Trump understands that Republican policies aren’t actually popular, but white supremacy is
By 
Hertel-Fernandez et al note correctly that the Trump tax cut has proved consistently unpopular; they don’t point out that at first Republicans were sure that it would be a big political winner: “If we can’t sell this to the American people, we ought to go into another line of work,” declared Mitch McConnell. But they couldn’t sell it, and the tax cut has virtually disappeared from G.O.P. messaging.
And Republicans appear to have been completely blindsided by the public backlash against their attempts to remove protection for pre-existing conditions, which is amazing if you think about it. How could they not realize that this is a sore spot?
Which brings me to something David Roberts wrote yesterday, which complements something I’ve been thinking for a while. He notes, in regard to the frame-Mueller debacle, that we’re dealing with the “second generation of Fox News conservatives,” who grew up entirely inside the right-wing bubble and don’t understand how people outside that bubble talk, think, and behave.
I’d say that this goes even more for professional G.O.P. politicos, who are all apparatchiks. That is, they grew up inside the apparatus of movement conservatism, and really imagine that everyone except a few leftist losers shares their ideology. They don’t even realize that their party’s success has been based on racial antagonism, that most people want to raise taxes on the rich and maintain social benefits.
And this, by the way, is where Trump has an advantage. He didn’t grow up in the conservative hothouse; his very crudity means that he understands that his electoral chances depend not on repeating conservative pieties but on maximum ugliness.
Precisely. Second and third generation movement conservatives almost without exception continue to get high on their own supply: these are people who have spent their whole lives being indoctrinated into the belief that unpopular policies are actually popular. They are genuinely shocked to be told that most voters don’t like the idea of slashing taxes on the wealthy while cutting social programs that benefit the vast majority of the populace. (That’s democracy for you, as C. Montgomery Burns would say).
What such people can never acknowledge, because it’s far too painful, is that Republican electoral success is based increasingly on nativism in its ugliest forms. (As Krugman points out, this is something the pundit class is also largely incapable of acknowledging to itself as well). And Trump’s authoritarianism is absolutely of a piece with this fact: if you lead a movement that attracts only a minority of voters, and that movement’s ideologues are committed to pursuing many policies that aren’t even particularly popular with that subset of voters, let alone with the public at large, your movement will, sooner or later, have to turn to an authoritarian demagogue.
While the rise of Donald Trump himself was far from inevitable — for one thing he is easily the most farcical major political figure in American history — the rise of someone fundamentally like him to the top of the Republican party has been foreordained for many decades now.