Transcript: Trump Mental State Exposed in Damning Video as Rubio Spins

Instead, what Republicans want is for Talarico to lie down and take these attacks. That’s the main event they want. They want, again, to go back to the Swift Boat example, for one side to be seen as strong and dominant and the other as weak and submissive and unable to fight back. And these attacks are almost designed to trigger bad instincts in Democrats, I think, in a way. Can you talk about this Texas Senate race example in this context a little bit? You wrote a great piece about this. It’s applicable, isn’t it?

Beutler: I think it’s directly applicable. And I do want to say it’s both things. There are definitely voters in Texas who, absent everything, might think Ken Paxton is such a sleazebag that even though I’m conservative, I’m a Republican, I like Donald Trump, Paxton takes it too far, so this time I’m going to vote for Talarico or I’m going to stay home.

And Republicans certainly want some of those voters to think, well, if you vote for Talarico, that means you’re not a real man. And they want those people’s friends to be saying, you’re not going to vote for that Talarico guy, are you? To create a kind of peer pressure, a social environment where supporting Talarico is something that you have to be ashamed of.

But the flip side of that is that there are people who are less committed. They’re really more genuinely independent. They vote for both parties or they vote for Republicans mostly out of habit. They’re not super committed. Republicanism isn’t part of their identity. But they do value strength. They do respect people who stand up for themselves. And they do think that people who don’t stand up for themselves are weak and pathetic in some sense.