'Raw animosity': 4 conservatives explain why MAGA voters 'want their opponents to suffer'

21 March

MAGA hat. James McNellis/Wikimedia commons

In the 2024, voters who helped put Donald Trump back in the White House ranged from hardcore MAGA Republicans to swing voters and independents — some of them 2020 Joe Biden voters — who blamed the Biden Administration for inflation. The economy was a major concern of Biden-to-Trump voters, and the term "buyer's remorse" is being used in connection with swing voters and independents who now regret voting for Trump and are worried about steep new tariffs or possible cuts to Social Security.

But diehard MAGA voters have no regrets about voting for Trump. In a conversation published by the New York Times' opinion section on March 21, four conservative columnists — David Brooks, David French, Bret Stephens and Ross Douthat — lay out some reasons why those voters continue to be diehard Trump supporters.

The writers aren't promoting Trump's policies during the conversation — French, in fact, is very much a Never Trump conservative — but rather, are explaining the president's unending appeal to his hardcore MAGA base.

Brooks cited "brokenism" as a key reason for their support. The columnist describes "brokenism" as "the idea that everything is broken and we just need to burn it all down."

Brooks told his Times colleagues, "Personally, I think some things are broken and some things are OK, but most of my Trump-supporting friends are brokenists. They get this from media consumption."

French, who is a scathing critic of Trump but also has major complaints about the left, interjected, "In addition to the brokenism that David talks about, there's a strong undercurrent of raw animosity in our politics. Republicans and Democrats have very negative views of each other, and many Republicans, sadly, want their opponents to suffer. They're actually happy to see people lose their jobs or to see nonprofits lose funding if those people are perceived as part of the 'deep state' or RINOs. So, yes, Republicans want a disruptive president, but who's being disrupted really matters — and if it's the government or institutions that many Republicans believe are hostile to them, then Republicans are just fine with the pain."

French added, "Many Republicans dislike foreign aid. Or loathe elite universities. Or hate big liberal law firms. Students and professors at elite universities have a long track record of targeting the free speech rights of their conservative colleagues, and Republicans are rationalizing their own constitutional violations as fighting fire with fire."

According to Brooks, diehard MAGA voters enjoy seeing him target institutions they feel excluded form.

Brooks told French, Douthat and Stephens, "I'd offer up one more word for consideration: 'exclusion.' Progressives really have spent the last few decades excluding conservative and working-class voices from a lot of institutions. Trump has gone after these institutions big time — the universities, the Department of Education, the State Department. Of course, the MAGA crowd feels justified revenge."

Douthat alluded to the fact that Trump's strongest support continues to be within the MAGA movement.

Douthat told his colleagues, "First, I would stress that Trump is not terribly popular, and undoubtedly will become less so if the stock market trends down and recession fears mount. He has a commanding position within his party, but even at his apotheosis, his approval ratings barely got over 50 percent. Second, Americans lived through the first Trump term, when sky-is-falling rhetoric was commonplace, but the average American did not experience a crisis until COVID hit."

Read the full New York Times article at this link (subscription required).

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