As much as Tim Scott pines for an “American sunrise” or Nikki Haley talks about “fiscal responsibility,” the GOP base seems stuck on Trump and DeSantis-style culture wars and grievance politics.
Republicans are lining up for the presidential primary like it’s 2015. Donald Trump was essentially in the 2024 race since he left the White House, but didn’t officially announce until a week after November’s midterms, where he led his party to squander any strategic structural advantage they might have had. It was little quiet, but Nikki Haley last week jumped in—albeit with “no clear rationale” for doing so—while entrepreneur and Fox News fixture Vivek Ramaswamy, who fashions himself as an anti-“woke” crusader, announced a long shot bid Tuesday on Tucker Carlson’s show.
Jared Kushner was reportedly going to help overhaul the Republican platform of 2016 for his father-in-law’s reelection bid. But didn’t happen, and so the Republican National Committee “dispensed with producing a 2020 platform, instead passing a resolution renewing what delegates enacted in 2016, bashing the news media and offering wholehearted support” of Trump, who, meanwhile, struggled to articulate a second-term agenda. Mitch McConnell is also guilty of this particular strategy, deciding not to release a legislative agenda before the 2022 midterms.
The question now is whether someone who isn’t Trump could win a GOP primary through Trumpism, which clearly isn’t fading away. When The Washington Post recently spoke to more than 150 Trump supporters, reporters found that in most interviews, “fatigue with Trump was not a break with Trumpist politics,”
Republicans made a Faustian deal in 2015. They put winning over policy and decency. It worked once but it hasn’t worked since. The problem is Republicans don’t want to take the pain of rejecting Trumpism and possibly alienating his voters, and perhaps, driving him to run as a third-party candidate. But until they do, the base will control the party and no amount of thoughtful speeches will break that fever.