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Republican Party Unravels Over Donald Trump’s Takeover
by Patrick Healy And
Jonathan Martin | May 7, 2016
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.
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.
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 hope
that’s what’ll happen.”
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