We can learn a lot from Barton Swaim’s Wall Street Journal article, “Can Trump Beat Harris with Common Sense?”

On the one hand, Swaim seems genuinely puzzled by the nature of Trump’s support.  Because people who attend Trump rallies are not energized by “any conservative worldview or set of policies,” he joins “the media, Democrats and Never Trump Republicans” in offering the “fandom” explanation.

On the other hand, Swaim is evidently a fair-minded reporter.  This makes it possible for him to learn something profound about the nature of Trump’s support from a Trump-supporter at a rally in Charlotte, N.C.:

Wayne Bowman, a healthcare worker in Charlotte, summed up his support by saying that Mr. Trump “does the right thing. Food, fuel, insurance, you know — the whole array of things. Just common sense,” Mr. Bowman said more than once.

I spoke with Mr. Bowman before Mr. Trump came onstage, and for that reason I noticed that Mr. Trump used the phrase “common sense” several times in his talk. “Who could want this?” he asked of men competing in women’s sports. “Who could want open borders? ... We are the party of common sense. We have to get back to common sense.” I hadn’t marked the phrase before in Mr. Trump’s talks, but looking back I note that he used it in his rambling nomination speech a week before. “We’re going to have a thing called common sense making most of our decisions, actually,” he said. “It’s all common sense.”

Notice that Swaim states that he would not even have noticed Trump’s use of the phrase “common sense” without Mr. Bowman’s help.  But of course, Trump has been using that phrase all along.  It is and has been all along a powerful source of the deep affinity between Trump and his supporters.

Supplied with this key to Trump’s support, Swaim scores a bull’s eye, while still clinging to his “fandom” account:

Mr. Trump’s popularity among lower- and middle-income Americans is largely the product of progressive insanity. ... Mr. Trump’s fandom is a measure of middle- and working-class exasperation with the delusions and perversities of an illiberal progressive elite.

The subtitle of Swaim’s article captures it all: “The former president’s fandom intensifies as the left gets crazier.”  Trump understands deeply what traditional Republicans, bound as they are to a “conservative worldview or set of policies,” cannot understand.  Progressive insanity has transformed the Democrats.  Consequently, the Republican party must be transformed to meet the challenge of a totally radicalized Democrat party.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan defeated President Jimmy Carter in a landslide victory.  We live in a different America.  Those days and the Democrat party of Jimmy Carter are long gone.  America hangs in the balance because the illiberal progressive elite who now control the government bureaucracies, the universities, the media, and the Democrat party are done with the bother of unwanted decisions by pesky voters like the one that happened in 1980.  From now on, they intend to select the winners of elections, as they did with Biden in 2020.  Amazingly, they are even willing to dispense with primary elections, as they are doing right now with Kamala Harris!

Trump has a tremendous advantage over traditional Republicans and those who report on politics professionally.  Trump understands that the Republicans must become the party of common sense.  Men competing in women’s sports, open borders, and all the rest of delusions and perversities of America’s illiberal progressive elite are crazy.  Progressive insanity must be met by the kind of policy positions favored not by traditional Republicans, but by the opposite of insanity, which is, of course, common sense.

Robert Curry is the author of Reclaiming Common Sense: Finding Truth in a Post-Truth World and Common Sense Nation: Unlocking the Forgotten Power of the American Idea.  Both are from Encounter Books.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.