Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign has been a two-pronged effort. Trump, hailed and feared as a populist since he came down the escalator nine years ago, is mostly campaigning to the normies. His friends, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tucker Carlson, Tulsi Gabbard, Elon Musk, Russell Brand — and, to some degree, J. D. Vance — are running a kind of parallel campaign. They are reaching out to the wild ones, the populist voters whom Trump first electrified, the ones who think the system, in one way or another, is rigged, broken, or conspiring against them. Trump’s electoral success depends on how well these groups, the normies and the populists, can tolerate each other, and how much they overlap already.
Normie, if you didn’t know already, has become the internet term of art for normal people in America, the people who want to work hard, play by the rules, make a little money, and then grill on the weekends. They are the reason the economy is always the No. 1 issue in American politics.
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