President Donald Trump boasts one quality above all others, according to a prominent New York Times columnist, that has made him much harder to beat than a typical politician — but also makes him “impossible” for Republicans to replace.
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On Tuesday, the Times released a new video featuring Jamelle Bouie, an outspoken political commentator and one of the publication’s most notable liberal columnists, appearing as a guest for its podcast, “The Opinions.” In the clip, Bouie suggested that many people in politics have underestimated one specific quality about Trump that has crafted a “unique coalition” around him that has been difficult to break: his “celebrity charisma.”
“I think people understate the importance of Trump’s kind of celebrity charisma,” Bouie explained. “The thing that has delivered him victories or near-victories in presidential elections is that he can turn out loosely attached voters, people who otherwise would not be voting and who, critically, in some cases, don’t even vote down ballot. They just vote for Trump. And in doing so, they’ve delivered him these very narrow victories. And I tie that explicitly to the fact that he’s a celebrity first and foremost to many, many Americans.”
Much has been made of Trump’s unique ability to drive “low-propensity voters” to the polls during presidential elections, where he is on the ballot. Conversely, this has caused trouble for the GOP during off-year and midterm elections, where higher propensity Democrats have tended to overperform expectations while Trump’s coalition stays home, even as he has endorsed a wide range of candidates. As a result, many in the GOP are feeling a looming sense of existential dread about the prospect of voter turnout once Trump can no longer legally run for president.
Speaking further, Bouie argued that this sense of Trump being a “celebrity” has also helped him evade the consequences of his own actions, with his supporters simply not believing the bad things he has said and done.
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“They don’t register or read him as a Republican,” he continued. “Which does two things. First, it’s hard to convince voters that he’ll do things that Republicans do that they don’t like. You can say, ‘He’s going to cut taxes for rich people.’ He may have already done it, but precisely because he’s not associated with the Republican Party in this intimate way, a lot of voters say, ‘Oh, well, you know, is he really? He signed the checks. Is he really going to be that bad?’”
Going forward, Bouie suggested that this issue is very much going to make life difficult for future Republican presidential hopefuls.
“So I think there’s no other Republican politician who has that, who had this decades-long, pre-political career where they essentially became a byword for wealth,” he concluded. “Trump was associated with wealth and pop culture. That doesn’t exist for anyone else. And I’m very skeptical that any of the people who seem to be presidential contenders have the ability to reconstitute or pull together anything like the Trump coalition.”
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