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“I didn’t want Trump to run at all,” she told me. “I felt like he should stay in the background. He could have been like the father of the party, an adviser to other candidates.” She shook her head at the naïveté. Trump, she knew, was unwilling to cede the spotlight and would never entertain the idea that anyone else might have a better shot at beating Biden in November. It was not his nature. “His ego is just the worst thing I’ve ever seen,” she said. “It’s beyond.”
“‘DeSanctimonious’ — that bothered me a lot. Still does. I don’t like the name-calling,” she said. “You’re not just saying that to him. You’re attaching that to his children. That can be lasting. That’s something that, in a few years, when they’re in school, other kids could tease them about their last name. Like, grow up, stop doing that. You can attack people without making fun of their name.” She had been talking fast, and now she stopped to take a breath. “Think of who has their name made fun of.” She raised her eyebrows and burst out laughing. Her name is Karyn. “It’s very personal! Any time someone uses that trope against me, they’re off my Facebook page. Like, Bye!”
She liked that DeSantis is a veteran, and she thought he seemed like a good executive. During the pandemic, her son was working at a restaurant in Florida, and when the shutdowns took effect and the unemployment system crashed and he didn’t have any income for two weeks, she called the governor’s office. “They resolved it for him in 24 hours,” she said. That impressed her. “That’s competence,” she said. “Even though he was polling so low, I was going to vote my conscience and throw away my vote to DeSantis. Which is not like me. I’m a strategy person. I’m not stupid. But I was going to do that.”
Then DeSantis dropped out, leaving her with only Nikki Haley and Trump as options.
She hated Haley — whose adolescent girlboss posture struck her as both anti-feminist and too reminiscent of Hillary Clinton for comfort — more than she disapproved of the former president. (Incidentally, she found herself bartending at Haley’s Primary Night party. Haley “didn’t mingle,” she noted, and the evening was over much earlier than those working the event would have liked.) “I wasn’t happy, but it was like, This is what you’re going to do,” Olson said. She spoke in a deep, commanding voice and pounded on her chest for effect. She was going to suck it up. She was going to vote for Donald Trump.
At campaign events leading up to New Hampshire’s Primary Day, Trump and his campaign surrogates promised the new administration would prioritize historical revision and revenge. At the Saddle Up Saloon in Kingston, a woman cried out, “When are we gonna learn the truth about January 6th?” J. D. Vance, wearing a bright-red MAGA hat, said that investigating “the truth” about the insurrection would be “one of the most important things” on Trump’s agenda once he was back in power. In Hollis on Monday afternoon, Donald Trump Jr. told me the indictments had backfired on Democrats by motivating people who were once “politically agnostic” to support his father in defiance of the “extreme nature” of the “deep state.” “They get it,” he said. “They realize they’ve been duped and lied to for far too long, so I do think it’s helpful.”
Fortified by the snow, by the subzero temperatures, by the dawn of the New Year, with his improbably bronze visage and long black overcoat, Trump emerges, resurrected, not as the great hope of the Republican Party, because what even is the Republican Party now and who even cares about the Republican Party now, but as the great hope of a movement that is branded, as he prefers, with the Trump name.
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