK with it, but I’m not OK with it,” she said. While some news coverage of ICE enforcement is overblown, she said, federal agents at times are “overstepping their boundaries.” Her mixed feelings extend to those ICE is arresting. She supports the removal of anyone who commits crimes, but doesn’t think the U.S. should deport someone brought illegally to the country decades ago as a child.

Adkisson-Redwine said she is withholding judgment about Wednesday’s fatal shooting. The video she saw of the encounter left her with more questions than answers: “Why was that person there? Why was ICE there? Like, why were they in that street? What was her intention? Did it require the use of deadly force? I don’t know.”

As for Trump’s muscular exercise of executive power, she said she likes that he is getting things done. But she questions moves such as the military’s capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

“I don’t like us going into other countries at all, even if they have a dictator and we make the dictator go away. I mean, why aren’t we doing it in North Korea? Then why aren’t we doing it in Russia? Why are we not doing it in China?” she said. Whatever the motivation, she added, “we have to take care of our citizens first.”

If any of these people are sincerely troubled, I don't know who speaks for them, or who could. I'm not here to play Ezra Klein and say that the Democratic Party needs right-centrists who'll advocate a kinder, gentler Trumpism -- but I wonder what the country would be like if there were room for someone who reflected that point of view. Would it be a bridge away from smashmouth Republicanism for people who can't quite bring themselves to align with even moderate Democrats?

I've occasionally had the thought that America doesn't need a third party -- it needs a third party and a fourth party. It could use two new parties, each of which would be to the left of one of the current major parties. (Establishment voices would say that the current Democratic Party is too left-leaning and might benefit from a right-leaning sister party, but that's nonsense.) The moderate Republican party might address the low-level anxiety about Trump and remind his softer supporters that America's government doesn't have to be arbitrary, terrifying, and brutal, and it isn't supposed to be that way.

But this couldn't happen -- even squeamish members of the current GOP would never leave, because it's safer to be inside the tent supporting trump's reign of terror than it would be proposing a more thoughtful approach to conservatism. And, of course, the way the current GOP runs is extremely effective. The reason the GOP incessantly focuses on demonization and culture wars is that it ensures a reliable vote for the party -- and that keeps the party in position to decrease taxes and regulations on rich donors. The plutocrats perhaps didn't realize that "culture war" would eventually mean "tanks in the streets in multiple cities" -- but it's still working for the them at a tax and regulatory level, so they're cool with it.

I don't know how my four-party system would work in practice, but I'm taken by the idea that no party would ever win an absoulte majority in Congress again, so negotations would be necessary before every congressional session just to put leaders in place, just as in actually civilized countries with parliamentary systems. It would be especially good if the existence of four parties led to the creation of even more parties. That would break the "duopoly."

Of course, ideally, I'd rather have a progressive government, and a Fox/Trump GOP weakened and brought low by general societal revulsion. But I know how unlikely that is to happen. It might have been possible once, but Democrats have allowed the GOP to demonize them so thoroughly over the past several decades that I think it will be a struggle for them to regain a truly dominant position in American politics.

I expect Democrats to eke out wins in 2026 and possibly 2028, but I don't see a shift away from this permanent culture war. Maybe it could happen in a country where the smashmouth/culture-war party represented only a quarter or a third of America. But it still represents the people quoted in this article, even if they;re squeamish about it.