Susan B. Glasser
When the party of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and two George Bushes met in Milwaukee this summer to renominate former President Donald Trump, it was the first time Republicans had chosen the same candidate in three elections since Richard Nixon and the first time since the GOP’s founding in the nineteenth century that it had ever done so in three consecutive races. A large percentage of Republicans—around half of them, according to surveys conducted during Trump’s presidency—now consider themselves more supporters of him personally than of the party generally. They have followed Trump to places once unthinkable in American politics, from going along with his assault on the legitimacy of the 2020 election to the abandonment of what were until recently core GOP principles, such as support for free trade. The current Republican Party is in essence the Trump Party, a takeover made all the more remarkable considering Trump’s past as a party-switching political chameleon, with little discernible ideology beyond a relentless focus on self-promotion, and a lifelong suspicion that the United States has been a perpetual mark on the world stage, getting ripped off by grasping allies and adversaries alike.
Trump’s current political dominance of his party, however, coexists with a somewhat more complicated reality. When the Pew Research Center asked Americans last year to name the best presidents of recent decades, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents were almost evenly divided, between the 37 percent who favored Trump and the 41 percent who continued to believe that the honor should remain with Ronald Reagan, whose conservative revolution at the end of the Cold War reshaped Washington and his own party for a generation. The Trump takeover, it turns out, is not entirely complete.
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