What Is the Republican Party?

Hint: It's moved beyond a party's standard focus on principles and policies in favor of a different sort of concern

Former president Donald Trump gestures to the crowd during a campaign rally in Waco, Texas on Saturday, March 25, 2023. (Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

I’ve made my position extremely clear: I think pursuing criminal prosecution of former (and possibly future) president Donald Trump at the federal level would be a mistake. And if he’s going to be prosecuted at the state level, the case being pursued in Fulton County, Georgia is vastly preferable to the one Alvin Bragg is bringing in New York City.¹

One reason I’ve been skeptical of efforts to take Trump down by legal means (as opposed to within the political arena) is that his “defense,” at least in the court of public opinion, would amount to a full-frontal attack on the rule of law and all those who act in its name. The “system,” he would say, is out to get me. Unable to fully defeat my movement to “Make America Great Again,” the liberal establishment is doing what it has done since I humiliated it with my triumph over Hillary Clinton in 2016: Using high-minded rhetoric about how “no one is above the law” to concoct a means of neutralizing me.

First they did it by launching the Russiagate investigation. Then they did it by impeaching me. Then they rigged the vote and stole the 2020 election. Then they tried to impeach me yet again for daring to fight back and encourage popular protests against their voter-fraud coup. And now, with me poised to exact revenge for myself and my millions of supporters by running and winning the White House again, they’re trying to throw me in jail.

But of course they don’t just imprison me, as they’d like to. They put on a show trial draped in legal finery designed to make it sound like a dispassionate act far removed from the sleaziness of politics. But in fact it’s the most political act imaginable. Hence the need for me and my allies to expose evidence of hypocrisy and double standards, to highlight every expression of overeagerness and inclination toward end-zone dancing, and to mock every attempt to pretend prosecutors are motivated by anything other than partisan zeal to neutralize a political threat.

We’ve always known Trump would respond to an indictment in this way: By doing everything in his demagogic powers to tear down the system and the “establishment” that runs it. If protecting and empowering himself requires burning the institutions of American self-government to the ground, he will gladly do it.   

But only now, with the first of what could be several indictments in multiple jurisdictions in the process of being acted upon, has it become undeniable that Trump isn’t acting alone. He has a powerful accomplice in spewing the political toxins of rage-fueled cynicism into the civic culture of the nation for the sake of the former president’s personal self-defense.

That accomplice is the Republican Party.

A Party in Collapse

A political party is an institution that aims to organize disparate factional interests around a vision of the common good that gets expressed in statements of principle and a policy agenda. Electoral politics in a democracy is a competition between parties over which of these principles and policies the country prefers at the local, state, and federal levels.

This described both parties through the 2016 presidential election, which unfolded in the way it did because both parties at the time were undergoing internal fights about which principles and policies they should elevate and seek to enact. On the Republican side, Trump advocated a shift away from ideals of open markets, liberal immigration policies, and hawkish internationalism in foreign policy in favor of “America First” nationalism.

Leaving aside the wisdom of these changes, running for president on an agenda of making them was perfectly continuous with the normal functioning of a political party. The GOP stood for one thing from the Reagan administration down through Mitt Romney’s failed effort to defeat Barack Obama’s bid for re-election in 2012. Trump proposed to make the party stand for something else, and there was enough support among the party’s voters for doing so that he won its nomination and eventually the presidency itself.   

But two things have happened since then.

First, rather than the party coalescing around a new policy focus, there’s been an almost total breakdown of consensus within the GOP. On foreign policy, there are Republican officeholders, policy thinkers, and voters who continue to uphold the hawkish internationalism of the Bush administration’s post-9/11 approach to the world. There are officeholders, policy thinkers, and voters who are militarily aggressive realists who believe the U.S. should step back from our obligations to NATO (including our defense of Ukraine against Russia) in favor of preparing for direct conflict with China. (Florida Governor Ron DeSantis appears to be groping toward this kind of position.) And then there is Trump himself, various other officeholders and policy thinkers, and plenty of voters who favor an even smaller role for America on the world stage.

These days you’ll find a similarly broad spectrum of opinion on taxes and entitlement spending; on crime (where a harsh law-and-order position sits uncomfortably with Trump’s own serious legal troubles and his support as president for criminal justice reform); and even on abortion, with the most devoted pro-lifers taking a very hard line and Trump and his more secular supporters favoring a more lenient position that has so far done nothing to dampen his polling support.

Really the only thing holding the party together on policy is hatred of the left, above all on culture war (or “woke”) issues, and the craving to use state power to crush it (with DeSantis showing the way forward by building, in part, on moves the Trump administration began to make during its final year in office).   

But the other major change since 2016 has nothing much to do with policy at all.

Trump personalizes everything. His initial case for support was I alone can fix it (not his party or in concert with his allies in the party, but just Donald Trump himself). Part of this was simple bragging, from a position of ignorance, about his political prowess. But it was also a demonstration of his skills as a populist who aimed to serve as the personal focal point for the grievances of his voters. He would be their tribune and champion, and more recently, even an explicit vehicle for their vengeance. He would attack the system in the name of his supporters, and when the system attempted to defend itself by hitting back at him, he would use the counterattack as evidence the system despises all of them equally and is willing to do anything and everything it can to destroy them.

That’s how it’s me against them became it’s them against us.

The Man and His “Party”