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Politics|Republican Party Unravels Over Donald Trump's Takeover
| New York Times | - |
By
seizing the Republican presidential nomination for Donald J. Trump on
Tuesday night, he and his millions of supporters completed what had
seemed unimaginable: a hostile takeover of one of America's two major
political parties.
Republican Party Unravels Over Donald Trump’s Takeover
By seizing the Republican presidential nomination for Donald J. Trump
on Tuesday night, he and his millions of supporters completed what had
seemed unimaginable: a hostile takeover of one of America’s two major
political parties.
Just as stunning was how quickly the host tried to reject them.
The party’s two living former presidents spurned Mr. Trump, a number of
sitting governors and senators expressed opposition or ambivalence
toward him, and he drew a forceful rebuke from the single most powerful and popular rival left on the Republican landscape: the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan.
Rarely if ever has a party seemed to come apart so visibly. Rarely, too, has the nation been so on edge about its politics.
Many
Americans still cannot believe that the bombastic Mr. Trump, best known
as a reality television star, will be on the ballot in November. Plenty
are also anxious about what he would do in office.
But
for leading Republicans, the dismay is deeper and darker. They fear
their party is on the cusp of an epochal split — a historic cleaving
between the familiar form of conservatism forged in the 1960s and
popularized in the 1980s and a rekindled, atavistic nationalism, with
roots as old as the republic, that has not flared up so intensely since
the original America First movement before Pearl Harbor.
Some
even point to France and other European countries, where far-right
parties like the National Front have gained power because of the sort of
resentments that are frequently given voice at rallies for Mr. Trump.
Yet
if keeping the peace means embracing Mr. Trump and his most divisive
ideas and utterances, a growing number are loath to do it.
The
ties between Republican elites — elected officials, donors and
Washington insiders — and voters have actually been fraying for years.
Traditional power brokers long preached limited-government conservatism
and wanted to pursue an immigration overhaul, entitlement cuts, free
trade and a hawkish foreign policy, and nominees like John McCain and
Mitt Romney largely embraced that agenda. Republican leaders also
vilified President Obama and Democrats, stoking anger with rank-and-file
conservatives.
Many
Republican voters trudged along with those earlier nominees, but never
became truly animated until Mr. Trump offered them his brand of angry
populism: a blend of protectionism
at home and a smaller American footprint abroad. And he was able to
exploit their resentments and frustrations because those same Republican
leaders had been nurturing those feelings for years with attacks on Mr.
Obama, Democrats, illegal immigrants and others.
Mr.
Trump, with his steadfast promises to deport immigrants who are in the
country illegally and to build a wall with Mexico, may have done
irreversible damage to his general election prospects. But he quickly
earned the trust that so many of those voters had lost in other fixtures
of America — not just in its leaders, but in institutions like
Congress, the Federal Reserve and the big-money campaign finance system
that Mr. Trump has repudiated, as well as in corporations, the Roman
Catholic Church and the news media.
On the Trail: The Week of May 1
CreditSam Hodgson for The New York Times
And
he has amplified his independent, outsider message in real time, using
social media and cable news interviews — and his own celebrity and
highly attuned ear for what resonates — to rally voters to his side,
using communication strategies similar to those deployed in the Arab
Spring uprising or in the attempts by liberals and students to foment a
similar revolution in Iran.
“Trump
leveraged a perfect storm,” said Steve Case, the founder of AOL, in an
email message. “A combo of social media (big following), brand
(celebrity figure), creativity (pithy tweets), speed/timeliness
(dominating news cycles).”
Mr.
Trump is an unlikely spokesman for the grievances of financially
struggling, alienated Americans: a high-living Manhattan billionaire who
erects skyscrapers for the wealthy and can easily get politicians on
the phone. But as a shrewd business tactician, he understood the Republican Party’s
customers better than its leaders did and sensed that his brand of
populist, pugilistic, anti-establishment politics would meet their
needs.
After
seething at Washington for so long, hundreds or thousands of miles from
the capital, many of these voters now see Mr. Trump as a kind of
savior. Even if he does not detail his policies, even if his language
strikes them as harsh sometimes, his supporters thrill more to his
plain-spoken slogans like “Make America Great Again” than to what they
see as the cautious and poll-tested policy speeches of Mr. Ryan and
other Washington Republicans.
“I
love the death out of Paul Ryan, but honestly, I’m going to vote for
Trump anyways,” said David Myers, 49, who attended a campaign rally for
Mr. Trump in Charleston, W.Va., on Thursday night. “Because Paul Ryan,
and I love him to death, but he’s one of those career politicians.”
Mr.
