Where to for the GOP after Trump exits the White House?
Contrary to conventional wisdom, the real danger with Trump is that he may end up changing little. This is not to detract from his real accomplishments in undoing much of the Obama regulatory regime, enacting pro-growth corporate tax reform, and appointing judges who recognise they are not legislators. But Trump is clearly a one-man show, sticking his finger in the dyke to hold back liberalism’s flood, while both parties seemingly learn nothing and try to wait him out.
It is easy to lose sight of the substance and be distracted by the disruptive style, the aura of celebrity, the in-your-face tweets, and the unapologetic combative demeanour. While the new judges represent permanent change, and the lower tax rates may last a while, most of the executive orders and regulatory actions can be easily reversed. Trump is a man, not a movement; he embodies executive strength, not a philosophy. When his time in office is up, he may leave behind millions of frustrated, voiceless people facing a status quo government and two limp, self-serving political parties eager to return to what they were, which wasn’t much.
Trump voters elected a President, causing them to think they had won the revolution. They hadn’t. Their power is one man, and he has an expiration date. It’s not clear that the GOP, as a party, has learned anything. The Republican elite’s desire for self-preservation, along with its recognition of the obvious populist conservative wave, has resulted in a temporary truce within the party. But the GOP will not be a populist conservative party as long as the current congressional leadership remains in place. These leaders would rather lead a shrinking GOP to contain and crush the populist uprising.
The Democratic Party is in no better shape. Consider what Mario Cuomo said about it in 1984: “And in between is the heart of our constituency — the middle class, the people not rich enough to be worry-free, but not poor enough to be on welfare. The middle class — those people who work for a living because they have to, not because some psychiatrist told them it was a convenient way to fill the interval between birth and eternity.”
Cuomo’s Democratic “heart” is today a description of the people who elected Trump. It’s a far cry from Bernie Sanders and his call for “Medicare for all”, or the progressive notion of a guaranteed universal income, or the obsession with identity politics over pocketbook issues. If the Republicans have become the party of big business, the Democrats have become the party of big government, and their idea of bipartisan compromise is to marry these behemoths.
The Trump movement should and can be bigger than him. Now that elite Democrats have renounced the blue-collar working-class voters who supported them as recently as 2012, Republicans must learn to consolidate and build on that base. The next Republican presidential nominee after Trump will have a fighting shot at bringing home the people who like lower taxes and dead terrorists but bristle at his crude behaviour.
Trump has both a high floor and a low ceiling, and it is up to the Republican Party to figure out how to maintain the former while shattering the latter. One clue is to remember Bob Dole’s admonition in 1996 that anyone who believes “that we are not open to citizens of every race and religion” could find the exits, “which are clearly marked”.
We used to be the party of limitless possibility. The moment immediately after Trump is the one that counts. It is possible that it took him to broaden us and that our subsequent existence will depend on his disappearance.
Where does all this leave us? We need to take over and reinvent the GOP. Trump won’t be the man to do it. We should create a more populist — Trumpian — bottom-up GOP that loves freedom and flies the biggest American flag in history, shouting that American values and institutions are better than everybody else’s and essential to the future.
Democrats are the past. They worship at the altar of identity politics, which means they believe in everything and nothing. We believe in one shared exceptional American identity, open to all who embrace it. I’ll bet millions of Americans would sign up for that, but not for anything less.
Bobby Jindal served as governor of Louisiana, 2008-16, and was a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.
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Barack Obama famously aspired to be transformative like Ronald Reagan rather than incremental like Bill Clinton. What about Donald Trump? His friends and foes alike seem to share only the conviction that the US President changes everything. But it’s worth considering how lasting his legacy will prove to be. What will happen to the conservative populist movement that he masterfully discerned and harnessed — but did not create — after he is done?