For better or worse (and I personally find it horrifically worse), the GOP is united behind Trump. But the fuel for their loyalty is not Trump’s sterling character or even his policies. The animating principle of the right is anti-leftism and Trump will make the case that the left is at ramming speed, not just on economics, but on every possible fault line in our cultural political wars. Trump might be racist, as his incendiary attack on “the Squad” of freshman Congresswomen proves, but he’s not entirely wrong to think that tying Democrats to their most extreme voices is a potentially winning strategy.

For all of his erratic and unhinged narcissism, Donald Trump has a vision: He wants 2020 to be 1972 all over again.
Trump is framing the choice Americans will have to make in 2020. He has chosen his enemies and defined them: “These are people that hate our country. They hate our country. They hate it, I think, with a passion.”

His message: My opponents don’t just disagree with me… they hate me. They hate you. They hate America. They hate everything you stand for and have built. The four minority women are not really Americans, they are aliens, socialists, communists… immigrants who have spit on the gift we have given them.

In other words: I may be awful, but you people are dangerous.