Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s social media posts have come in for a lot of scrutiny lately. I noticed something in a recent tweet that hasn’t gotten much notice, but which I think reflects an interesting and perhaps disturbing attitude. On January 30 she wrote that “the people of this country are absolutely 100% loyal to” President Trump.

But of course “the people” of the United States are not all that enamored of the former president, either now or at any point. He got 45.9 percent of the vote in 2016, 46.8 percent in 2020. He got 3 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton and 7 million fewer than Joe Biden. He’s the first president ever whose approval rating in the Gallup Poll never reached 50 percent, and as he left office his average poll rating was 38 percent. So it doesn’t really seem that the American people are “absolutely 100% loyal” to him. Yet on Facebook, Twitter, and elsewhere you can find constant affirmations that the elites may not like Trump but “the people” support him. Who are these people?

Claiming the mantle of “the people” is a common theme of populists, of course, from William Jennings Bryan, who asked “Shall the People Rule?” but lost three presidential races, to Hugo Chavez, who denounced his opponents as homosexual, Zionist, and tools of “the bourgeoisie” and the Americans. Political scientists Daniele Albertazzi and Duncan McDonnell described populism as an ideology that “pits a virtuous and homogeneous people against a set of elites and dangerous ‘others’ who are together depicted as depriving (or attempting to deprive) the sovereign people of their rights, values, prosperity, identity, and voice.” Populists typically claim to speak for “the people” against some set of elites and/​or against groups who are not elite but are in some way “other” — foreigners, immigrants, Jews, racial or sexual minorities, etc.

In a 2019 Reason article on authoritarian populism, Tom G. Palmer emphasized this point:

The Princeton political scientist Jan‐​Werner Müller proposes another characteristic: “In addition to being antielitist, populists are always antipluralist,” he argues in 2016’s What Is Populism? (University of Pennsylvania Press). “Populists claim that they, and they alone, represent the people.” In that formulation, the key to understanding populism is that “the people” does not include all the people. It excludes “the enemies of the people,” who may be specified in various ways: foreigners, the press, minorities, financiers, the “1 percent,” or others seen as not being “us.”

Republicans like to point to a red-blue map of recent elections by county or precinct, in which a few blue dots are visible in a sea of Republican red. Those are “the people” — even if there are more cows than people in many of those vast red areas. They’re “the real America,” as Glenn Beck titled a book. Sarah Palin said the “the real America” was the small towns. Living in Virginia, I hear the same claims about “the real Virginia.” When former Sen. George Allen noticed his opponent’s “tracker,” a young Indian-American, filming his speech, he called out “Let’s give a welcome to Macaca, here. Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia.” In 2009, Republican candidate Ken Cuccinelli told Shenandoah County Republicans that they represented “the real Virginia.”

And that, I think, is what Representative Greene and others mean when they say “the people” support Trump. They mean The People. The real people. Not those other people. Even if the other people turn out to be a majority.