The Post-Trump GOP
and why the Republicans should be concerned about it.
Donald Trump turns 76 this year.
Were Trump to win another term as President, he would be 82 on January 20, 2029. Trumpian abandonment of the Constitution and bizarre QAnon beliefs notwithstanding — that would be the political end of Trump.
Then what, Republicans, and where to?
Most presidential elections come down to referendums on the incumbent in one way or another.
In 1988, the GOP presidential primary came down to a battle over who was the political heir of Reagan. Then-Senator Robert Dole’s acceptance of that political theme cost him — dearly. Vice Presidents are the natural political heirs of Presidents. Just ask Nixon, Bush, and Gore.
Some presidential contests, however, loom as tests of political principles not personalities.
In 1952, Dwight Eisenhower took on Senator Robert Taft (R-OH) in a battle over whether the GOP would return to isolationism as a cornerstone of its foreign policy principles.
In 1948 and 1968, the Democrats were split on the direction of its populist underpinnings with civil rights and the Vietnam War forcing those discussions, respectively.
And there are races where the popular will is supplanted by political spin, gaslighting, and snake oil.
And in 2000 and 2016, this nation was divided over a good economy at home and relative peace abroad as the party out of power argued for a political reboot. In both those years, the GOP won with less than stellar standard bearers arguing for tax cuts, deregulation, and some level of cowboy diplomacy.
The fact that second place pluralities seem eager to reject such policy successes is worrisome for Democrats who have struggled with political messaging for decades. For Republicans, dwindling political support for GOP presidential candidates should be setting off alarm bells — neither their ideas nor their candidates enjoy broad popularity.
In 2028, the Republican Party could face the following scenarios:
Arguing over who Trump’s political heir is at the end of his second term,
Arguing whether Trump might run for President at the end of Biden’s term,
Arguing whether Trump can beat a President Harris,
Or engaging in a political battle akin to “the Apprentice”, in which failing to genuflect before Trump is a sure way to be fired by GOP voters.
Unless, of course, Trump dies between now and 2024. Not to be ghoulish, but a dead Donald Trump would make the above scenarios seem ideal by contrast. In the current political milieu, the cannabalistic tendencies among elected Republicans would get considerable worse. Just as the Democrats struggled with their Kennedy legacy for almost 20 years following JFK’s assassination, the GOP won’t easily shake off its Trump brand and Trumpism.
The Trump brand is nothing more than Trump’s ego and Trumpism an uncompromising obeisance to whatever Trump wants at a particular moment. While the lack of any principles or pragmatic impulses on Trump’s part feeds the modern Republican Party’s fealty to nihilism, it also makes Trumpism politically useless to anyone but Trump.
When personalismo dethrones principle, political parties wither. And like Peron, Castro, and others, Trump’s insistence on his own self importance is compelling people to leave the Republican party, not to join it. Trump’s base gets older, angrier, and smaller by the day. Rant-filled rallies, bizarre political broadsides, and Trump’s caudillos are not reversing the demographic death march; quite the opposite, they are making it worse. And, the GOP’s blind acceptance of Trump’s reliance on extra-constutional constructs to reattain political power and support for political violence is accelerating that process.
Gerrymandering and voter suppression notwithstanding, changing demographics point to a dwindling populace to support things Republican. According to a study1 done by the Center for American Progress, the growing political importance of Millenials (born 1981-1996) and Generation Z (born after 1997) loom as problematic obtacles to the GOP’s political agenda. Abortion, climate change, gay rights, the BLM movement, and a plethora of other policies in the Democratic Party’s agenda has a growing generational base that will likely transform the political landscape within 20 years.
With Millenials and Generation Z voting lopsidedly Democratic, the Republican Party’s unwillingness to define itself beyond Trumpism makes little sense.
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/americas-electoral-future-3/