An entire generation of Republican leaders has blithely ignored and betrayed the core concerns of many Republican voters, while too many of their jobs were shipped to China, their sons were sent off to unwinnable wars and their communities were poisoned by drugs.
Compare this thinly veiled contempt with the way Mr. Trump embraced working-class voters. He was the only Republicans since Ronald Reagan who seemed to genuinely like everyday Americans. The irony of it taking a real estate mogul, reality television star to be the politician most able to connect with grass-roots voters cannot be overstated. As president, Mr. Trump helped deliver rising wages, peace and economic growth, and the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade.
To political insiders, Mr. Trump’s imperviousness to criticism from the likes of National Review or even Tea Party-era conservative standard-bearers seemed like a kind of superpower. To his supporters, though, all those attacks revealed the elitist contempt for conservative voters that those voters had suspected was there all along.
This presents a tricky problem for Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida or any other potential Republican presidential candidate who seeks to be Trump-y without being Mr. Trump. Mr. DeSantis has vaulted to well-deserved stardom for his aggressive stance against corporate cultural meddling, his fearless defense of parents and his levelheaded foresight in handling the pandemic.
But the defining dynamic of the G.O.P. that enabled Mr. Trump to win in 2016 — primary voters’ deep and justified distrust of the Washington elites to handle the issues they care about the most — adheres in 2022. The conservative intelligentsia and establishment Republicans embracing Mr. DeSantis should understand that their public affection for him may ultimately end up harming a candidate they seek to help.
Mr. Trump still wants to upend the system that Republican voters distrust. Since 2016, the establishment has lit more of its credibility on fire. You don’t have to think Mr. Trump should be canonized as a saint to believe the system is still rigged, as corrupt and hostile to nonelite Americans as ever.
If Mr. Trump once again runs against that system, and the people who run that system haughtily, censoriously align with other candidates, who do you think Republican voters will support?
Rachel Bovard is the policy director at the Conservative Partnership Institute and a tech columnist at The Federalist.