Think back to various primaries. Think about 2016, with Donnie, "little Marco" Rubio, "lyin' Ted" Cruz, and the rest of them. Think about this year, with about 8-10 Republicans, and Donnie couldn't even be bothered to show up for debates.
Donnie doesn't nominate himself. He gets the support of a lot of people. It's true that he never won the support of the majority of the voters (despite his protestations to the contrary), but tens of millions of people voted for him.
Have you ever watched even a few minutes of his rallies on TV or youtube? He's a caricature. He is, as Biden pointed out, twice, in a presidential debate in 2020, a "clown." He acts and talks like an idiot (and his mental state is deteriorating before our eyes), his primary method of communicating is lying, conspicuously, he adopts patently ridiculous conspiracy theories, and I interpret these rallies as mutual masturbation: Donnie blathers about various kinds of nonsense until the crowd shows interest, at which point he just repeats what the crowd wants to hear. And the crowd, if you've ever listened to any of them talk, are completely out in orbit, and would normally be ashamed of themselves and their gross limitations, except Donnie tells them they're not wrong, as the rest of the world has told them, but that they're right. They shouldn't be ashamed; they should be proud. Donnie gets his audience off (gives them what they want), and they get him off.
H.L,Mencken said "As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their hearts' desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." If Mencken thought the inner soul of Americans is that they're downright morons, Trump's prominence has made it impossible to argue with him. Well, a minority, true, but not a small minority.
If we come back to 2015 and 2016, we saw that Donnie Trump gave every indication of being a fool, a liar, dishonest, and empty. He did not earn the support of the majority of the voters, but because of the distortion created by the Electoral College, he won the election. By 2020, once he proved beyond any doubt that was even worse than he seemed, he got more votes than he did the first time.
The problem is not Trump. It's the voters, who are stupid and superficial enough to vote for someone like that. And it doesn't stop there. Mitch McConnell refused to allow Obama to nominate a Supreme Court Justice when Scalia died, and he claimed his reason was that Joe Biden had offered some similar policy about a divergence between the president's party and the Senate's majority party years before (as if McConnell generally adopts whatever Biden proposes). McConnell also claimed it would not be fair representation to have a president nominate a SCOTUS hopeful within the last year of the president's term. So he allowed Trump to nominate Gorsuch, on the flimsiest of theories, in which McConnell himself doesn't even believe, and to nominate Barratt three weeks before Trump's term ended, also inconsistent with McConnell's alleged beliefs. And McConnell's Senate showed no concern about Kavanaugh's blatant lying, very unstable temper, and overt bias during the hearings.
And it's not even just the voters and the Republican Senate. Trump can insult his Republican competitors any way he wants, including ad hominem attacks on them and their families, and they fall in line, and suck their thumbs, as soon as he wins, even when they had previously declared him unfit and highly defective, which he certainly is. The most recent competitor suddenly to see Trump in an entirely different light is Nikki Haley, who had been trying to give the impression she was moderate, and took a very dim view of Trump, until she couldn't uphold the facade any more.
Whenever there are elections, and primaries, there are 1%ers, and others who don't crack single digits of support. Donnie Trump had all the makings of a loser like that, except he got way too much, and way too inexplicable, support from too many places. He's done tremendous damage, and his supporters don't seem to care. Among other things, he told his throng that he believes Putin over US intelligence, and now, Lindsay Graham, who had previously spoken very negatively of Donnie, says he trusts Israel over US intelligence. It's a very pervasive dumbing down. And Donnie, even with a minority of the vote, was once elected president despite no relevant experience, persistent and pervasive failure in business, no evidence of morality, total self-focus, lack of family respect or stability, a bumbling and idiotic style of communicating, and inveterate lying. If you want to know how someone like that gets any support at all from American voters, you can ask Mencken.
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