Former President Donald Trump devoured and remade the Republican Party in his image on Feb. 13, 2016. Standing onstage at a Republican presidential debate in Greenville, South Carolina, days before the primary, Trump turned to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and calmly slaughtered the remaining sacred cows of the pre-Trump GOP.
“Obviously, the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake,” Trump said. “We spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives. We don’t even have it. Iran has taken over Iraq with the second-largest oil reserves in the world. … We should have never been in Iraq. We destabilized the Middle East. … They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction, there were none. And they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction.”
The moment was a crossing of the Rubicon for a Republican Party that had long been defined by its commitment to a belligerent, neoconservative foreign policy that led the United States into a costly quagmire in the Middle East. Bush feigned shock and offense — the neocon response to a challenge is always to feign shock and offense — but the crowd wasn’t buying it, and neither did the voters.
And that was it. The neocons never recovered control of the party. The page had been turned.
In the proceeding months and years, Trump refashioned the Republican Party in the mold of his more populist brand of conservatism. No longer would the GOP be the party of military interventionism but instead of a measured realism; it would no longer attempt to strike “comprehensive” immigration reform but boldly act to secure the open southern border; it would champion fair trade over free trade and protect entitlements such as Medicare and Social Security.
For all of the criticism Trump garners — and to be sure, nearly all of it is well-earned — Trump does not receive nearly enough credit for forcing the Republican Party to adopt policy positions that are broadly favored by the electorate. It is easy to forget just how unpopular Republican stances on major issues had become during the Bush and Obama presidencies, as well as how little the public trusted the GOP to govern effectively.
The Trump takeover marked the beginning of a long and steady upswing in popularity for Republican policy positions. It is a truly remarkable fact that voters now favor the Republican Party on the economy, immigration, crime, foreign policy, and even education — which not even the wildest conservative optimist could have predicted eight years ago. Today, the only issue on which Democrats have a consistent polling advantage is abortion. The Trump-led GOP runs the table on nearly everything else.
It shouldn’t be too shocking that a figure who spent his life becoming popular on Page Six and prime-time TV managed to make the Republican Party popular again. It is a shocking turnaround nonetheless.
The only problem is that the popularity of the Trump-led GOP hasn’t translated to proportionate electoral outcomes. The public clearly desires the Trump platform to a greater extent than its GOP predecessor but not the people who champion the cause. Despite having a massive advantage on the issues in the 2022 midterm elections, for example, the outcome was effectively a draw. The only place where the once-vaunted red wave crashed was in Florida, where the populist GOP features a different face.
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And the 2024 rematch between Trump and Biden — a rematch only made possible by Trump’s loss in 2020 to an elderly man in a Delaware basement — appears to be a dead heat despite the latter’s near-total mental incapacitation. A newly released Bloomberg poll of swing states suggests that Trump is the favorite (though betting markets disagree). But given the quality of the Democratic nominee, not to mention the GOP’s advantage on most issues, should this race really be close at all?
In order to capitalize on its many built-in policy advantages, for which Trump himself can be thanked, the post-Trump GOP must find more palatable faces to promote its broadly popular agenda. It’s ironic that Trump, the undisputed king of American branding, has delivered on the substance but bungled the sale. A repackaging of the product is all that stands between the GOP and an era of unprecedented power and influence. For a less vicious, less erratic, and ultimately less weird GOP, the sky is truly the limit.
Peter Laffin is a contributor at the Washington Examiner. His work has also appeared in RealClearPolitics, the Catholic Thing, and the National Catholic Register.
