A lifelong Democrat, she said in the poll that she would vote for Mr. Trump over Mr. Biden, whom she called “too old and a bit out of touch” and “a bit of a doofus.” Yet she believes the problems in the country had more to do with gerrymandered congressional districts than with Mr. Biden. By the end of the interview, she said she “will likely vote for him again — I’m just not happy about it.”
“Honestly, it was more of a choice of it just not being Joe Biden,” said Clara Carrillo-Hinojosa, a 21-year-old financial analyst in Las Vegas, of her support for Ms. Harris. She said she would probably vote for Mr. Trump: “Personally, I think we were doing a lot better when he was in the presidency, price-wise, money-wise, income-wise.
Yet in some ways, Ms. Carrillo-Hinojosa is the kind of voter Mr. Biden hopes he can win once people start focusing on the race. Mr. Trump has offended her as a woman, she said, and she likes some of what Mr. Biden has done, including his support for Israel.
“My biggest thing is not seeing America fall in shambles,” he said. “With this war I think Biden is way too lenient — with Hamas, Iran, Iraq, the whole nine yards. What I like about Trump is he was keeping everybody at bay and not wanting to mess with America.”
Mr. Maxon, who is Black, said Mr. Trump had made racist remarks, yet he plans to vote for him. “He’s helped out countless Black people, more than Biden did by a landslide,” he said. Specifically, he said, it was through pandemic unemployment assistance and other relief funding at the start of the pandemic (the Biden administration also distributed relief funding).
He absolutely does. The guy lives and dies by his name, and he wants Americans to remember him as a hero. He’ll likely get his wish, too. I have no doubt that, twenty years from now, we’re going to have some Thomas Sowell / Ross Perot / Milton Friedman analog leading up the “Trump Institute” in the same way the Hoover Institute and the assorted Eisenhower, LBJ, Reagan, and Clinton revisionists rebranded their old meal tickets’ reputations.
Like Reagan before him, Trump wants to be an icon that points the way for the party of the future. But he’s not terribly good at building organization. It congeals around his personality, but isn’t easily transferable even to his immediate family. He’s certainly tried to transfer that image, if for no other reason that it would have allowed him to cultivate allies in Congress and the judiciary more easily. But all he ever really gets is a bunch of yes-men aping him while running off on their own personal agendas the moment they’re in office.
That’s the real legacy of Trump. Folks are going to be arguing about “True Trumpism” long after he kicks it, but it’ll be that much more word salad. None of his political ideologue will carry forward, because that ideology is still rooted in the old National Socialism of his father’s generation and it is antithetical to modern American business theory. But folks running around in bronzer and saying “I’m just like Trump”? That’ll echo for a generation.