Why Do House Republicans Like Troy Balderson Blindly Follow Trump?
Susan Glasser’s end of the year missive in the New Yorker, The Year We Stopped Being Able To Pretend About Trump, could have been written in 2015… or any time since. Or it could have been titled “The Year We Stopped Being Able To Pretend About The Republican Party.” She shared a German word, Trumpregierungsschlamasselschmerz, and a shortened version, Trumpschmerz, which translate to something like “Trump-worry,” but on steroids. Glasser defined it as “‘the continuous pain or ache of the soul’ that comes from the excessive contemplation of the slow-motion Trump car crash. Well, here we go again. Headed into 2024, America is stuck with another bad case of Trumpschmerz.”
Trump’s 4 separate criminal cases— totaling 91 felonies— proved to be a political boon for him in MAGAdonia. At the beginning of the year, his polling average among Republicans was 46%; now it’s 61%, although that may have something to do with what a weak field of primary opponents he drew. DeSantis looks more like a Jeb Bush-like punching bag than the GOP Great White Hope, despite the upwards of $100 million spent to date. His candidacy, wrote Glasser, “has been a total dud. Trump never even had to stoop to appearing on a stage with his rivals, who proved to be so afraid of the Trump-loving Republican electorate that they rarely so much as criticized the man they were theoretically running against. The defining moment for this field of craven also-rans came during their first debate, in August, when the Fox News moderators asked for a show of hands as to who would support the indicted ex-President— ‘the elephant not in the room,’ as Fox’s Bret Baier called him— were he to receive the nomination. Virtually all of them indicated they would. Needless to say, the two dissenters, Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson, have no chance.”
Trump has ended the year, meanwhile, striking his usual statesmanlike note. In a Christmas Day social-media post, his message to his opponents was “MAY THEY ROT IN HELL,” followed by the incongruous but nonetheless perfectly Trumpy conclusion, “AGAIN, MERRY CHRISTMAS.”
The only surprise is that anyone is surprised by this. In the first week of March, months before he was indicted by the Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith, Trump gave a speech to cpac in which he promised a run centered on the theme of “retribution” for all the grievances nursed by him and his followers. Despite the current conventional wisdom that the spate of indictments against Trump over the spring and summer allowed him to reinvent his campaign around a narrative of his own persecution, revenge was his mission well in advance of the court cases; 2024 was always going to be about seeking payback. The list of wrongs never mattered as much as the fact that he would have a litany of them to recite. The “rigged election.” The martyrdom of his supporters who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and were sent to jail for it. His own undermining by the “deep state.”
His message then, as later in the year, was simple and messianic: “This is the final battle.” The audience cheered and hooted and clapped. They were, like the bulk of the Republican Party, not Never Trumpers but Always Trumpers. The story of 2023 turned out to be not the GOP’s search for another Trump but the persistent preference of a large majority of Republicans for the one they already have.
It’s refreshing to watch how Democratic congressional candidates can use this Trumpschmerz against their opponents. Jerrad Christian is running against an establishment Republican, Troy Balderson, who has twisted himself into a pretzel to appear more MAGAty for the unwashed GOP base. This week he told his supporters that “There has been a lot of media chatter lately about President Biden’s poll numbers and the up and down prediction game for 2024. What has gotten short shrift in all the noise about politics? Donald Trump’s very upfront and very clear message that he intends to operate outside the law if he is elected again next November. Among other notable examples, including Trump saying outright that he would “only” act like a dictator “on Day One,” is the following post Trump made on his social media network:
“This graphic,” wrote Christian, “is a representation of a single word used by 1,000 likely voters to describe what they think Trump and President Biden want out of a second term. Trump’s word cloud emphasizes the following words and major themes:
POWER
REVENGE
DICTATOR
DICTATORSHIP
Notably, ‘freedom,’ ‘democracy,’ and ‘peace’ (prominent in President Biden’s word cloud) require a magnifying glass to see. And Trump is more than ok with this: he seems to relish the idea of using the most powerful job in the world to exact revenge on political opponents— precisely the way dictators and fascist leaders have done in the past. I am not running against Donald Trump, but I am running against a staunch Trump backer and MAGA proponent who will eagerly do Trump’s bidding— without question. Ohio voters are fed up with this anti-democratic agenda and are fighting back.”
I hope he’s right. Ohioans did vote against the entire Republican Party establishment to protect abortion rights in the state, including in the two big red counties where most of the voters live in Christian’s district. It’s worth investing in his campaign to see if he can turn that into a win next November. You can do that here, a great way to end 2023 and start 2024.
