David Frum, former Bush speechwriter and current senior editor at The Atlantic, has spoken to a number of Trump supporters and paints a frightening picture of life inside their minds.
They are convinced that Trump will win. None of his “mistakes” matter. What look like mistakes to us are brilliant strategic moves to them. This campaign is designed to be different. Expect the unexpected.
Some quotes from a synthesis of these conversations:
Our convention worked. Donald—I’m not on the payroll, I can call him that—Donald energized his voters: people who are afraid of crime and worried about the mass immigration that’s transforming their country and displacing them. We talk a lot about polls, but you ignore the polls that don’t show what you expect to see.
and
The Putin thing. You think you’ve really nailed Donald with the Putin thing. Get it through your head: Our people are done fighting wars for your New World Order. We fought the Cold War to stop the Communists from taking over America, not to protect Estonia. We went to Iraq because you said it was better to fight them over there than fight them over here. Then you invited them over here anyway! Then you said that we had to keep inviting them over here if we wanted to win over there. And we figured out: You care a lot more about the “inviting" part than the “winning" part. So no more. Not until we face a real threat, and have a real president who’ll do whatever it takes to win. Whatever it takes.
and
You loved the Democratic convention didn’t you? Soaring rhetoric, we’re all together in just one big beautiful rainbow quilt: illegal aliens and billionaires, all together. And the flags? So many flags. You wave the flag one day every four years, and you think it means you’ve taken America from us. You haven’t, not yet—and that’s another thing our voters will be wanting to say on Election Day. Lots of ideas too: free this, free that, more investment in this, higher taxes on that, and ‘common sense gun laws.’ I bet you don’t own a gun. I bet you’ve never had a DUI either. So it wouldn’t worry you that you could lose the first if you get the second. But it worries our voters. Their lives are kind of messed up. They get into trouble. That’s why they want guns for themselves, and not just for Mayor Bloomberg’s bodyguards.
That’s probably enough to keep you up at night for a few weeks. It doesn’t say anything about the state of the race. Just be aware. Vote blue. Get your friends to vote blue.
But we need to know where they are at. And that’s why you should read the whole article.