This Presidency poses stark questions about the ideological future of both parties.
Trump will not be President forever—he may be in the role for only a few more months. It’s hard to imagine that the Republican Party could come close to replicating him with another Presidential candidate, unless it’s Donald Trump, Jr. But is there a future in Trumpism? This is a live question for both parties. The major political development of the past decade, all over the world, has been a series of reactions against economic insecurity and inequality powerful enough to blow apart the boundaries of conventional politics. On the right, this can be seen in the regimes of Jair Bolsonaro, in Brazil; Narendra Modi, in India; Viktor Orbán, in Hungary; and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in Turkey. There are new nativist and nationalist parties across Western Europe, and movements like the ones that produced Brexit, in Britain, and the gilets jaunes, in France. An ambitious Republican can’t ignore Trumpism. Nor can an ambitious Democrat: the Democratic Party has also failed to address the deep economic discontent in this country. But is it possible to address it without opening a Pandora’s box of virulent rage and racism? Lisa McGirr, a historian at Harvard who often writes about conservatism, told me, “The component of both parties that did not grapple with the insecurity of many Americans—that created the opportunity for exclusionary politics. It’s not Trump. It’s an opportunity that Trump seized.”
Nobody pretends that President Trump pores over detailed policy briefs. By all accounts from reporters and from Administration defectors, what you see (tweets, rallies, enmities, palace intrigue) is what you get. Even though Republicans controlled the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the White House for two years, Trump failed to achieve his most loudly voiced campaign promises from 2016, such as building that big, beautiful wall and making Mexico pay for it, getting Congress to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and undertaking a major infrastructure-building program. He is running for a second term without having produced any formal platform. What he did accomplish is a surprisingly conventional Republican program: substantial tax cuts, a vast rollback of federal regulations, large increases in military spending, and the elevation to the federal bench of more than two hundred judges with lifetime tenure, including, most likely, three avowedly conservative Supreme Court Justices.
This is likely to be Trump’s last campaign. In talking to dozens of conservatives over the past few months, I didn’t find anybody who likes or admires him in any conventional way. The Republican officeholders who opposed his nomination but don’t stand up to him are displaying either party loyalty or fear: he remains extraordinarily popular with Republican voters, especially in red states, and he is so vengeful that to displease him is to risk political death. Jeff Sessions experienced this firsthand during his run, earlier this year, for the Republican Senate nomination in Alabama. Sessions had a long, successful history in politics in Alabama and in the Senate, and a record of Trump-like views on immigration. He incurred Trump’s wrath when, as Attorney General, he recused himself from any investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election, which led to the appointment of Robert Mueller as the special counsel. For months, Trump relentlessly mocked and attacked Sessions on Twitter before firing him, in November, 2018. This year, he endorsed Sessions’s Republican opponent, Tommy Tuberville, a former football coach making his first run for political office. Trump tweeted that Tuberville was “a REAL LEADER.” Sessions lost the primary.
Senator Lindsey Graham, who during the 2016 primary season declared that Trump was “not fit to be President of the United States,” quickly became one of his most abject loyalists, expecting that the President’s support would guarantee his reëlection to the Senate in 2020. “Lindsey was scared of being primaried,” a veteran South Carolina Republican consultant told me. “Republicans in South Carolina didn’t like him—but he’s getting cheered by Republicans now.” Graham’s strategy may have worked with Republicans in his home state, but he is paying a price for it. His Democratic opponent, Jaime Harrison, who has raised more money in one quarter than any previous candidate for the Senate, has drawn close to Graham in some polls.
Donald Trump is far too bizarre to be precisely replicable as a model for the generic Republican of the future. That raises the question of where the Republican Party will go after he leaves office. The jockeying for the 2024 Republican nomination is already well under way. Did Trump’s ascension represent a significant change in the Party’s orientation, and, if so, will the change be temporary or lasting?
Trump has already changed the Republican Party. Its most hawkish element—hawkish in the Iraq War sense—has gone underground, if it still exists. The same goes for publicly stated Republican skepticism about Social Security and Medicare. One must be hostile to China, and skeptical, to some degree, of free trade. Especially since the arrival of the pandemic, it’s hard to find a true libertarian in the Party—at least among those who have to run for office. In the future, according to Donald Critchlow, a historian of conservatism who teaches at Arizona State University, “the advantage would go to a candidate who is Trump without the Trump caricature. An old-fashioned Chamber of Commerce candidate would not do well. We’re in a new situation, in both parties. Everything’s up for grabs.” A senior Republican staffer who has Reversalist sympathies says, “Trump isn’t good at a twenty-first-century policy agenda,” but that work can go on without him. “If he loses, we’ll have a massive argument in the Republican Party. Some will say, ‘He’s a black swan.’ To me, the lesson is: he correctly diagnosed what was going on. Let’s apply that to conservative economic policy. To me, what’s up for grabs is the working-class vote. Not just working-class white—working-class. Does what the President tapped into have to be racial? Can it be about what neoliberalism has done to the country?”
Trump’s genius is to command attention, including the attention of people who dislike him. That makes it tempting to think that, when he’s gone, everything he stands for will go with him. It probably won’t; elements of Trumpism will likely be with us for a long time. Which elements, taking what form, in the possession of which party? Such questions will be just as pressing after Trump as they are now.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/02/the-republican-identity-crisis-after-trump?reload