Donald Trump‘s 2016 election broke the Republican Party like it was Humpty Dumpty, and all the establishment’s horses and all the establishment’s men can never put the old GOP together again.
So says longtime Republican strategist and writer Sarah Longwell, who asserts that an irreversible Republican schism occurred with Trump’s election — and that 2016 represents a true point of no return for the old GOP.
2016 turned names like Reagan, Bush, Romney, Baker, Shultz, Ryan, Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld and McCain into dinosaurs, stone statues of which sit preserved — and often enough graffitied — in some sort of political Jurassic park. Lifeless. Extinct.
What Longwell sees — and she says she has attended hundreds of GOP focus groups in recent years — is that to today’s MAGA voters, anything or anyone that reeks of pre-2016 smells like the swamp. And they loathe the swamp above all.
Smart @SarahLongwell25: “It’s now clear that we should consider Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign not as part of America’s political continuum but as one of these temporal dividing lines.”https://t.co/RYrSm5CzEr
— Josh Kraushaar (@JoshKraushaar) April 17, 2023
The GOP voters today, dominated by MAGA, want radical populists — and so cast to the fringes of the party milquetoast pols like Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, Chris Christie and others who worked in pre-2016 government, possibly having on their record an instance of having compromised to get something done.
2016 must be considered “year zero” for the GOP then — the year Humpty fell off his wall, replaced by Trumpty who promised to build one.
The death of the establishment GOP was declared overtly back when Trump won the 2016 primary, with even MSNBC saying The GOP Establishment Is Dead. But Longwell’s point is that only now are many in the party realizing how deeply changed the voting sentiments are among those who actually vote in the GOP primary.
News media may quote Lindsey Graham, for instance, and he still holds his South Carolina Senate seat, but voters think he’s a Trump-antagonizing cry baby, even when he defends Trump vociferously, since he was in the Senate before Trump was elected. (He even worked with John McCain — not a badge of honor for the new GOP voter.) Graham bears the stain, in other words, as these voters consider it.
The voters aren’t stuck on Trump either, Longwell implies, but only his insurrectionist, burn-everything style. Another candidate showing equally ample antipathy toward the status quo will also win their support. Marjorie Taylor Greene is an example, but Kevin McCarthy — Speaker of the House — might not be extreme enough.
Fox News reiterated the death of the Republican establishment in 2022 during the midterms, even though the most recent elections were not a big success for Trump-backed candidates. Still, more active GOP voters are looking for Kari Lake and Lauren Boebert types to vote for, Longwell says. These are among the current crop of MAGA politicians who recognize that 2016 broke the GOP, opening the door for them. These MAGA politicians are to the establishment GOP what humans are to dinosaurs — they exist in different eras, different worlds.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis realizes the change too, Longwell asserts. But it may be already too late for DeSantis, who in his pre-2016 life took less intransigent positions and was known to espouse highly unpopular with MAGA ideas, such as that Russia poses a geopolitical threat.
