After Trump

By Dan McLaughlin

Thursday, August 25, 2022

 

It may be hard to see amidst the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago and primaries contested over the 2020 election, but a post-Trump Republican Party is coming, sooner or later. No man is forever. As Sparky Anderson used to say whenever his team lost a good ballplayer, “Babe Ruth died, but the game went on.”

 

Donald Trump’s time as leader of the party faces inevitable limits. Trump is 76 years old; he is barred by the Constitution from winning more than one additional presidential election, and a losing candidacy in 2024 would finish him as the leader of the party. His children have yet to demonstrate the capacity to replicate his influence on their own.

 

At some point, a new leader will emerge, who will necessarily eclipse Trump. Florida governor Ron DeSantis seems the likeliest candidate at the moment, but if it’s not him, it will be someone else — perhaps a more low-key figure such as Glenn Youngkin, the governor of Virginia. Just as Trump has put his stamp on the party, the next leader will, too. The political future of the party can turn faster than we think.

 

Past Republican presidents have cast shadows of differing lengths. Aside from the earliest Republicans — the party was still finding its identity under Lincoln and Grant — Ronald Reagan cast the largest and longest shadow. Reagan remade the party’s self-image, ideology, rhetoric, and voting base, reorienting it as a pro-life party that professed small-government nostrums and constitutional originalism. William McKinley realigned the GOP’s approach and tactics, forging a pro-business Republicanism that proved durable enough to outlast Theodore Roosevelt’s effort to repudiate it. Dwight Eisenhower’s only lasting effect in domestic politics was to end frontal assaults on the New Deal, but his victory over the Robert Taft wing of the party set the terms of Republican foreign-policy debate for 65 years.

 

At the opposite pole, aside from the number of long careers that started in his administration, Richard Nixon left such a small footprint that, within a year of his leaving office, one hardly knew that he had ever been there. Reagan, though he never broke with Nixon, was a vocal critic of Nixon’s policy direction, and the rising generation followed Reagan’s lead, not Nixon’s. George W. Bush’s presidency marked more an end than a beginning of efforts to work within the Reagan tradition, and produced a backlash against many of Bush’s views.

 

Perhaps the most useful analogy to Trump is TR. Roosevelt rode the wave of early progressivism and a popular current of reaction against “malefactors of great wealth.” His forceful personality made him a cultural icon. For a decade after leaving office in 1909, Roosevelt was the most dynamic figure in American politics. Even after his third-party run in 1912, Republicans struggled to escape his shadow, losing the 1916 election in part over divisions in California between the moderately progressive Republican presidential nominee and Roosevelt’s 1912 running mate. Until the day that Roosevelt died in January 1919, he was seen as a leading contender for the Republican nomination in 1920.

 

Yet Teddy’s influence died with him. The Republican Congress elected in 1918 looked like McKinley more than Roosevelt. The thoroughly conservative Harding-Coolidge ticket was very un-Teddy in both substance and style, yet won a historic landslide in 1920 and governed the country for the next eight years as a “return to normalcy.” While Roosevelt has inspired latter-day admirers from John McCain to Josh Hawley, his dominance of the party was a matter of personality more than ideas.

 

In Trump’s case, the past seven years have seen changes to the party in six main areas: personnel, ideology, priorities, style, norms, and demographics. On several of these fronts, much will depend on whether there is a second Trump term. If Trump is returned to the White House, he will likely be surrounded by far fewer people with backgrounds in pre-2015 Republican politics. That could lead to further departures from traditional GOP thinking and approaches. It could also produce a backlash on the order of Bush’s second term.

 

Leadership matters in politics; people follow the cues of those they respect and choose as leaders. That, more than anything, is why a post-Trump Republican Party will look and act differently from the Trump party — and the sooner the post-Trump future arrives, the more the next leader can change the party’s tune.

