Behind Trump’s Hold Over the GOP

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Now, as we heard earlier in the show, in Iowa, Trump strengthened his position as the GOP’s frontrunner. But what keeps Republicans so loyal? One person who has explored Trump’s personality is New York Times columnist Zeynep Tufekci. Her latest piece is “A Strongman President? These Voters Crave It.” And she joins Hari Sreenivasan to reflect on his appeal at this critical moment.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, CORRESPONDENT: Christiane, thanks. Zeynep Tufekci, thanks so much for being here. Yesterday, we saw a pretty decisive victory for Donald Trump, even though his opponents campaigned a lot longer, harder, spent more money, perhaps. What do you make of that?

ZEYNEP TUFEKCI, OPINION COLUMNIST, THE NEW YORK TIMES AND PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY: In some ways, it’s not surprising, but it is one more marker that the current Republican Party is Trump’s. We have seen a lot of efforts to unseat him. And we have seen this in 2016 where a lot of Republican contenders try to get the nomination instead of him. That was not successful. And remarkably, despite everything that has happened since he was voted out of office, he has an enduring bond with much of the Republican base. And I think what’s happened is they don’t want Trump lite or a Trump replacement or someone like Trump, they want Trump.

SREENIVASAN: You wrote a piece in “The New York Times” this week and it was called “A Strongman President? These Voters Crave It.” Tell me what was in the center of that story.

TUFEKCI: So, in 2016, when a lot of commentary around Trump’s early candidacy was that he’s just a celebrity. He’s just, you know, joking, he’ll go away. I had gone to Trump rallies and I had also talked to a lot of Trump supporters, and instead of a bumbling celebrity, which is what I had expected to find, I found a politician who was very much in touch with his base, and he was realigning the politics of the GOP around a couple of issues like trade, immigration, loss of manufacturing. And it was a very powerful message. So, eight years later, I wanted to understand, has this changed? Is this something that is now a different kind of dynamic? Are the voters just curious about him? Are they looking for an alternative? And what I found after talking to a large number of voters, more than a hundred, in Iowa and New Hampshire. But also following activities online and talking with other voters elsewhere who want to support Trump, what I found is that they see him as a strong leader. And they see President Biden as a weak leader in contrast, but they also see the other Republican candidates as weak. So, what they want in their telling is that they want somebody who’s strong enough to stand up to everything that’s going on in the world, and also stand up to what they perceive as the Washington establishment that’s against Trump. And he’s selling that message. That’s the message that he goes with. And he has a bond with the base. And when you ask them about, you know, his vulgar language, the things he says, the way he talks about, say, immigrants or his political opponents, what they say to me is, all politicians talk like that. They’re corrupt, and they say all sorts of things, but only Trump kind of blurts it out. So, even things that, to a non-supporter, are alarming are seen by these people as he’s strong enough just to say it. He’s authentic enough just to say it. And remarkably, they also think that had Trump been president, that the war in Ukraine might not have happened, that the Hamas attack would not have happened because in their worldview, the — Trump’s — they acknowledge somewhat crazy, sometimes somewhat unpredictable behavior, they think, will project strength and fear in the rest of the world, and they wouldn’t dare because they’d be afraid of him. And additionally, and finally, they, to a last person, will cite the economic conditions under Trump being as better, especially inflation and mortgage rates come up a lot as an objective thing. But I think it really comes down to, they see him as an authentic, strong man that they find a lot of attraction to, and they’re not going away from that bond.

SREENIVASAN: So, what are the similarities that you see to say how Former President Trump casts himself versus, say, Duterte in the Philippines or Orban in Hungary or Erdogan in Turkey?

