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Where Is the Republican Party Heading? | The New York Times
Instead of adopting a new platform, the party declared its support for President Trump. But what will it support when Trump is gone?
Donald Trump Jr. The heir apparent.
Win or lose, Trumpism will be a defining feature of GOP politics for at least the next decade or perhaps more, depending on what happens in the 2020 election.
Many political pundits view November 3rd as a national referendum on Trumpism, and the past four years of Donald Trump in the White House.
Instead of adopting a new platform, the party declared its support for President Trump. But what will it support when Trump is gone?
Donald Trump Jr. The heir apparent.
8/25/20
For its quadrennial convention this week, the Republican Party broke with precedent by declining to articulate a new vision for governing. Instead, the party opted to recycle its 2016 platform and declared that it “enthusiastically supports President Trump and continues to reject the policy positions of the Obama-Biden Administration.” Whether this strategy will prove electorally effective in November is anyone’s guess. But what does it mean for the future of the party’s political identity? Here’s what people are saying. In Politico, Tim Alberta, who chronicled the history of the Republican Party over the past decade in his book “American Carnage,” writes that the absence of a platform this year underscores the extent to which the party has become a cult of personality that has given up on ideas. “With Election Day just a few months away, I was genuinely surprised, in the course of recent conversations with a great many Republicans, at their inability to articulate a purpose, a designation, a raison d’être for their party,” he writes. As for the judiciary, Eric Posner writes in The Times that Mr. Trump would probably seek to appoint an even farther-right Supreme Court justice if a vacancy opened up. And on foreign policy, he might finally follow through on withdrawing from NATO.
In Washington Monthly, Paul Gastris raises the possibility of Democrats’ taking back the Senate, which would further hamstring Republican lawmakers. While much of Mr. Trump’s base may continue to back him, Mr. Gastris predicts that his numbers would eventually start to slip. In the event of a Biden victory in November, the Times columnist Bret Stephens argues that the future of the Republican Party would depend on Mr. Trump’s margin of defeat. If he loses narrowly, the Trump family will do what it can to retain control of the party. As Adam Harris writes in The Atlantic, it is Donald Trump Jr., not Nikki Haley or Tim Scott, who currently seems the president’s most natural political heir. But if Mr. Trump loses overwhelmingly, Mr. Stephens predicts a more profound schism will emerge within the Republican Party. But others think that such a reversion is doubtful, at least for now. “The basic Trump worldview — on immigration, trade, foreign policy, etc. — will shape the G.O.P. for decades, the way the basic Reagan worldview did for decades,” the Times columnist David Brooks writes. “A thousand smarter conservatives will be building a new party after 2020, but one that builds from the framework Trump established.”
Win or lose, Trumpism will be a defining feature of GOP politics for at least the next decade or perhaps more, depending on what happens in the 2020 election.
Many political pundits view November 3rd as a national referendum on Trumpism, and the past four years of Donald Trump in the White House.