Perhaps what Trump understood from the beginning is that practically nobody liked Republicans, or the Republican Party, to begin with. People didn’t like the GOP platform, so Trump ran against it. People didn’t like GOP politicians, so Trump insulted them rather than play the suck-up game. People certainly didn’t like the fussy, richie-rich party elites. About 60 percent of Americans view the Republican Party with distaste, according to a polling average, while just 29 percent see the GOP favorably—a near-record low. In one recent survey, more than a third of Republican primary voters had a negative view of their own party.
And so Trump has unified the party by turning it upside down, and few find much to mourn. In the Anaheim convention center’s enormous central arena, which was not quite packed to the rafters, the country-club crowd mingled with the Trumpenproletariat, trying to figure out if they could get along.
When I asked one neatly dressed pair of attendees whether Trump had been their first choice, both of them made you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me faces while drawing their chins sharply back into their necks. “Oh no, no, no,” said Katie, a 26-year-old who wore a pink-and-blue dress printed with elephants and gold elephant earrings, her shoulder-length blond hair tucked behind her ears. “Or second, or third, or fourth, or fifth.” (Katie did not want to give her last name because she was afraid Trump supporters might come after her for speaking her mind about the candidate.)
Join the conversation as a VIP Member