Trump’s Two-Pronged Play for Normies and Populists

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Wednesday, October 23, 2024

 

Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign has been a two-pronged effort. Trump, hailed and feared as a populist since he came down the escalator nine years ago, is mostly campaigning to the normies. His friends, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tucker Carlson, Tulsi Gabbard, Elon Musk, Russell Brand — and, to some degree, J. D. Vance — are running a kind of parallel campaign. They are reaching out to the wild ones, the populist voters whom Trump first electrified, the ones who think the system, in one way or another, is rigged, broken, or conspiring against them. Trump’s electoral success depends on how well these groups, the normies and the populists, can tolerate each other, and how much they overlap already.

 

Normie, if you didn’t know already, has become the internet term of art for normal people in America, the people who want to work hard, play by the rules, make a little money, and then grill on the weekends. They are the reason the economy is always the No. 1 issue in American politics.

 

Conservatives are by nature on the side of the normies, because they are on the side of norms and the normal. Conservatives are on the side of people who have acquired some assets and capital and who want to preserve the system that they are prospering in. Conservatives believe human nature is fixed, that enduring institutions exist in order to make us better than we otherwise would be, that the norms of a good society make the normies productive and valuable neighbors. When normies come to distrust an institution that they feel belongs to them — like their local school district — they immediately and bloodlessly take it over from whatever radicals had temporarily captured it, and they restore normalcy. Normies in Virginia started doing this during Covid and then elected the King of the Normies, Glenn Youngkin, their governor.

 

Although Trump constantly interjects with odd, unsettling, or populist themes, the majority of his campaign speeches and the ad-campaign rhetoric are about restoring normal order at the border and touting Trump’s pre-pandemic economic record. He casts illegal immigrants as people who don’t eat normal American food. Trump sets himself against the suddenly abnormal cost of living. He casts the trans issue as a threat to girls’ sports, a preoccupation of normies in the suburbs. In perhaps his most-seen commercial, he casts Kamala Harris and Tim Walz as the candidates of the non-normal, trans enthusiasts. “Kamala’s for they/them. President Trump is for you.” Even his position on abortion is meant to appeal to the broadest middle ground, people who want the option early in pregnancy but who are disgusted by late-term abortion. Trump’s normie pitch is, “Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are too far left and incompetent to do the job.” Normies want to be respectable. They don’t like it when Donald Trump sounds hostilely racist or conspiratorial.

 

But then there has been this other campaign, one that picks up some of the themes that Trump pioneered in 2016 but has outsourced since then. In this campaign, the other side isn’t merely incompetent; it’s sinister. This is the campaign that has been traveling around the country with Tucker Carlson’s live show and as a series of events with disaffected Democrats Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard.

 

For Gabbard, it’s the foreign-policy blob and the security state that have gone rogue. From her perspective, she signed up with the Army National Guard to fight al-Qaeda after 9/11, but in the years since, the U.S. effectively aligned itself with al-Qaeda and its offshoots in Syria. This security state now protects itself from scrutiny through tyrannical actions, through a public–private partnership to censor “misinformation” on social media. Gabbard herself has been subjected to a quadruple “SSSS” status on TSA — meaning the government currently treats her as an active terrorist threat, even though she is a veteran and member of the National Guard in good standing. Many veterans share at least some of her disaffection with the Pentagon’s leadership or the foreign-policy blob, including vice-presidential nominee J. D. Vance.

 

Vance too is part of this populist vanguard, though his focus is as much on trade globalization as on foreign policy. He casts Washington’s establishment as indifferent to the fate of the Rust Belt — ignoring its problems. He campaigns for policies that would make it more attractive for capital to be invested in these forgotten regions and for more political capital to be expended protecting them from fentanyl coming over the border. His charge is that elites have come to serve themselves rather than their constituents.

 

And then there is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He is infamous for his belief that the expanded childhood-vaccine schedule and some vaccine ingredients cause autism. While this is still a relatively marginal belief, public distrust of the medical establishment — including the FDA and Big Pharma — has been supercharged by the opioid epidemic and the mishandling of Covid-19. Kennedy became one of the first and loudest critics of Dr. Anthony Fauci and lockdowns, writing a 2021 best-selling book against the doctor. He correctly championed natural immunity from Covid-19 and criticized the masking of young children. Anyone who is familiar with the world of young conservative mothers knows there is a huge audience for his antiestablishment views on food, such as his promotion of beef tallow over seed oils, or his criticism of certain pesticides in farming and chemical additives to foods.

 

And that last part points to the emerging overlap between normies and raging populists. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s abandoned 2024 candidacy for president may seem like a footnote. But like the culture-war speech of Pat Buchanan or the anti-NAFTA campaign of Ross Perot, his opening campaign speech is likely a harbinger of politics in the coming decades. The theme in the middle of it was trust in our government and its institutions. “When my uncle died in 1963, about 80 percent of Americans said they trusted their government,” he said. “Today, 22 percent trust their government, and 22 percent trust the press, the lowest level ever. And the media is at the lower nadir, because we know the media lies to us now.”

 

Who can deny it? The pandemic had a radicalizing effect on many normie conservatives who saw authorities lying to them brazenly in real time. These weren’t lies to protect national-security secrets, like Eisenhower lying about the U-2 spy plane; these were lies used to justify closing churches, forbidding hospital visits, putting masks on crying toddlers and the dying, with the effect of muffling people’s tenderest words to each other. These were lies that divided families and damaged relationships irrevocably. The masks that were supposed to save your lives suddenly were acknowledged as “useless face decorations” by the very authorities who mandated their use.

 

Many marriages have this division running through them. A natural normie who believes that misgovernance is incompetent. And a populist who knows that such incompetence is indistinguishable from active malice. They both want Trump — and Trump’s bifurcated campaign has welcomed them both in with open arms.