The GOP’s Breakdown Is Only Just Beginning. For years, pundits have predicted that the Republican Party is breaking apart. But it took Donald Trump to make it happen. The Republican Party is like a gigantic Antarctic ice shelf with fissures we’ve watched develop for years. Those cracks were evident in 2010, when the Tea Party emerged, and in 2014, when GOP primary voters rejected establishment favorites, including the sitting House Republican Leader, Eric Cantor.
Story Continued Below As the fractures grew, the party held together—for the past eight years, opposition to President Barack Obama was more or less enough to ice over major intraparty differences. But in the glaring sun of Donald Trump, those dividing lines are no longer survivable: The party has melted down and cracked apart, and its various components are drifting away. In the past, party splits have frequently been unclear, messy and short-lived. By contrast, this year’s Republican unwinding is hesitant and halting—and it’s not clear at all where it will end. ‘We Are in for a Pretty Long Civil War’ As the country geared up for the third and final presidential debate last week, the fellows of the storied conservative Hoover Institution gathered in Palo Alto to present their research to the think tank's wealthy patrons. Elsewhere in America, in the homestretch of perhaps the weirdest election the nation has ever experienced, things were getting tense, excited, even feverish.
But the rooms at the Hoover retreat at Stanford University could have doubled as a funeral parlor, and the lectures as eulogies for a bygone era. Larry Diamond, a prominent political sociologist known to fellow scholars as “Mr. Democracy,” talked about the breakdown of the party system. Kori Schake, a National Security Council official in the George W.
Bush administration and adviser to the McCain-Palin campaign, spoke about how the U.S. was endangering the international order it had itself created. Story Continued Below The chasm that opened first was intellectual. These wounds won’t heal quickly, or at all.” The 1965 Law That Gave the Republican Party Its Race Problem. During the long, three-year debate over the immigration act of 1965, members of Congress debated the wisdom and morality of removing 1920s-era quotas on immigration to the United States. Not far from the center of this debate was the nettlesome issue of race. “The people of Ethiopia have the same right to come to the United States under this bill as the people from England, the people of France, the people of Germany, [and] the people of Holland,” griped Senator Sam Ervin, a conservative Democrat from North Carolina.
“With all due respect to Ethiopia, I don’t know of any contributions that Ethiopia has made to the making of America.” Story Continued Below President Lyndon Johnson, hoping to tamp down concerns about the immigration act at a time when Congress was engaged in an even more ferocious debate over the voting rights act, sought to downplay the implications of the proposed immigration law: “This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill,” he said upon signing it.
Paul Ryan can't escape from Trump's shipwreck of the Republican party | Richard Wolffe | Opinion. Today’s Republican party makes no sense. It spent decades as the party of national security before nominating a man who both defends Russia and pretends to know nothing about the place. If it is the party of small government and constitutional liberty, it’s not clear why its members feel so good about locking up political opponents like Hillary Clinton.
To cap it all, the party is currently led by a reality TV star who destroyed his own campaign with a TV interview. But all those contradictions look simple compared to the pretzel shape that now passes for the strategy of its leadership. House speaker Paul Ryan was a reluctant endorser of Donald Trump. Now he is a reluctant non-endorser of the same. Ryan told his own Republican caucus on Monday that he would no longer defend Trump or campaign with him. But there is no escape from this shipwreck, as Trump himself made clear on Twitter. Ryan is indeed wasting his time. Those battlegrounds are already leaning a long way away from the GOP.
How the Party of John McCain Became the Party of Donald Trump. Will Seberger/ZUMA Wire One Saturday afternoon in June, a few thousand Donald Trump supporters wearing T-shirts with slogans such as "Italian Lives Matter" and "I'm the infidel Allah warned about" streamed into the Arizona State Fair Grounds in Phoenix, to hear the newly minted Republican nominee speak at a venue known locally as the "Mad House. " Walking among the rallygoers, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio was greeted by a succession of cheers from the crowd, a reception befitting a man whose immigration raids and birther task force had foreshadowed Trump's rise.
