So why is Trump such a litmus test for primary voters?
For the same reason Trump was elected: attitude.
There’s been a continuous two-year effort afoot to intellectualize Trumpism, as though Trump’s popularity is tied to his policy proposals. That’s nonsense. Trump won the Republican primaries because he was — by far — the most aggressive, no-holds-barred candidate. Republican primary voters wanted to see Hillary Clinton pummeled on stage, and Trump offered the best promise of that. After brutalizing Jeb Bush and reducing Senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz to frustrated stammering, Trump proceeded to pile drive Hillary Clinton at every opportunity. Republican primary voters got precisely what they bargained for.
What’s more, backing Trump lent Republican voters a sense that they were in the fight. After Mitt Romney’s destruction at the hands of Barack Obama in 2012 — after the Democrats turned the cleanest politician of the modern era into a gay-bashing, dog-hating sexist who wanted to put black people “back in chains” — Republicans were fully on board with the Sean Connery line from The Untouchables: “They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way.” Trump was the knife, and the morgue, and all the consequences wrapped up into one giant bag of id, topped with a puzzling hairdo.
Pawlenty had called Trump "unsound, uninformed, unhinged, and unfit to be president of the United States" during the 2016 campaign. Pawlenty lamented, "The Republican Party has shifted. It is the era of Trump, and I’m just not a Trump-like politician."
https://www.dailywire.com/news/34530/another-prominent-anti-trump-republican-just-went-ben-shapiro
For the same reason Trump was elected: attitude.
There’s been a continuous two-year effort afoot to intellectualize Trumpism, as though Trump’s popularity is tied to his policy proposals. That’s nonsense. Trump won the Republican primaries because he was — by far — the most aggressive, no-holds-barred candidate. Republican primary voters wanted to see Hillary Clinton pummeled on stage, and Trump offered the best promise of that. After brutalizing Jeb Bush and reducing Senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz to frustrated stammering, Trump proceeded to pile drive Hillary Clinton at every opportunity. Republican primary voters got precisely what they bargained for.
What’s more, backing Trump lent Republican voters a sense that they were in the fight. After Mitt Romney’s destruction at the hands of Barack Obama in 2012 — after the Democrats turned the cleanest politician of the modern era into a gay-bashing, dog-hating sexist who wanted to put black people “back in chains” — Republicans were fully on board with the Sean Connery line from The Untouchables: “They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way.” Trump was the knife, and the morgue, and all the consequences wrapped up into one giant bag of id, topped with a puzzling hairdo.
Pawlenty had called Trump "unsound, uninformed, unhinged, and unfit to be president of the United States" during the 2016 campaign. Pawlenty lamented, "The Republican Party has shifted. It is the era of Trump, and I’m just not a Trump-like politician."
https://www.dailywire.com/news/34530/another-prominent-anti-trump-republican-just-went-ben-shapiro