Donald Trump thinks climate change is a hoax invented by China and that exercise drains humans’ finite energy reserves. But dense though he may be, he clearly has a special intuition about the American psyche. Consciously or not, Trump senses what will transfix, flatter, enrage, humiliate, impress, and distract tens of millions of people. He’s got America’s number — not the whole country, but enough to take the Republican primary and then the 2016 election by storm with no political experience whatsoever.

Since then, the entire Republican Party establishment has been trying to decide what to do with their magnificent moron. Some, unable to stomach Trump’s unpredictability, are waiting in the wings for better days. But many angle for proximity to him, hoping to steer and coax the president. They are routinely ignored and rebuffed, and frequently banished when Trump tires of them. But Trump can’t devote his scarce mental energy to serious consideration of every decision that crosses his desk, and his rotating cast of advisers retains some influence.

These advisers have hatched a plan for Trump in 2020. According to the Daily Beast, they want him to go hard against “socialists and communists,” to red-bait his way to reelection. He has obliged in public on several occasions, saying, for example, that any vote for a Democrat is “a vote for the rise of radical socialism and the destruction of the American dream,” and promising in his 2019 State of the Union address that “America will never be a socialist country.”