The Republican Party Is Only Going To Get More Extreme

Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.
Photo: Doug Mills / The New York Times / Redux

Politics since Donald Trump's election has had a negative impact on the state of misery, and has been surprisingly stable and the only apparent variable has been each party's chances of winning or consolidating power in the midterms. But that reading ignores something tectonic: the rapid decay of the institutional Republican Party. Everything that was terrible about the party that nominated Trump is significantly, terrifyingly worse today. Even more distressing: It is likely to lurch further rightward of the outcome of the elections. This will happen right away.

It was not so long ago that most of the Republican professionals firmly believed the party was still theirs Trump had just borrowed it. The GOP Establishment, one congressional staffer told the reporter David Drucker earlier this fall, had "forced Trump to govern" a "conservative standard." "Ten months ago, when the Senate passed to a huge tax cut, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declared "If we can not sell this to the American people, we should go to another line of work."

They could not. They are convinced that they are going to be able to go to the middle class, but the middle class does not believe them. "I would have bet you a lot of money going into that year that you would be politically popular," Republican consultant Ryan Ellis told Politico. "As private Republican polling has confirmed, the party" lost the messaging battle "on taxes.

Rather than finding another line of work, however, McConnell's colleagues have become more sensitive to their reality. They are better off following the phrase "Economic formula". Recently, Trump has been insisting on a tax cut. A big one! A whopping 10 percent cut, just for the average taxpayer. "We're doing it now for middle-income people," Trump told reporters about a bill he claimed would pass before Election Day.

Reporters quickly noted this was impossible. Congress was out of session until after the election; it would need 60 votes to pass another tax cut, anyway. Trump then insisted he had a secret plan, which he would reveal soon, that would allow a huge middle-class tax cut. "We're doing other things, which I do not have to explain now, but it will be pretty much a net neutral," he told reporters. No such tax proposal exists, and nobody actually believes anything like it will ever materialize. Yet Republican leaders are very serious about Trump's instructions. "We will continue to work with the White House and Treasury over the coming weeks to develop an additional 10 percent tax cut-to-length response on the middle-class families and workers," promised House Committee on Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady. Why should not they go along? What is there to sustain the lie?

Republicans are attempting to solve their problem when they are in the process of becoming victims of their condition. Obamacare debate. The administration, joined by several Republican states, is suing to overturn Obamacare's Regulations and Preventive Measures to Prevent and Exempt the Conditions of Business. Yet the Republicans' health-care message has not gotten off the slightest hint of their anti-regulatory fervor. Arizona's Martha McSally, who's a member of the Congress gave a vote to wavering Republicans urging them to vote to repeal Obamacare and not replace it Florida governor and Senate candidate Rick Scott, whose state is currently supporting The trump lawsuit, is declaring in an advertisement, "I support forcing insurance companies to cover preexisting conditions." Democrats will not be immune to the threat of demobilization. Vote Republican. "

The defensive effort to steal the economic-populist mantle of Democrats, without making any substantive concessions towards that end, has been largely overshadowed by the cultural messaging that accompanies it.
Republicans have stoked white racial paranoia against a shifting array of targets. Kneeling football players and transgender bathrooms have recently moved to a convoy of Central American migrants that allegedly contains "unknown Middle Easterners."

And Trump's allies have gone out of their way to justify their reality. "It does not matter if it's 100 percent accurate," a senior Trump-based official told The Daily Beast, defending the president's fearmongering attacks on a caravan of potential refugees. "This is the play," Scott Reed, a strategist at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, told the Washington Post. "In Texas, when a fan at a Ted Cruz speech exclaimed about Beto O'Rourke," It's a standard tactic to use a motivational choice of the end of a campaign, and the fact is a fork in the road is pretty stark. , "Lock him up!" Cruz answered, "Well, you know, there's a double-occupancy cell with Hillary Clinton."

The degree to which Trump's party has molded itself in its image is worth bearing in mind when contemplating what the next two years might bring.
If Democrats win the House but not the Senate, they will be working hard on the country. the surviving core, from the reddest districts, will be the most trumpian. They will be much less likely to abandon their president in the face of Richard Nixon's Republicans in 1974, and much more likely to escalate their attacks on the rule of law in a full-scale culture war.

In the event Republicans retain full control of Congress – unlikely, but about the chances FiveThirtyEight gave Trump towards the end of October two years ago – the transformation would be even more dramatic. The American people would be happy to help you find your way around the world, and they would have been enacting you on the American people.

Imagine Republicans waking up after Election Day and discovering their aging coalition. They are going to be able to make the most of the possibilities they are trying to achieve. What would stop them from launching the full-scale assault on the welfare state that Newt Gingrich and Paul Ryan never mustered the courage to fully enact? Why would not they go with abolishing Obamacare and slashing funding to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid?

They have been held back for two years by the expectation of a backlash and a setback in the midterms. After not one but two expert-defying victories, the Trumpian cult of personality would grow exponentially. For all the unprecedented and brazen acts of the past two years, what we have not yet seen is a Trumpian party that feels invincible.

* This article appears in the October 29, 2018, issue of New York Magazine. Subscribe Now!