On stage, former Gov. Jan Brewer, an immigration hardliner who clashed with the White House on border security, warmed up the crowd with a chant of "Build! When it was his turn onstage, Trump egged on his supporters' delirium with visions of triumph. McCain confessed to a room of donors in May that if Trump continued to alienate Arizona's Hispanic voters, "this may be the race of my life. " And it is. But now she was on edge. The secret history of Trumpism |Timothy Shenk | News. The Republican party, its leaders like to say, is a party of ideas.
Debates over budgets and government programmes are important, but they must be conducted with an eye on the bigger questions – questions about the character of the state, the future of freedom and the meaning of virtue. These beliefs provide the foundation for a conservative intellectual establishment – thinktanks such as the American Enterprise Institute, magazines such as National Review, pundits such as George Will and Bill Kristol – dedicated to advancing the right’s agenda.
Over the last year, that establishment has been united by one thing: opposition to Donald Trump. Republican voters may have succumbed to a temporary bout of collective insanity – or so Trump’s critics on the right believe – but the party’s intelligentsia remain certain that entrusting the Republican nomination to a reality television star turned populist demagogue has been a disaster for their cause and their country.
Then it disappeared. House Republicans Remain Divided Over Gun Control After Deadly Shootings. Gun control, terrorism, and constitutional rights have coalesced to create a complicated set of concerns that have left House Republicans struggling to find common ground. The deaths of two black men at the hands of police officers, and the murder of five police officers in Dallas, Texas, have brought renewed attention to a national debate over gun policy. Yet nearly a month after a terrorist attack at an Orlando nightclub, House Republicans remain deeply divided over how to respond. The discord on display may be a sign of hardening conservative battle lines—and that would spell trouble for House Speaker Paul Ryan.
House Democrats called for expanding background checks for gun sales and preventing firearms from falling into the hands of suspected terrorists after the Orlando attack. House Republicans have not seemed quite sure how to react to the demands. So far, conservative criticism has appeared to win out. Paul Ryan, House GOP leadership team split on supporting Trump. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), middle, and Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.), left, have both said said they will support Trump, braking with Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg) House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) returns to the Capitol this week to face not just a divided caucus trying to determine how to handle Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, but also a leadership team that is split down the middle on whether to support the presumptive Republican nominee.
While Ryan grabbed headlines with his declaration that he is not ready to back Trump, his top lieutenants splintered just like the broader Republican establishment has broken apart over Trump. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.), the Nos. 2 and 3 members of leadership, have both fallen in line supporting Trump as the party’s standard bearer this fall, even as their level of enthusiasm for the controversial figure should not be considered high. Republican Party Unravels Over Donald Trump’s Takeover. Photo By seizing the Republican presidential nomination for on Tuesday night, he and his millions of supporters completed what had seemed unimaginable: a hostile takeover of one of America’s two major political parties.
Just as stunning was how quickly the host tried to reject them. The party’s two living presidents spurned Mr. Trump, a number of sitting governors and senators expressed opposition or ambivalence toward him, and he drew a forceful rebuke from the single most powerful and popular rival left on the Republican landscape: the House speaker, . Rarely if ever has a party seemed to come apart so visibly. Rarely, too, has the nation been so on edge about its politics. Many Americans still cannot believe that the bombastic Mr.
But for leading Republicans, the dismay is deeper and darker. Yet if keeping the peace means embracing Mr. The ties between Republican elites — elected officials, donors and Washington insiders — and voters have actually been fraying for years. Mr. Mr. Mr. The 10 Republicans who hate Donald Trump the most. The Fix breaks down the 10 Republicans who have been most vocally opposed to Trump's nomination. (Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post) On Friday alone, two of the men who ran against Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination said they not only wouldn't endorse him but that they wouldn't even be voting for him in the general election. Lindsey Graham went first, summing up his sentiments in two tweets.
