Jonah Goldberg warns Republicans that all they accomplish by rushing to the president’s defense whenever he says or does something indefensible is convince more Americans that “Trumpism” isn’t confined to Donald Trump.
That damage won’t be erased by another record stock-market closing or an uptick in the GDP numbers. It will outlive The Trump Show for generations.
And yet. (more…)
Senior Republicans have castigated President Donald Trump in the last week, some implicitly, others explicitly.
Now that Donald Trump’s Rasputin, Steve Bannon, has declared open season on Republicans, will the party finally see its president for the saboteur he is?
Mike Allen and Jonathan Swan report for Axios that Bannon is recruiting right-wing primary challengers against every incumbent Republican senator running for reelection next year except Ted Cruz. He told Fox News: “Nobody’s safe. We’re coming after all of them.”
Opposing the leadership of Trump critic Mitch McConnell is “a de facto litmus test in Bannon’s recruitment.”
Allen and Swan conclude:
If Bannon were to field the slate he envisions, the Republican Party would have a civil war on its hands that makes 2010 look like a tea party. (more…)
Donald Trump is splitting America’s Republican Party in two — and his side is winning.
NBC News and The Wall Street Journal asked Republican voters if they consider themselves to be a supporter of the president first or a supporter of the Republican Party. 58 percent said Trump, 38 percent the party.
The Trump supporters are more likely to hail from rural areas and to be men while Republican Party supporters are more likely to be women and residents of the suburbs.
CNN found a similar divide: Trump’s support is strongest among old white voters without a college education. Republicans under the age of fifty with a degree are disappointed in him.
These trends portend a realignment of America’s two-party system in which the Democrats become the party of the affluent and the optimistic and the Republicans a coalition of the left behind.
Before such a realignment can happen, though, the Republicans need to break up. (more…)
In August 2016, I was penning an article titled “The Coming Republican Civil War”. The premise was simple: after a self-inflicted Trumpian defeat in November, the party of Lincoln would tear itself asunder assigning blame and shedding factions.
But Hillary lost. For a few brief months, the Grand Old Party looked triumphant.
Not so much anymore.
The long-term trajectory of the Republican Party isn’t great; factional infighting has already sunk several attempts to roll back the Affordable Care Act and by the end of the month we’ll know just how deep the divides go should tax reform and the Graham-Cassidy health-care bill fail. (more…)
Donald Trump is on a collision course with his own party.
Republicans have publicly rebuked the president for threatening to shut down the government if they don’t fund construction of a southern border wall.
Building a wall between Mexico and the United States was Trump’s signature campaign promise. But it is an impractical plan that few lawmakers are willing to spend billions of dollars on.
When they return from summer recess in two weeks, Republicans will have about twelve working days to pass a budget that Trump must sign to keep the government running.
If Trump makes good on his threat (and he seldom does), it could trigger a civil war inside the party — which he is most likely to win. (more…)
Firing Reince Priebus as his chief of staff has allowed American president Donald Trump to put even more distance between himself and the party that elected him, argues Tim Alberta at Politico:
More and more, Trump talks as though there are Democrats and Republicans — and him, a party of one.
With the exception of his vice president, Mike Pence, none of Trump’s remaining confidants have a history in the party.
Many, including the president himself, weren’t even Republicans until one or two years ago.
Republicans must start to wonder what, other than winning the presidency and putting a conservative, Neil Gorsuch, on the Supreme Court, Trump has done for the party? (more…)
Democrats in the United States are heaping praise on Republican senator Susan Collins for taking a stand against her party’s health reforms.
The praise is deserved. Collins, a centrist Republican from Maine, refused to support a plan that would have taken health care away from millions of low-income Americans while making it cheaper for the wealthy.
But it’s too bad the left doesn’t extend the same gratitude to conservative purists who joined her.
None of the other supposedly moderate Republicans in the Senate supported Collins in her fight against the rushed effort to replace Obamacare. They all caved to right-wing pressure.
Mike Lee of Utah, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Jerry Moran of Kansas and Rand Paul of Kentucky held firm. (more…)
What does Donald Trump need to do for Republicans to lose faith in him?
