BEDFORD, N.H. — “This,” Ted Johnson told me, “is what I hope.” We were here the other day at a bar not far from his house, and we were talking about Donald Trump and the possibility he could be the president again by this time next year. “He breaks the system,” he said, “he exposes the deep state, and it’s going to be a miserable four years for everybody.”

“For everybody?” I said.

“Everybody.”

“For you?”

“I think his policies are going to be good,” he said, “but it’s going to be hard to watch this happen to our country. He’s going to pull it apart.”

The notion that somebody might wish for the country’s dismantling would have sounded shocking coming from anybody, but it was especially jarring coming from Johnson. Because I was at a Nikki Haley town hall at the VFW in nearby Merrimack in the first week of September when Johnson stood up and asked her a question. He introduced himself as an independent voter and a retired soldier and said it felt like the nation was “in a civil war” and that some of his neighbors would hate him if he so much as put up a sign for her in his yard. On his mind, too, was his estrangement from his older brother — a rift the former president had done nothing but widen. He wanted to hear Haley’s plan “to pull us all back together.”

Haley at that moment was beginning to become the top non-Trump pick in the Republican primary process, slowly, steadily replacing Gov. Ron DeSantis. She pitched conservative policies with a more moderate mien, a split-the-difference escape hatch for MAGA movables to not have to outright denounce Trump but still turn the page. Could she finish second in Iowa? Could she win New Hampshire? Could she actually topple Trump? To do any of that, though, she needed a mix of GOP-leaning independents, Trump-averse Republicans and at-all-open-minded Trump voters. She needed Ted Johnson. And Ted Johnson was listening.

So Johnson’s journey from that VFW last fall to how he says he’s set to vote this week — a four-and-a-half-month turnabout from literally wanting to “pull us back together” to literally wanting to “pull it apart” — offers as instructive an insight as I’ve yet encountered into how on earth we are where we are. Trump could be just a disgraced ex-president facing time in prison. Instead, at least for now, he is a durably dominant political force credibly eyeing a return to the White House. And if Trump wins in New Hampshire on Tuesday (and polls say he probably will), and if he beats Joe Biden come November (and polls say he certainly might), it will be because of Johnson and the many thousands of others like him who looked for ways to quit Trump but ultimately couldn’t, didn’t and haven’t — and not remotely reluctantly but with an explicit sense of vengeance.

“He’s a wrecking ball,” Johnson told me here at the place he chose called the Copper Door.

“Everybody’s going to say, ‘Trump is divisive,’” he said, “and he’s going to split the country in half.” He looked at me. “We got it,” he said.

It’s what the Ted Johnsons want.

He’s 58. He’s married to his second wife and has three young adult sons. He was in the Army for 22 years — he retired as a lieutenant colonel — and now he is a senior project manager for an IT........

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