Malcom Kyeyune is a freelance writer living in Uppsala, Sweden
As America inches ever closer to its next election, the rest of the world is now forced to face the fact that Donald Trump is almost guaranteed to be the Republican nominee, and the favourite to return to the White House. It wasn’t supposed to be this way: surrounded by scandal and dogged by several attempts to imprison him through lawfare, he ought to have been weak coming into 2024. But all attempts to stop him have failed. This time around, he was challenged by half a dozen political opponents contending for the Republican nomination. Trump, refusing to even attend any of their debates, handily crushed them all.
To many on both the Left and the Right, this is an almost inconceivable state of affairs. His popularity seems nearly impossible to justify, and thus people come up with equally fantastical or belittling explanations for his success. To some, Trump appears like some sort of hypnotist, a snake charmer who has simply mesmerised much of the electorate. To others, the “explanation” begins and ends with concluding that Americans have simply gone insane.
But America hasn’t gone insane, nor is Trump — a man who has occasionally been booed at his own rallies, even by his own most loyal supporters — some sort of hypnotist. The appeal of Trump in 2024 is quite different from the Trump that rode down that golden escalator eight years ago and promised to “Make America Great Again”. In fact, you don’t hear that particular slogan chanted very much at all these days. This might seem paradoxical, but it really is not: as the belief in “MAGA” has waned, the power and appeal of this new Trump has only waxed. This is no longer a man who promises to make America great again — and this is precisely the reason why many American voters still feel that they need him.
