Trump’s power President’s message to stay after he goes, even in California
Donald Trump will no longer be president come Jan. 20, barring a legal Hail Mary. But Trumpism isn’t going anywhere.
Trump has signaled that he will continue to stoke divisiveness as inauguration day approaches with his baseless allegations of a stolen election. He has launched or threatened legal action in several states, with no indication of evidence that would overturn the results.
But after he leaves the White House, Citizen Trump will still have influence — even in California, where 2 out of every 3 voters supported Presidentelect Joe Biden.
“He will become that much more influential,” said Lisa Moreno, a physician’s assistant who lives in Fresno and is one of more than 4 million Californians who voted for Trump. “Because he’s not going to be under the constraints of politics anymore.”
Moreno said devotion to Trump
goes deeper than many California Democrats realize.
“They’re not just following a candidate,” she said. “They’re following someone that gave them a voice.”
Trump will still be able to relay his every thought through an 88 million-follower Twitter feed. He will enjoy an open invitation to hold forth on the two highestrated shows on cable news — hosted by Fox News’ Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, where he will face no threat of tough questioning.
And Trump will continue to command fealty from many elected Republicans, starting with House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy. The Bakersfield Republican, whom Trump refers to as “my Kevin,” asserted on Fox News last week that “President Trump won this election,” even as the vote counting indicated otherwise.
Also unlikely to bolt from Trump’s side is Rep. Devin Nunes of Tulare, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, who sent reelection fundraising pitches showing him standing with the president he unwaveringly defended through impeachment.
“I don’t see this movement dwindling, and I don’t use that word ‘ movement’ randomly,” Moreno said. “I only see it growing exponentially.”
Every weekend for the past few months, Trump supporters have held rallies in parks up and down the Central Valley and driven their vehicles in “Trump caravans.” One 600vehicle caravan last month jammed traffic on Highway 99 from Fresno to Bakersfield, the heart of deep red California.
Moreno said 1,000 to 3,000 Trump supporters in the valley organize gatherings through private social media groups. They often don’t make them public for fear of attracting the president’s opponents, she said.
Moreno said Trump represented “the people who feel unheard here in the valley, unheard by the establishment across the board.”
And Republicans in the valley don’t want Trump to concede.
“Why should he? This is what the establishment wants,” Moreno said. “The last four years has been resistance this, resistance that. If he does, then we will never win again.”
Moreno said that for many Republicans she knows, it’s not about the policies Trump supports. Even after his four years in the White House, they see him as an outsider — and they like that. He’s not part of a system they believe is rigged against them.
“Everybody else is a politician,” she said. “He’s a person that everybody hates — the media, the Democrats. Everybody comes at him, but he keeps fighting.”
Some of what Trump’s followers saw in him was “a willingness to release all of the isms that they have felt that they had to repress: racism, sexism and xenophobia,” said Jennifer Lawless, a professor of politics at the University of Virginia.
“I’m not saying that all of the people who support Trump are racist or sexist. But he taps into this antiliberalism and antielitism, particularly toward people who live on both coasts,” Lawless said.
“There are 70 million Americas who voted for Donald Trump, and they’re not holding their noses,” Lawless said. “Trumpism is not going away.”
A’shanti Gholar, president of Emerge, an organization that recruits and trains Democratic women to run for office, said that when people asked her before the election whether Trump could win, she replied, “He absolutely can.”
“I told them that there’s people that are going to go into that voting booth and say, ‘ Is he racist? Yes. Is he sexist? Yes. Has our country gone down, has our foreign standing gone down? Yes. But am I OK? Is my family OK? Will we be OK with another four years? Yes.’ And they checked that box,” she said.
Plus, Lawless said, many Republicans in office will owe allegiance to Trump — or at least to the people who voted for him.
“His supporters learned how to be politically active,” Lawless said. “That will the longestterm effect of the Trump presidency. He activated all of these people who may not have been politically active before.”
Will those people remain active without Trump in the White House? Steve Phillips, a San Francisco attorney and Democratic donor who helped raise $ 11 million for Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, doubts it.
Philips sees Trump as a oneofakind candidate and president. For the past four years, he said, Trump withstood constant controversy because he was insulated by his “wealth and celebrity. ... He didn’t have to risk a political career the way anybody else would have had to.”
Still, Phillips said, “what was sobering about these election results” is that Trump’s support is “a far more sizable minority than anybody would have liked to admit. But it is a minority.”
Gholar said she believes Trumpism is going to last.
“When I told one of my friends that, she literally started crying,” Gholar said. “But there are people who believe in everything that he has done. There are people who already believe that this election has been stolen from him. He still has his Twitter account. He still has his fans. He will be here for a while longer.”