The latest revelation from The Washington Post is that Trump disclosed highly classified information to Russian officials during a meeting in the Oval Office.
The president reportedly bragged about the “great intel” he was getting and went on to discuss aspects of an Islamist threat the United States learned through the espionage capabilities of a key partner.
Most alarmingly, officials said, Trump revealed the city in the Islamic State’s territory where the American intelligence partner detected the threat.
None of which should have been relayed to the Russian ambassador and foreign minister of all people. According to The Post, the information hadn’t even been shared with American allies.
The story was confirmed by Reuters and other news organizations. (more…)
Last week, I wrote about Donald Trump’s soft support among Republicans. Democrats already strongly disapprove of his bigotry, buffoonery and right-wing ideology. In order to dip down to Nixonian or Bush ’43 levels — high 20s, low 30s — he will have to lose support from conservatives and Republican-leaning independents.
This is looking more and more likely. The recent health-care debacle shows why Trump is in trouble — and, unless he makes a fundamental change, doomed to a pointless presidency free of policy accomplishments.
This is the dynamic at play:
Donald Trump is on the fast track to approval depths last plumbed by George W. Bush, or at least that’s what many Democrats hope. RealClearPolitics has his approval at 41.1 percent — and trending downward.
But without a major change in the political environment, Trump’s ratings won’t sink that much lower. Why? Because he has already burned off the public benefit of the doubt normally afforded to new presidents. In other words, those that could disapprove of him because of his clownish behavior or rank bigotry already do.
Any further decrease in his popularity will have to come from disaffected Republicans and conservative independents.
Until the health-care debacle, this was an unlikely prospect. But now it may be inevitable. (more…)
Many center-right commentators in the United States opposed Donald Trump during the Republican primaries. When he nevertheless won the nomination, some halfheartedly threw their support behind Hillary Clinton to try to stop him.
Now that he has been elected anyway, they are hoping Republicans in Congress will rein him in.
Don’t count on it. (more…)
If, as expected, Hillary Clinton humiliates Donald Trump in America’s presidential election next week, Republicans must quickly stamp out his nativist insurgency — or risk a hostile takeover by his supporters.
The immediate fight will be in Congress, where Republicans could face two big decisions:
In both cases, Republican lawmakers are torn between doing the right thing and appeasing their hard-right base, which is now in thrall to Trump.
Principled conservatives should be able to justify approving Garland (Clinton’s pick would be worse) and TPP (there was a time when Republicans supported free trade and containing China).
But principled conservatism is not what Trump and his movement are about. (more…)
Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy in the United States is accelerating three trends that could reshape the country’s two-party system: the consolidation of lower-educated white voters in the Republican Party and the flight of college-educated whites and minority voters to the Democrats.
New York magazine reports that Hillary Clinton’s party is trading white working-class supporters for suburban Republicans, a trend that is reshaping the electoral map: Whereas Trump weans white voters away from the Democrat in Northeastern Rust Belt states such as Michigan, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania, Clinton is making inroads in the suburbs of Colorado, Florida, North Carolina and Virginia.
This is deliberate, writes David Wasserman in The New York Times.
The Clinton campaign calculates that its candidate is likelier to prevail by “disqualifying” Mr Trump — using ads to make the idea of voting for him socially unacceptable in professional suburbs — among additional well-educated voters (in states like North Carolina) than by holding on to working-class voters tempted by Mr Trump’s populism (in states like Ohio).
Trump’s misogyny, his sexism and the many accusations of sexual misconduct against him have made him particularly vulnerable among educated women.
FiveThirtyEight reports that polls show an average 15-point gender gap in Clinton’s favor. That is double Barack Obama’s lead among women over Mitt Romney four years ago. (more…)
Republican House speaker Paul Ryan made headlines on Monday when he said he could no longer defend Donald Trump, his party’s presidential nominee.
But it didn’t take long for commentators to point out that Ryan hadn’t withdrawn his endorsement. So we have the spectacle of the most powerful elected Republican in the country saying he can no longer “defend” his party’s nominee while still supporting the same person to become president of the United States.
Hypocritical? Of course. And for those of us who had high hopes for Ryan, it is profoundly disappointing as well. (more…)