Jeb Bush followed -- with a Facebook post in which he argued that Trump "has not demonstrated that temperament or strength of character. He has not displayed a respect for the Constitution. And, he is not a consistent conservative. Where do Bush and Graham fit in the ranks of the biggest Trump haters of this election? 10. 9. Miller is still at it despite it all. 8. Donald Trump is epically unprepared to be president.
That's pretty stinging. 7. 6. 5-Minute Fix newsletter Keeping up with politics is easy now. Please provide a valid email address. 4. 3. 2. 1. The Republican Party’s implosion over Donald Trump’s candidacy has arrived. MADISON, Ala. — The implosion over Donald Trump’s candidacy that Republicans had hoped to avoid arrived so virulently this weekend that many party leaders vowed never to back the billionaire and openly questioned whether the GOP could come together this election year. At a moment when Republicans had hoped to begin taking on Hillary Clinton — who is seemingly on her way to wrapping up the Democratic nomination — the GOP has instead become consumed by a crisis over its identity and core values that is almost certain to last through the July party convention, if not the rest of the year.
A campaign full of racial overtones and petty, R-rated put-downs grew even uglier Sunday after Trump declined repeatedly in a CNN interview to repudiate the endorsement of him by David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Trump had disavowed Duke at a news conference on Friday, but he stammered when asked about Duke on Sunday. Campaign 2016 Email Updates Please provide a valid email address. Sen.
Why Today’s GOP Crackup Is the Final Unraveling of Nixon’s ‘Southern Strategy’ Fresh chatter among Washington insiders is not about whether the Republican Party will win in 2016 but whether it will survive. Donald Trump—the fear that he might actually become the GOP nominee—is the ultimate nightmare. Some gleeful Democrats are rooting (sotto voce) for the Donald, though many expect he will self-destruct. Nevertheless, Republicans face a larger problem. The GOP finds itself trapped in a marriage that has not only gone bad but is coming apart in full public view.
The abrupt resignation of House Speaker John Boehner was his capitulation to this new reality. At the heart of this intramural conflict is the fact that society has changed dramatically in recent decades, but the GOP has refused to change with it. The party establishment, including business and financial leaders, seems to realize that Republicans need to moderate their outdated posture on social issues.
Nixon’s “Southern strategy” was cynical, of course, but it was an effective electoral ploy. The GOP sinks deeper into chaos. Can it still function as a party? It was the soundbite heard 'round Capitol Hill: House Majority Leader and presumptive House speaker nominee Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., has dropped out of the race for speaker. The Washington Post's Elise Viebeck explains the sudden news — and what happens next. (Julie Percha/The Washington Post) Less than a year after a sweeping electoral triumph, Republicans are on the verge of ceasing to function as a national political party.
The most powerful and crippling force at work in the once-hierarchical GOP is anger, directed as much at its own leaders as anywhere else. First, a contingent of several dozen conservative House members effectively forced Speaker John A. With no obvious replacement for Boehner in sight, “it is total confusion — a banana republic,” said Rep. [The speaker chase: Who’s next?] Republicans including Rep. Initially, GOP elders believed that their primary would be a showcase for a cast of well-regarded senators and governors, current and former.
A House divided: How the GOP is 'fractured' ahead of leadership elections. For Republicans, questions of who can lead them and can they govern? House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) announced Friday that he’d resign from Congress on Oct. 30 after nearly five years as speaker. (AP) When Republicans scored their big victory in the midterm elections of 2010, they looked like a party on the rise after a devastating pair of losses in 2006 and 2008. Instead, they have become a party in almost permanent disorder, torn by warring factions and near-constant tensions between their establishment leadership and a tea party-infused grass roots. Now, in the wake of GOP House Speaker John A. Boehner’s decision to quit, and the suddenness with which the news broke, provided one more piece of evidence of how badly strained the Republican coalition is. Those divisions have infected the battle for the GOP presidential nomination.
[Boehner’s surprise decision to step down] Much of this has its roots in the reaction to the election of President Obama and to the agenda he has pursued. The anger has fed on itself. Sen.