TUFEKCI: Right. So, one of the things that I think is striking across all of these leaders that you just mentioned is that they have a base that they do protect through both patronage and welfare state and safety net. In fact, one of the misunderstandings about Trump is that he would be like a regular Republican in terms of, you know, targeting Medicare or Social Security. Just quite the opposite. He talks about, you know, his opponents, Florida Governor DeSantis and Nikki Haley, as the kind of people that would target welfare or, you know, would target Social Security and Medicare. They don’t see that as — they see those as deserved. And he also talks about in these, I alone can fix it. I am the person who will take care of you. I am the leader that will look out for your interests in a world, as he would put it, and as these other leaders would put it, everybody else is against us. So, he’s channeling a certain kind of anger, a certain kind of disaffection like with many of these other leaders, there’s a us and them. And the them, for example, in Orban’s Hungary is the immigrants. In Trump, there’s a lot of that as well, but it depends on, you know, what part of the world you’re looking at. So, if there’s a deserving people, there is an other to blame. And there is these elites that have, in their view, sold out the people, the deserving people. And here comes a strong leader here to come and take care of you, to provide a safety net for you, to keep you safe in a tumultuous world. And I have to say, historically speaking, this is with so much precedent. This has happened again and again in history that strongmen come through popular support through a mix of exploiting disaffection, you know, pointing the finger at some enemy that is easy for their base to rally around, demagoguery. And all these details that we worry about, perhaps, in terms of the separation of powers, liberal democracy, you know, journalists in jail, you know, a lot of these examples that you have spoken about are not high on these people’s list. And here we are.

SREENIVASAN: So, you know, that leads me to something that Trump said that he would only be dictator on day one. I don’t know how much of that was a joke or not, but the Biden campaign has certainly picked up on that idea and that theme, and they are trying to make the case to their voters and the American voter that democracy is at stake. The alternative is authoritarianism and dictatorship and strongmen and so forth. And I wonder, the people that you were speaking to at the rallies that you’re attending, what you’re watching online, does that resonate at all with them?

TUFEKCI: Well, let’s start with that comment. So, I mean, I think it’s fairly straightforward to point to a lot of worries about democracy, especially what we consider liberal democracy, which is not just a majoritarian role. You don’t just have, you know, whoever gets in power gets to do what they want. We have limits and checks and balances. And you can point to a lot of things in that regard from Trump’s first term and also the conflict of interest, you know, the hotels, all those things, you can make a lot of cases. But let’s take that particular quote, right? The — in that interview, Trump said, I’m going to be a dictator for day one, and I’m going to sort of have a rule on the order and we’re going to drill, drill, baby, drill, and it was referring to like doing executive orders on day one. And then he said, I will then not be a dictator anymore, right? So that was the context. So, I felt like this was the kind of thing where instead of picking many of the other examples about Trump that the Biden administration could have picked, they picked one in which he was not really coming and saying, I am going to be a dictator, right? He was saying, I’m going to pass executive orders. And I asked about this to many people, and they knew this, right? So, they would say, well, the media says, you know, Trump’s going to be a dictator, but I watched the whole clip. Now, I’m not here defending Trump, right? Like, when I point this out, a lot of people get mad at me because they want me to say, well, Trump will be a dictator. I’m not trying to deny at all that there is genuine concern about rule of law, separation of powers, conflict of interest. But that particular quote is not really playing with these people because when you watch the whole video in that particular moment, like, it’s not like he’s got some confession to make that somebody caught him on tape. He’s saying something about executive orders, right? So, there’s other arguments, of course, to be made on election denial. There’s arguments to be made on January 6th. There’s arguments to be made on — especially, I think, this conflict of interests and making money from the hotels from foreign governments and all the emoluments clause. Those things have kind of not really been talked about as much. And I would — I challenged a lot of these voters, because I wanted to hear what they would say back. And in that — when I challenged them, what I heard was that they would first point to something about traditional media where they had half a point, right? Like, this is a little bit of a misrepresentation here. He didn’t really say that. They would first present some issue that I would say, well, maybe you got half a point. But next step would be to deny or to question if January 6th had happened with — you know, from Trump’s involvement or Trump’s encouragement or even Trump supporters. I heard everything from, well, it was a couple of bad apples. And that happens to — maybe it was entrapment. The government allowed it. And there, they’re in their information bubble, right? They do not really trust traditional media. And they hear it from their talk radio. They hear it from their TV stations. They hear it on YouTube and, you know, current X, Twitter, came up a lot. So, it’s not syncing, right? It is not something that, at least this group of people, are either hearing or concerned about. And additionally, they would very often point to me all the other executive orders that, you know, current presidents use, and everything is happening through executive orders. That’s not very democratic. So, they say, let it be our guy, right? So, they sort of say, OK, let it be our guy. And he has a way of talking to these people that is underrated in how effective it is. I think if you’re not a Trump supporter, and you go sit there, it’s very hard to sort of, you might not feel it, right? Because if you’re not a Trump supporter, you’re not feeling that. And so, it takes a little bit of effort to try to step back and say, OK, how does this feel to people who do like him, right? And to people who like him, to people who are at least open to him, he comes across. In my eight years of talking with Trump supporters, he comes across as genuine and authentic.

