Exactly.
Limbaugh was offering a template for the next decade of culture-war arguments on the political right. For eight years, the Republican Party’s chief villain was the first black president, whose center-left liberalism was decried as “Kenyan anti-colonialism,” whose health-care bill was “reparations,” and whose election set off a “race war” waged by power-mad black Americans. His anointed successor, Hillary Clinton—in Limbaugh’s words, a “feminazi” armed with a “testicle lockbox”—was an easy target for anxieties about a different inversion of power, that of America’s traditional gender hierarchy. Clinton’s defeat was not sufficient to remove her as a target; to this day, Fox News’s most successful hosts return to the Clinton oasis like wanderers dying of thirst.
Trump, first by embracing the “birther” movement, and later as the candidate who promised to return the United States to an idealized past, successfully rode these backlashes to the White House. Four years later, Trump is hoping to ride the same wave of anger, fear, and resentment to a second term.
There’s only one problem: His opponent is Joe Biden.
For the past few months, Trump and the conservative propaganda apparatus have struggled to make the old race-and-gender-baiting rhetoric stick to Biden. But voters don’t appear to believe that Biden is an avatar of the “radical left.” They don’t think Biden is going to lock up your manhood in a “testicle lockbox.” They don’t buy that Biden’s platform, which is well to the left of the ticket he joined in 2008, represents a quiet adherence to “Kenyan anti-colonialism.” Part of this is that Biden has embraced popular liberal positions while avoiding the incentive to adopt more controversial or unpopular positions during the primary. But it’s also becoming clear that after 12 years of feasting on white identity politics with a black man and a woman as its preeminent villains, the Republican Party is struggling to run its Obama-era culture-war playbook against an old, moderate white guy.
The only people this worn-out politicking is appealing to is the small, minority base of Americans that are already behind Trump 100%. The 35% or so of his cult-base. The rest of America is giving a collective yawn as none of it sticks to Biden.
They will continue to try the mentally deficient angle, but that backfires on them as well as the mental state of Trump is of equal concern, if not more concern, to the other 65% of the public. They will try the “too-touchy-feely” angle with women, which also has no room for growth, given Trump has been credibly accused by countless women of sexual assault and even rape. They may even go back to the Hunter Biden angle, which really has no teeth behind it either. Given the blatant corruption of Trump and his family, who have milked the US Taxpayer for millions and millions of dollars while in office.
It is amusing watching the Trump fan-boys spin their wheels, desperate to make something, anything stick.