 

Personnel: The most prominent sign that we are not yet in a post-Trump party is Trump’s continuing impact on the sorts of people who run for office as Republicans. This year’s Senate races have been conspicuous for how few Republican governors and House members tried for the job. Trump’s habit of betraying and humiliating everyone who works with him — and of putting elected Republicans to choices between violating their consciences and oaths of office and taking career-ending stances against him — is a major deterrent to recruiting the sorts of candidates who have won statewide office in the past decade. Veteran senators and governors such as Pat Toomey, Doug Ducey, Rob Portman, and Larry Hogan have followed Paul Ryan’s lead in stepping away from political office rather than serving again alongside Trump.

 

Beyond recruiting, a big job of party leadership is quality control: using influence with voters and institutional power to promote good candidates and sideline bad ones. Trump has played the opposite role, assembling a rogues’ gallery of endorsees solely on the basis of who is willing to parrot his lies about the 2020 election.

 

A truly post-Trump party could be quite different if it chooses a leader with different priorities, even if that leader otherwise seems “Trumpy.” A strong leader confident in his position would have more incentive to elevate allies who could help the team rather than people willing to burn their credibility for his ego. That would not signal the end of hard-hitting populist candidates — a new party establishment will not look like the old one — but it would crimp the pipeline of unelectable buffoons.

 

Ideology: Trump’s presidency proved less of a dramatic ideological shift than his 2016 campaign rhetoric had suggested. He sharpened a harder line on immigration that was already being drawn, pursued a tough-minded but less internationalist foreign policy, gave up after a try at Obamacare repeal, and abandoned entitlement reform and other small-government initiatives. Probably his most drastic shift of the party’s orthodoxy was on trade. Primaries in 2022 have elevated a few candidates, such as J. D. Vance in Ohio, who want to go further, but the overall contours of Republican ideology have not changed greatly. Trump’s influence is likely to linger for a while, although both foreign affairs and entitlements are due eventually to re-intrude themselves in the form of crises. 

 

Priorities: What Republicans believe has not changed so much; what they care about and prioritize, and how they resolve competing ideals in tension, is another story. The big-picture shift has been away from fiscal issues and big-business concerns and towards more cultural battles and a tougher stance against businesses and local governments that are on the wrong side. Republican governors have learned to pick fights at the intersection of culture-war and kitchen-table issues such as schooling, policing, energy policy, leftist insanity in the workplace, transgenderism’s menace to women’s sports. The template will persist without Trump’s personal presence. Expect a post-Trump Republican Party to escalate its confrontations with the administrative state and the whole network of experts, academia, social media, and other unelected elites.

 

Style: Trump’s personal style cannot be imitated, and when his presence is gone, the party will likely see fewer candidates aping his transgressiveness. Even now, some of the most transgressive candidates, such as Eric Greitens, have difficulty getting through the primaries. But Trump’s combativeness, his confrontational approach to the press, and his bluntness and swagger are all likely to become long-standing features of the party as it represents culturally conservative Americans who feel estranged from the nation’s elite institutions.

 

Norms: Trump’s contempt for the polite and established norms of American political discourse has sometimes been long overdue, but more often, it has enabled the most dangerous aspects of his politics. The worst of that tendency was on display during the “stop the steal” assault on the outcome of the 2020 election. Sore losers and rule-breakers have always existed in politics; what was unusual was having one as the president. If the party is to remain a viable contender for even periodic majority coalitions, it will need to move past that — a task that will require a better leader. But the furies Trump unleashed may never entirely leave American politics.

 

Demographics: As much as leaders matter, all of the preceding is the tip of the iceberg; the party’s voters are the part below the waterline. We will likely see a continuation for the next decade of a number of the trends of the past few years, in which working-class voters (increasingly including Hispanic Americans) stream into the party while college-educated whites (especially suburban women) stream out. As the universes of regular and periodic Republican voters shift, we should not be surprised to see the party shift with them, Trump or no Trump.