GOP in the basement

"There is no consistent philosophy," veteran Republican pollster Frank Luntz told POLITICO's Tim Alberta, who is himself stumped, despite writing the book on the making of the modern Republican Party. "Owning the libs and pissing off the media,” shrugs Brendan Buck, a longtime senior congressional aide “There’s really not much more to it.”

Donald Trump’s party is “the very definition of a cult of personality,” Alberta writes. Bold ideas have been replaced by an appetite for conflict: "This is not a party struggling to find its identity. This is a party in the middle of a meltdown."

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Trump has been unable to articulate his second-term vision, even in the friendly confines of Fox News. He gave a news conference Sunday night: no hint of it, just a Hail Mary play at a new Covid-19 treatment that the FDA had refused to approve in recent days.

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“No president is reelected on the basis of saying, ‘I’ve done a good job. Reelect me,’” Karl Rove told my colleagues Nancy Cook and Meridith McGraw. “They have to say, ‘I’ve got a second act in me.’

Trump's new second-term promises, released on the Trump campaign website Sunday night, include: Eradicate Covid-19, go back to normal in 2021, create 10 million new jobs, hand out tax credits for companies ditching China, end surprise medical billing, "drain the globalist swamp," and teach "American Exceptionalism."

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  Politico

Un.fucking.real.

The location [of the GOP convention] changed three times; Trump's former chief strategist Steve Bannon was arrested Friday; a tape of the president's sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, calling Trump cruel, stupid and a liar was published on Saturday; and then his 2016 campaign manager Kellyanne Conway announced plans to step down Sunday night.

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There's no party platform: Too hard, skip! The campaign has a more practical list of memorable bullet point promises instead.

  Politico

Bullet point promises which have no detail as to how they'll be accomplished. Eg: "Create 10 million new jobs in 10 months". And, under "Education" there are only two points: 1) Provide school choice to every child in America (by which I assume they mean every child's parents), and 2) Teach American exceptionalism. Holy fuckanoly.

It can now safely be said, as his first term in the White House draws toward closure, that Donald Trump’s party is the very definition of a cult of personality. It stands for no special ideal. It possesses no organizing principle. It represents no detailed vision for governing. Filling the vacuum is a lazy, identity-based populism.

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“Owning the libs and pissing off the media,” shrugs Brendan Buck, a longtime senior congressional aide and imperturbable party veteran if ever there was one. “That’s what we believe in now. There’s really not much more to it.”

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There is no blueprint to fix what is understood to be a broken immigration system. There is no grand design to modernize the nation’s infrastructure. There is no creative thinking about a conservative, market-based solution to climate change. There is no meaningful effort to address the cost of housing or childcare or college tuition. None of the erstwhile bold ideas proposed by the likes of Newt Gingrich and Paul Ryan—term limits, a balanced budget amendment, reforms to Social Security and Medicare, anti-poverty programs—have survived as serious proposals. Heck, even after a decade spent trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Republicans still have no plan to replace it. (Trust me: If they did, you’d hear about it.)

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When I called one party elder, he joked that it’s a good thing Republicans decided not to write a new platform for the 2020 convention—because they have produced nothing novel since the last one was written. [...] The party is now defined primarily by its appetite for conflict, even when that conflict serves no obvious policy goal.

The result is political anarchy. Traditionally, the run-up to a convention sees a party attempting to tame rival factions and unite around a dynamic vision for the future. Instead, Republicans have spent the summer in a self-immolating downward spiral.

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Meanwhile, as party operatives worked feverishly to win ballot access for Kanye West, a bipolar Black celebrity who could ostensibly draw votes from Joe Biden, emerging victorious from at least three GOP primaries were congressional candidates who have expressed support for QAnon, the psychotic conspiracy theory that accuses Democrats and Hollywood elites of trafficking and cannibalizing young children. Given a chance to disavow this nascent movement, the president pleaded ignorance and, along with other party officials, embraced these candidates, even the self-described “proud Islamophobe” who has fantasized about immigrants dying en masse.

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To be a Republican today requires you to exist in a constant state of moral relativism, turning every chance at self-analysis into an assault on the other side.

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[N]ot a single American’s life has been improved; not a single little guy has been helped. Just as with the forceful dispersing of peaceful protesters in Lafayette Park—done so he could hold up a prop Bible for flashing cameras—Trump and his allies continue to wage symbolic battles whose principal casualties are ordinary people.

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Unsavory fringe characters have always looked for ways to penetrate the mainstream of major parties—and mostly, they have failed. What would result from a fringe character leading a party always remained an open question. It has now been asked and answered: Some in the party have embraced the extreme, others in the party have blushed at it, but all of them have subjugated themselves to it.

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“The GOP has been here before with John Birchers and it didn’t end well,” said Ben Sasse, the Nebraska senator who has been a vocal if terribly inconsistent Trump critic. “The party of Lincoln and Reagan ought to have something big and bold to offer the country, but it’s got way too many grifters selling grievance politics.”

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There is a place in politics for fighting—and, yes, for culture wars. Some of the great policy debates of this century, from abortion to same-sex marriage to marijuana legalization, were shaped more by social movements than policy debates. The problem for Republicans is that most of the fights they’re picking nowadays are futile at best and foolhardy at worst. NASCAR? Confederate flags? Goya beans? Face masks? To the degree any of these issues move the needle politically, Republicans are on the wrong side of them.

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“Healthy parties need to build coalitions around a shared vision that speaks to all Americans,” Sasse told me. “Our current course is unsustainable. We’ve got a hell of a rebuilding ahead of us, whatever happens in November.”

If Trump wins, that can't happen. Even if he loses, it may not be possible.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.