The Atlantic (Opinion)
By Molly Ball
August 24, 2015
What
is happening to the Republican Party? I put that question to Lindsey
Graham, the senator from South Carolina and basement-dwelling
presidential candidate, who was
getting ready to hold a campaign event in Hooksett, New Hampshire.
"Well, the front-runner is crazy," Graham said.
He
was referring, of course, to Donald Trump, the GOP's seemingly
unstoppable chart-topper, who has survived outrage after outrage that
would have ruined a conventional
candidate. He commands, on average, double the support, among potential
Republican primary voters, of his nearest challenger. Graham—who is
running in 15th place—calls him "a huckster billionaire whose political
ideas are gibberish." And while he expects voters
eventually to come to their senses, he said, "I think a certain amount
of damage has been done already."
As
Trump evinces surprising staying power atop the Republican field,
nervous party members increasingly fret that he is hurting the image of
the GOP and damaging its eventual
nominee—who most assume will not be Trump. The most obvious problem is
Trump's outspoken opposition to immigration and immigrants, which has
offended Hispanics—a fast-growing voter demographic the party can't
afford to lose ground with—and dragged other candidates
into a discussion of inflammatory ideas like ending birthright
citizenship.
But
many Republican strategists, donors, and officeholders fret that the
harm goes deeper than a single voting bloc. Trump's candidacy has
blasted open the GOP's longstanding
fault lines at a time when the party hoped for unity. His gleeful,
attention-hogging boorishness—and the large crowds that have cheered
it—cements a popular image of the party as standing for reactionary
anger rather than constructive policies. As Democrats
jeer that Trump has merely laid bare the true soul of the GOP, some
Republicans wonder, with considerable anguish, whether they're right. As
the conservative writer Ben Domenech asked in an essay in The
Federalist last week, "Are Republicans for freedom or
white identity politics?"
"There
is a faction that would actually rather burn down the entire Republican
Party in hopes they can rebuild it in their image," Rick Wilson, a
Florida-based Republican
admaker, told me. For his outspoken antagonism to Trump, including an
op-ed calling Trump voters "Hillary's new best friends," Wilson has
received a deluge of bile from Trump's army of Internet trolls; his
family has been threatened and his clients have been
harassed. He worries that the party is on the brink of falling apart.
"There's got to be either a reconciliation or a division," he said.
"There's still a greater fraction of people who are limited-government
conservatives than people motivated by the personality
cult of Donald Trump."
The
Trump drama, Wilson and others note, comes at a time when the probable
Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, is struggling with image problems, a
protracted scandal,
and her own party's divisions—but the focus on Trump has prevented
Republicans from capitalizing on Clinton's troubles. "He's framing up a
scenario where the election in the fall doesn't become a referendum on
the tenure of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton,
but on the Republican positions advanced by Donald Trump—which are not
particularly Republican, and not particularly conservative," Wilson
said.
But
the establishment feels embattled—and helpless. A Politico survey of
Republican insiders in Iowa and New Hampshire, published Friday, found
70 percent saying Trump's
immigration plan was harmful to the party's image. "He's solidly put an
anchor around the neck of our party, and we'll sink because of it," one
Iowa Republican said. The right's leading writers—George Will, Charles
Krauthammer, Michael Barone—have excoriated
Trump, to seemingly no avail. Trump doesn't need them; he has his own
cheering section in the likes of Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, and
Breitbart.com. Trump's rise has highlighted the distance between the
Republican establishment that favors cutting Social
Security, increasing immigration, and expanding free trade, and the
party base that, like Trump, wants the opposite.
Many
analysts blamed Mitt Romney's 2012 loss on his rightward tack on
immigration during the primaries, when he urged "self-deportation." That
was a major conclusion of
the Republican National Committee's postmortem report after Romney's
loss. "In 2012 we were talking about electrified fences and
self-deportation; in 2016 we're talking about birthright citizenship and
forced, mass deportation," Peter Wehner, a former aide
to George W. Bush, told me. "That's not a step in the right direction,
and we're doing that because of Trump."
Party
elites can already envision the attack ads of sad-eyed children being
torn from their parents. The harsh immigration rhetoric doesn't only
offend Latino voters,
they say—it hurts the party with other minority groups, with moderates
and independents, with young voters and with women. And as other
candidates have been pushed to take sides on Trump's plans, they, too,
have wandered into problematic territory. Several
have said they agree with parts of his immigration agenda.
Even
Graham, a longtime proponent of immigration reform, has said he would
consider ending birthright citizenship, though he told me any changes
would be aimed at the
small group of "birth tourists" and would not apply to current
citizens. But Graham said Trump's immigration proposals were
"offensive." "If he is the voice and face of the Republican party, I
think our allies are shaking their heads and our enemies are licking
their chops," he said.
Graham
has not hesitated to call out Trump; another lagging candidate, former
Texas Governor Rick Perry, has also criticized him. Many of the others
have scolded him for
one offensive comment or another—whether it's the one about Mexicans,
or the one about John McCain, or the one about Megyn Kelly. In general,
however, the other candidates seem afraid of provoking Trump, whether
because they don't want to lose his supporters
or because they fear the mogul's talent for devastating insults.
(Graham's tangle with Trump led the famously luddite senator to replace
his old flip phone with an iPhone, which he refers to as "the most
positive thing to come out of this campaign so far.")
Last
week, Jeb Bush signaled a major shift in strategy when he went on the
offensive against Trump, criticizing him as insufficiently conservative;
Bush's allied super
PAC flew a plane over Trump's Alabama rally on Friday trailing a banner
reading "TRUMP 4 HIGHER TAXES, JEB 4 PREZ." Some Bush allies cheered
his courage in taking on Trump, while others worry Bush may damage or
diminish himself in the process. Bush's offensive
represents the first sustained effort to run a conventional political
campaign against Trump; the GOP establishment is watching closely to see
if such tactics can succeed, or whether Trump will again prove immune
to the normal rules of politics.
In
the (possibly apocryphal) past, there would have been a smoke-filled
room where the GOP grandees could meet and hatch a plan to excommunicate
Trump. His success, and
the inability to stop him, speaks to the weakness of the party
establishment in the time of the Tea Party. These days, the
counter-establishment devoted to attacking Republican incumbents often
seems better organized than the establishment it harasses. (Early
on, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus tried calling
Trump and asking him to back off; the tactic backfired.)
For
Trump, the establishment's indigestion is simply evidence he's doing
something right. Roger Stone, the ex-Trump strategist who remains
devoted to the cause, said Americans
are looking for a candidate who doesn't kowtow to the conventional
wisdom. "Voters don't trust career politicians, Congress, the elite
media—they think they're all in bed with the political establishment,
and in many cases they're right," Stone said.
The
Beltway freakout that Trump has inspired proves his ability to shake up
the system, Stone added. "I think what they're really upset about is
that if he got elected
they'd be out of a job, since they're in the lobbying revolving door,"
said Stone, himself a former lobbyist. "They can't buy him; they can't
influence him in the traditional Washington ways. He'll be a truly
independent president, and I don't think that's
something the Republican establishment wants."
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