Rebel Yell Part I: Donald Trump broke the back of the GOP establishment by driving blue-collar and lower-middle-class politics in a Southern direction. His gentry Republican critics have only themselves to blame.

Walter Russell Mead

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Donald Trump’s first and in many ways most enduring political accomplishment is not the humiliation of the Democratic Party he has toppled in two of the last three presidential elections. It is the devastating defeat he has inflicted on the Republican establishment he has marginalized and dispersed. Our once and future president will not win every battle with what remains of the old Republican establishment, and in politics nothing is eternal. But as of Nov. 5, 2024, the “man from Queens” has achieved a domination of the Republican Party that no previous Republican president has ever enjoyed. The modern Republican Party that Ronald Reagan made, and that George W. Bush took into the 21st century, has fallen before the MAGA hordes, and today’s ambitious Republican politicos must say to Trump what Ruth said to Naomi: Whither thou goest I will go; and where thou lodgest I will lodge.

Until recently, when people thought about the political divisions inside the Republican Party, they saw two camps. There was the predominately liberal Republican Party rooted in the Northeast and represented by figures like Nelson Rockefeller and Mitt Romney, and there was the Sunbelt Republican movement led by Ronald Reagan. Sunbelt Republicans were seen as further to the right than their Rockefeller Republican rivals on both economic and social issues. The shift of white Southerners in the 1970s and 1980s to the Republicans from their traditional post-Reconstruction Democratic affiliation decisively tipped the balance between Sunbelt and Rockefeller Republicans, driving the whole party into the more conservative form it assumed under both Reagan and Bush.