SREENIVASAN: Do you think that there’s been a shift in how his supporters perceive the events of January 6th? Has there been an increased tolerance for violence or a justification of what happened over time?

TUFEKCI: So, in my own conversations, I did not find a single person who defended it, right? I don’t doubt there are people who think it was justified because Trump really plays up the election was stolen. So, if you genuinely believe that there’s a nefarious force stealing elections, you know, that kind of creates a what’s justified kind of question. So, perhaps because they were talking to me or perhaps because of the kind of face there is in Iowa and New Hampshire and other places, I did not encounter anyone saying, oh, it was great. It was justified.

SREENIVASAN: Yes.

TUFEKCI: But what I did encounter was explaining away, downplaying, bad apples, or some degree of a conspiracy that this was the deep state or federal government or Trump enemies, or this or that, that’s where it gets into the conspiracy part, that aided and abetted and allowed this to happen as a form of entrapment, which. you know, comes from a lot of the conspiracy theories that you encounter about what happened. So — and they don’t really — I mean, given that, I don’t think they’re like rooting for a redo of that.

SREENIVASAN: Yes.

TUFEKCI: But it’s not going to dissuade them either. So, once again, the question perhaps is not what the most diehard supporters of Trump think, right, like those people may just be completely attached to him and that might be that, and he’s got that. The question to understand is there’s a large part of the country, and this is kind of, I think, what people need to understand and hear, is that if you look at the polls, currently, the majority of the country thinks that Trump would do a better job on the economy, they think Trump would do a better job on foreign policy, and they think that Trump would do a better job on immigration compared to President Biden, right? And this is not — like once you get to that kind of majorities, you’re not talking about, you know, Trump’s diehard supporters, you’re talking about the kind of coalitions that cause elections to be lost.

SREENIVASAN: Had these people who your piece focuses on, the ones who are kind of gravitating towards a stronger leader, were they there in 2020? What’s different about the 2024 electorate? Are there more of them now? Has Biden pushed people more towards that camp? What’s different?

TUFEKCI: I think in 2020, a large chunk of the country had been tired of Trump’s presidency. And you still have to remember, like it wasn’t a huge margin.

SREENIVASAN: Yes.

TUFEKCI: Like he could have plausibly won. It was not a huge margin. But it was not as much of a win in a landslide sense as one would think given all that happened. So, the second thing is a lot of things happen under President Biden’s, administration. And I think, again, inflation is a major thing. And Ukraine war and even the Middle East situation happened under his watch. And you might say he doesn’t run the world. It doesn’t work like that. And I wouldn’t disagree. But to his supporters and to some people, it looks like when Trump was president, people were scared to oppose him. That’s what they say. And they — also, the counterfactuals, it didn’t happen. And the third thing I think that people, once again, are underestimating is the effect of age. Now, we have, I think, 78 versus 81 by the time November comes around, when — if it’s Biden versus Trump, that is a strikingly old matchup. So, there is that. And in some sense, you might say, well, their ages are close to one another. It is both strikingly older than average presidential candidates. And that’s true. But the polls are very clear, President Biden’s age is seen as a much bigger liability to him than Trump’s age is seen to him. It’s perhaps like his aggressive behavior. Perhaps it’s the way, you know, Trump sort of his rallies, the way he talks, the way he comes across. Like, I’m not going to try to explain exactly why that is. But it’s really clear to me, from talking to people, and looking at the polls, that people see President Biden’s age as something that makes him weaker and less competent compared to they have the same criteria for, you know, Trump. So, four years ago, it wasn’t like — you know, we don’t talk about 81. We’re talking about, you know, 77, 78.

SREENIVASAN: Yes.

TUFEKCI: I think that’s a big part of the mix of where things are right now.

SREENIVASAN: Zeynep Tufekci, professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton, thanks so much for joining us.

TUFEKCI: Thank you for inviting me.