It is very important, in some contexts, to distinguish between Republican voters and Republican politicians. What you hear if you talk to the former can be wild

It is very important, in some contexts, to distinguish between Republican voters and Republican politicians. What you hear if you talk to the former can be wildly different from what the latter deliver and even what they make planks of their party platform. Notably, the voters tend not to like neoliberalism and globalization and to be big fans of "why don't they just..." solutions for various problems—say, "why don't they just build a wall at the border?" Sound like any recent, prominent R politicians? Yep—he seems to have noticed the large gap between the Republican Party platform and what the average Republican voter you talk to at a diner says they want, then exploited that gap, which worked because the gap is very real and pretty large. This occasionally got a bit weird, like in some of his speeches about how he'd provide "beautiful" healthcare to everyone, which seemed strangely close to some kind of (very vague) messaging about adding a public option of some kind of universal coverage and was met with cheering by his audience. This is because left- and right-wing populism in the US share a surprising amount in common, but those issues and commonalities are often ignored or deliberately sidelined by party elites. This is related to how laws that get passed and policies that are enacted are disturbingly disconnected from public sentiment generally. (none of this should be taken as an endorsement of the former president, I'm just observing the lay of the electoral landscape and how he exploited that. I am also not claiming that a similar difference between typical voters and party leaders/platform doesn't exist for the Democrats—it absolutely does. This is all probably a result of our really shitty FPTP elections.)