And yet he dominates the party. How could that be without popular support from the party base?

It’s easy to dominate the party as long as you have 51% of the primary voters, which in 2024 was about 20% of registered Republicans.

Essentially if you have the very strong support of 10-15% of the party voters, you’re untouchable.

If people cared they would vote in the primaries. If they don’t, then they must be happy with how those who do are voting.

But then they also vote for him in the general election, since he won, so I conclude he has the support of the Republican base.

Ahh democracy

Of course that also relies on those “I don’t want Trump” republicans actually voting for him.

But let’s assume that all happens and it’s not the fault of republicans because they are apethetic. How do you explain the congress and senate members who back him?

Trump is very adept at talking out of both sides of his mouth in a way that is much different from how a standard politician does it, so he gets a lot of people are excited at hearing what they want to hear. A regular politician equivocates and never really commits. Trump just asserts a statement that sounds definitive despite being word salad, and then shamelessly contradicts himself by asserting the exact opposite later. If he gets called out on it he just responds with nonsense.

If you were evaluating him as a regular person you'd conclude he was demented or otherwise had significant brain damage, and was the no-inhibition combative type that needed to be in a facility. But his word salad apparently appealed to enough people's self-centeredness to end up as President instead. Maybe my happy place can be imagining he's got aphasia, doesn't want any of these harmful policies either, and he's suffering right along with the rest of us.

Because Fox, and Newsmax work overtime to convince people that Trump wouldn't do the things he said, and he'll actually do the good things people want. And that if anything bad happens, it's the aftershock of previous administrations (of which, Trump's is exempt, of course).

You don't have to be tapped in to see that whatever is said on Fox becomes Republican dogma very quickly. That's why half the country is more concerned that Zelenskyy is, somehow, a dictator, and less concerned that we ushered Russian state media into our white house.

It's an embarrassing state we're in, but many voters have been fostered with complete incuriosity with what Republican politicians stand for.

50 years of attacks on our education systems have yielded exactly what was intended: a nation so poorly educated that they cannot discern truth from fiction anymore.

They wanted destruction of minorities (racial, sexual, gender, religious), but not of the country. They still hold out hope that Trump will hurt them more in the long run. It’s an extremely mean-spirited party at this point.