Conventional wisdom used to be that if you wanted to become the president of the United States, you’d better be someone regular folks would like to have a beer with. It’s not that Americans never voted for upper-class people. After all, wealthy, privileged presidents like Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and George H.W. Bush had won the office. But there was always a certain resonance to the idea that someone who came up from nothing, a regular guy, could rise to the very top in America.
Think of Jimmy Carter, who was raised on a peanut farm, or Harry S. Truman, who had been a (failed) haberdasher in his civilian life. Richard Nixon grew up very poor. We had, after all, explicitly rejected the idea of an aristocracy and built our entire national mythology around the idea that you could make something of yourself no matter what the circumstances of your birth. So we naturally admired those who exemplified that ideal. At least until they disappointed us.
Ronald Reagan had tremendous success as someone who originally came from Midwestern, middle-class roots and then went on to become a very famous, wealthy actor, successfully modeling the character of an average man who achieved an almost royal status in celebrity-mad America. But even though he brought Hollywood glamor to the White House, no one perceived him to be an actual aristocrat.
But it was in 2000 when Texas Governor George W. Bush, who had developed a sort of bumbling everyman persona that the media and half the country found to be incredibly charming, made the “guy you’d like to have a beer with” the standard description of what Americans look for in a president. This was despite the fact that Bush didn’t drink and his very patrician Connecticut lineage went all the way back to President Franklin Pierce. It became an article of faith that unless a president was able to present himself as a down-home guy, he didn’t have a chance.
Both Vice President Al Gore and Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry were tortured in the media for not being “Real Americans” with a bond with the common man. Gore was portrayed as some kind of bizarre robot and Kerry was treated like a conceited aristocrat when he ordered what they thought was the wrong sandwich or drank the wrong drink. These “gaffes” were considered deal breakers and no matter how hard they tried to show off their skills at mingling with ordinary voters, they were given no quarter. If you didn’t have that beer buddy magic, you were out.
Republican voters do not want a president they can have a beer with. They never did. They yearn to be subjects.
In 2008, John McCain’s running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who entranced the GOP elites with her good looks and her plain-spoken, rural folksiness, seemed to be their dream come true. She had five kids, one of whom was an infant, was a born-again evangelical, had a sketchy education (and it showed) and was a fully formed product of the right-wing talk radio style of politics that had been building for a couple of decades. Her whole schtick was about being the voice of so-called Real America, the men in the steel-toed boots and the women who loved them. They lost the race, but something had been unleashed.
Palin was the personification of the Republican ideal, and for quite a while after that race, she was considered the front-runner to win the nomination in 2012. She quit her job as governor to start her own Super PAC and appear before adoring crowds where she slammed the “lame stream media” and took up all the right wing grievances big and small (“I want my straws! I want ’em bent!”). She starred in her own reality show called “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” and started living the high life. She eventually flamed out, but her moment in the spotlight had a major influence on the Republican Party. She had opened the door to Donald Trump.
Trump was very much the heir to the style that Palin had created. He knew very little about the issues and wasn’t interested in learning about them. But he articulated all the grievances and bored right into the right-wing id that had been primed for years by the likes of Rush Limbaugh. He was much better at it than she was.
But Trump never had any pretensions about being a common man. In 2016, he made that clear:
Back in 2015, he told journalist Mark Liebovich:
“Jimmy Carter used to get off Air Force One carrying his luggage,” Mr. Trump said, smirking. “I don’t want a president carrying his luggage.” It sends the wrong message, Mr. Trump believed, for a president to act like some kind of humble servant, an everyday slob. A commander in chief should be imperial and, yes, superior. “I don’t want someone who is going to come off carrying a large bag of underwear”
The GOP base actually loves Trump for his out-of-touch, imperial ways, which he’s making more and more obvious in this second term. For instance, he clearly has no idea what every single person in the country calls the store where they buy food and household supplies.
(He’s said it dozens of times.) If John Kerry had said that, he would have been pilloried for weeks.
He’s decked out the Oval Office to look like the Las Vegas version of the palace of Versailles and is running around the Middle East right now gushing over his favorite fellow world leaders — oil-rich Sheiks and potentates — as if they are his long-lost relatives. He’s whining that they have bigger planes than him, so he is planning to accept a “gift” of a $400 million dollar flying palace from his good friends the Qataris. A few MAGA influencers and GOP politicians have objected, but Trump doesn’t care. He is running his presidency as if he were a monarch who answers to no one. At this point, it’s unclear if he does.
So, no. Republican voters do not want a president they can have a beer with. They never did. They yearn to be subjects. Donald Trump understood that instinctively and he’s giving them exactly what they always wanted.
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