Trump now feels so empowered that he does not think he needs the
political support of the party establishment to defeat the likely
Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton. He is confident that his appeal
will be broad and deep enough among voters of all stripes that he could
win battleground states like Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania without
the support of leaders like Mr. Ryan, Mr. Trump said in an interview on
Saturday.
Although
he plans to meet with Mr. Ryan and House Republican leaders on
Thursday, Mr. Trump said he would not materially change his policies or
style to win their endorsements. “Everything is subject to negotiation,
but I can’t and won’t be changing much, because the voters support me
because of what I’m saying and how I’m saying it,” Mr. Trump said. “The
establishment didn’t do anything to make me the nominee, so its support
won’t really make much difference in me winning in November.” (Mr. Trump
will, though, be somewhat dependent on the party’s fund-raising muscle
since he has indicated he will not fully self-finance his general
election campaign.)
One
reason Mr. Trump takes a skeptical view of establishment support is
that he does not believe much in the power of the Republican elite. He
is the party’s presumptive nominee, after all, because the political
forces that once might have halted his rise have been enfeebled. Leaders
such as Mr. Romney warned in the direst terms that Mr. Trump’s
nomination would stain the party and lead it to ruin. Venerable media
outlets on the right, like National Review, sought to reprise their role
as arbiters of who is fit to carry the banner of conservatism. Their
pleas fell on deaf ears.
Continue reading the main story
Mr.
Trump’s arsenal was far more fearsome. Combining modern-day fame and an
age-old demagogy, he bypassed the ossified gatekeepers and appealed
directly to voters through a constant Twitter stream that seemed
interrupted only by television appearances.
In
doing so, he seemed to grasp that a new twist on direct democracy was
in the offing: that disaffected voters who tune out the traditional
modes of political communication might be reachable through their
smartphones, and Twitter messages or Reddits might be more relevant to
those voters than the findings of a more scientific poll.
On
the left, too, Senator Bernie Sanders has built his own movement with
millions of voters, and $210 million in fund-raising, by using online
tools as simple as email to seek support. Yet Mr. Trump’s celebrity has
been an enormous asset with voters who feel gratified and inspired that
he would lavish them with attention and bluntly express some of the
ideas and attitudes they share.
For
12 consecutive years, polls have indicated that Americans believe the
country is on the wrong track, and Republicans have been especially
vulnerable to a political campaign like Mr. Trump’s that seeks to
channel voter anger. In every state where the question was asked in exit
polls during the primary season, 50 percent or more of Republicans said
they felt betrayed by their leaders.
The
adhesive that once held Republicans together — a shared commitment to a
strong national defense and limited government — was weakened by the
demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. But internal
divisions were papered over when new, unifying threats emerged after the
attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
It
was not until near the end of President George W. Bush’s second term
that those fissures broke open again, first with Mr. Bush’s attempt at
an immigration overhaul, including a path to citizenship for illegal
immigrants, and then after the financial rescue of big banks from the
2008 financial collapse.
Alongside
the turbulent economy were signs of something more profound plaguing
blue-collar white communities, which have increasingly become core
Republican constituencies: an increase in children born to single
parents, higher rates of addiction and suicide, and shortened average
life spans.
“The
economic deprivation of the last 30 years for working-class whites,
combined with growing social isolation, was really dry tinder,” said
Robert D. Putnam, the Harvard political scientist who wrote “Bowling
Alone.” And Mr. Trump, Mr. Putnam contended, “lit a spark.”
“He
constructed a series of scapegoats that these folks would find
plausible,” said Mr. Putnam, citing Mr. Trump’s attacks on Muslims and
immigrants. “He was willing to say things that might have always been
popular, but you couldn’t say it.”
With
Mr. Trump now saying it loudly and clearly, many Americans feel deeply
unsettled by the nation’s politics. Not since Mr. Bush invaded Iraq have
so many liberals been murmuring about moving to other countries. And
many Republican officials and donors just hope to get through the
election with their party intact.
“The
party has never been more out of touch with our voters,” Vin Weber, a
former Minnesota congressman, said of the two factions, acknowledging
that Republicans could splinter completely after this election. “I don’t
know how you reconcile a lot of them.”
Mr.
Weber expressed hope that Mr. Trump and Mr. Ryan would find some common
ground. But few in the party now deny that the threat of an enduring
split is real.
“I
think there’s a pretty clear Trump wing of the party coming to life,”
said Barry Wynn, a prominent fund-raiser who supported Jeb Bush for
president and has not yet fallen in behind Mr. Trump. “But I have to
think that four or eight years from now, the Trump wing will be a little
more traditional, a little less hard-edged, and will be blended into
the party just like the evangelical Pat Robertson voters were after the
1988 election.”
“At least,” he added, “I hop
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