What Is the Future of the Republican Party?

             The topic of discussion for this Constitution Monday is the new Republican Party that has emerged over the past five years. In 2015, Donald Trump came down the golden escalator and announced that he was a candidate for the Republican nominee for President of the United States. Most Republicans, including myself, supported other candidates and were surprised when Trump became the Republican nominee.

            There were lots of news reports about Trump’s morals, and many Americans considered him to be a clown of a candidate. I did not want Hillary Clinton to become POTUS for many reasons, but I was most concerned about the type of people that she would nominate for judges and justices. I was basically a one-issue voter in 2016, and Trump promised to nominate conservative judges and even put out a list of judges from which he would choose justices. I voted for him for the conservative justices and judges that I hoped that he would appoint to the federal courts.

            Trump made a lot of promises – like most politicians do. Numerous Presidents previous to Trump promised to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem but chickened out. Several of them promised to secure the southern border but made little progress. They kept sending our military into endless wars. I was pleasantly surprised to see that Trump kept his promises to move the embassy, to close the border, and to keep the United States out of war.  

            For the first time in history – at least for many years, we had a President that kept his campaign promises. Trump was a President who put America first. He fought for Americans when other politicians wanted to put Americans last, and this is the reason why Trump’s base has not deserted him. Now we are in the 2022 election.

            Trump-endorsed candidates are winning in many primary elections, and two of them ended political dynasties. On May 24, incumbent Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton won a lop-sided victory against challenger George P. Bush. Bush is the current state land commissioner, and he is also the son of former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, the nephew of George W. Bush, and the grandson of George H.W. Bush. Yet, he lost the primary to Paxton by a 68%-32% margin. That was the end of the Bush dynasty.

            Last Tuesday, Liz Cheney, the incumbent Wyoming congressperson and daughter of former Wyoming congressmen and former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, lost her bid for re-election by a similar 40-point landslide. The Cheney dynasty was ended by a relatively unknown attorney named Harriet Hageman. The voters of Wyoming were tired of voting for Cheney because she was not representing their interests.

            Josh Hammer at The Daily Signal discussed the two lop-sided losses and explained that they represent something even bigger than the blows to the Bush and Cheney political dynasties. 

But the even bigger and more important coup de grace is not that for any specific individual – or, indeed, for any particular family dynasty. Rather, the crucial symbolic death blow is that for the effete, country club Republicanism and swashbuckling neoconservatism represented by the Bush-Cheney era. The tremendous defeats this year of Liz Cheney and George P. Bush, scions of neoconservative family royalty, at the hands of two Trump-backed primary opponents, represent a clarion plea from the Republican rank and file: “We will not go back to the old, pre-Trump era.”

Good.

After President Donald Trump’s narrow defeat in the hotly contested 2020 election, many in the housebroken GOP establishment began quietly pushing the party to reject all the substantive departures from sclerotic orthodoxy that Trump’s presidency entailed, to whitewash his myriad accomplishments from the history books and to revert to the “principled loserdom” status quo ante of John McCain and Mitt Romney. But Trump’s generally sustained success in Republican primary contests this year, outside some blips on the radar, evinces the folly of such Beltway conceit.

            So, what does the ending of the Bush and Cheney dynasties mean to the Republican Party? George P. Bush had the famous name, but he was not yet on the national scene. However, Liz Cheney had a “lofty perch in the petty and vindictive Jan. 6 ‘selective committee’ witch hunt.”            Hammer claims that there is a “New Right” that is an “amalgamation of nationalist and conservative-populist sentiment.” He stated that the “New Right” rose “as a rebuke to the overly ‘liberal’ conservatism of yesteryear” and “is here to stay.” Hammer explained his reason for making this claim.

There will be no going back to the old, feckless, moralistic nation-building crusades of decades past. There will be no going back to the old, neoliberal-inspired free trade absolutism that outsourced entire supply chains to our Chinese geopolitical archfoe, dramatically undercutting America’s industrial resilience. There will be no going back to the old, pro-Fortune 500 immigration agenda of open borders, amnesty for illegal aliens and mass visas for all sorts of foreign nationals.

There will be no going back to the old, corporatist economic agenda of prioritizing corporate and capital gains tax cuts while working-class families struggle to raise their kids on a single income. There will be no more focusing on libertarian economics, the donor class’s policy hobbyhorse, to the exclusion of those “nasty,” “icky” cultural issues that animate the GOP’s actual voter base.

Republican presidential primary voters in two years will likely have an opportunity to decide whether the party’s future is best represented by Trump himself, on the one hand, or some variation of conservative-populist “Trumpism without Trump,” on the other hand. But those remain the only two games in town. There will be no going back to the pre-2016 “dead consensus” – except perhaps in the fever dream monologues of Liz Cheney’s impending CNN show.

            Donald Trump showed that it is possible to fight back against the Establishment politicians running the federal government. The attacks of the FBI and other government agencies on Trump, his families, and his supporters show that the Swamp – the Deep State or permanent federal employees – will not go out without a war.

The Russian Collusion investigation started with a false dossier paid for by Hillary Clinton. Rogue FBI leaders lied on FISA requests to unmask Trump and his associates. Trump and his family were put through hell for two years. The Deep State failed to keep Trump out of office or to remove him from office after election. So, they imposed the Ukraine impeachment as another effort to remove Trump from office. That attack also failed, but Democrats were only too happy to attempt to keep Trump from being re-elected by a second impeachment.

The January 6 “select committee” is another attempt to keep Trump out of office. Liz Cheney has admitted that this is her life goal. The committee has been investigating for nearly two years and still has not found any charges for Trump. Suddenly, there was the FBI raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, a last-ditch effort to find something – anything – to use in keeping Trump out of office.

The people of America, and particularly those who voted for Trump, have watched the efforts of Democrats and the Deep State to destroy Trump and his associates. In fact, anyone who voted for Trump is considered to be racist, sexist, evil, and stupid. Is it any wonder that conservative voters are using their only power – the power to vote -- to remove liberal Republicans from office?