By Bradley Blankenship
IN the closing days of the U.S. presidential election, a series of articles on major media platforms have pondered the question of what will happen to the Republican Party in the post-Donald Trump era. Should he lose, who will be his successor? What would be the new direction of the party even after he’s potentially exhausted his first presidential term? The answer is probably more unsatisfying than these wishful thinkers would like to admit because there’s no putting the Trump genie back in the proverbial bottle.
One common mistake looms over these takes: that Trump’s Republican Party is not the same as the one from before, or as his presidential contender Joe Biden put it, “this is a different breed of cat now.” This is simply not true; the Republican Party has long been a party hellbent on white identity politics, voter disenfranchisement, corporatocracy, religious fanaticism and partisan brinkmanship.
It was President Richard Nixon, another controversial Republican not so dissimilar from Donald Trump, that popularized the “Southern strategy” to appeal to white voters in the Southern United States, at that time a Democratic Party bastion.
Running on a similar theme of “law and order” and “states’ rights” that Trump has channeled, Nixon won his election bid in 1968 by orienting the national Republican Party toward white identity politics and against civil rights. It was Roger Stone, a former Nixon operative, that was a key strategist for Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
President Ronald Reagan, who is often compared to Trump, also expanded this strategy. Using racially coded language and popularizing such colorful terms such as “welfare queen,” Reagan appealed to racists in order to gain political support to ram through a radically pro-corporate agenda. It was also Reagan that allied with evangelicals as they became a powerful political force during the 1980s.
The only real difference between Trump and these two former presidents, one of which is to this day hailed as a god by the Republican Party, is that he says the quiet part out loud; he is an overt bigot while the others kept up some degree of plausible deniability. But behind closed doors it’s extremely well-documented that they knew what they were doing and that’s exactly why Trump isn’t going to just be forgotten after his time in the White House is over.
Ben Terris writing for the Washington Post asks whether Vice President Mike Pence, an evangelical Christian often painted as a standard Republican, could be the next leader of the party.
The piece quotes a faulty take by Florida Senator Marco Rubio’s former spokesperson. “Trump could be our party’s Iraq War,” the spokesperson said, “I wonder if four years from now we are nominating someone who had nothing to do with the Trump era.”
This comparison lacks any connection to reality because the architects of the Iraq War and its supporters in both major parties have faced little political consequences.
Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, the last two Democratic nominees for president, both supported the war and powerful Bush-era Republicans like Bill Kristol, David Frum and Colin Powell have been gleefully welcomed into the “Never Trump” resistance. Even President George W. Bush, who was historically unpopular when exiting office, has been rehabilitated in the public eye by this crowd.
Even if Pence didn’t begin as a Trump-esque politician, he’s certainly ended up that way just like other Republicans like Senators Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and others that had their lofty political ambitions shot down by the renegade candidate Trump. They’ve adopted his same unhinged style, hateful language and Twitter potshots seamlessly while once denouncing them, which only shows that Trump’s way of doing politics has been fully normalized to Republicans. And surely what was once subtext was always there to begin with.
Another piece this week in Politico Magazine speculates that maybe Congresswoman Liz Cheney, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, could be the new face of conservatism after Trump.
Cheney’s brand of conservatism is hardly different from Trump’s policies: hand-outs to the wealthiest Americans, voter disenfranchisement, attacks against minorities and women in the name of religious liberty, with the only real difference being a more hawkish foreign policy. According to FiveThirtyEight’s “Trump Score,” Cheney votes in Congress with Trump’s position 96 percent of the time.
The only difference that Trump’s internal opposition wants to see is a stylistic one – they want all the same bigotry with toned-down language that makes it less obvious. Call it moral sensibility or a strategic calculation, but the difference in terms of policy and how it affects people’s lives is nonexistent.
– The Daily Mail-CGTN news
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