These aren't dog whistles but open appeals to conservatives who aren't as ideological as much as they're angry—angry at immigrants for taking the jobs, angry at phone menus that ask them to press 1 for English, angry that they have to think about whether someone is a Christian or not, or whether they're hurting someone's feelings by using the wrong pronoun. Maybe Trump will make all of that better. Or maybe he'll just infuriate liberals, which is the next best thing.

Or, as Jane Coaston put it in a recent op-ed for BuzzFeed, "The policy conversations and conflicts and basic premises that once governed conservatism—or at least appeared to—have been largely replaced by a set of principles built on the rock-solid foundation of irritating liberals." GOP policies can do much more than merely annoy liberals—ask any trans soldier—but knee-jerk reactions against social progress is what defines conservatism today. Maybe in the past conservatives used the Bible or some nod to tradition to defend their views. But in the age of Trump, they can skip a few steps and go right to hating whatever liberals say.

In a column on Townhall headlined "We Must Elect Senator Kid Rock," conservative Kurt Schlichter wrote, "We're past voting for the ideology. Now we're ready to vote for the id." These two sentences, quoted by Coaston, better explain the rise of Trump, and the reasoning behind the majority of his political decisions, better than almost anything you'll read. Trump has succeeded by playing into broad cultural fears, never mind that his policies are hurting people, like trans folks in the military or undocumented immigrants, who don't have the power to defend themselves.