"It is both an uneasy and an incredibly easy time to be an ambitious Republican politician. A generation of hothouse freaks bred for and molded by the conservative political ecosystem are running up against the realization that their base cares nothing about the ludicrously shitty and unpopular policies they’ve been pushing for generations, and also hates their tricksy and smug debate-club rhetoric, and also hates them, really, mostly for the usual reasons that people dislike Yalies but also because they are boring. But what has replaced all that professional stuff is just trolling and recrimination and bile; there is no real reasoning to it, or with it.
"What this base wants to see is itself, reflected in shades of gunmetal and gold, because it does not trust and cannot care about anything but that reflection. This is the language that Jenner is trying to learn to speak, the uncanny patois of sunburned small-business tyrants and seething but secretly bored bosses and aggrieved middle-management. The task before Jenner is to learn the things that the deranged hornball grifters and serial antagonizers of customer service professionals and sloppy hair-trigger affluenza cases hear all day from their televisions, and then learn to say it back to them. Trump was able to do this because, for all his wealth, he was exactly as small of spirit and vacant of principle and jealously selfish as the people that idolized him, and just as voracious a consumer of the same terrible television. For all the other things that might hold Jenner back as a candidate, she does at least seem to have all that going for her." -- David Roth, writing about Republican candidate for California Governor Caitlin "I Can See Homeless People From My Hangar" Jenner, but really about Republican pols in general, who reflect the vacuity of their base in the era of the former guy.
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