Trump’s grip imperils GOP rebuild By: Editorial Posted: 7:00 PM CST Tuesday, Nov. 17, 2020

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/11/2020 (1760 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Thousands of Donald Trump supporters flooded into Washington, D.C., last Saturday to demonstrate their continuing admiration for the Republican U.S. president, who is still refusing to accept defeat in the Nov. 3 presidential election.

Mr. Trump received 73.1 million votes, giving him 232 electoral college votes, against 78.7 million votes and 306 electoral votes for Democratic candidate Joe Biden. Despite the numbers, Mr. Trump and his supporters contend the election has been stolen through unspecified electoral fraud.

Those supporters keep in touch with Mr. Trump through Twitter, where he has 88 million followers. They turn out to his rallies and other public appearances, where he courts their adulation. He rose to national prominence in the years 2004 to 2015 as host of the reality-TV show The Apprentice.

The support of his fans was enough to elect him president in 2016, with 63 million votes and 304 electoral votes against Democrat Hillary Clinton’s 65.8 million votes and 227 electoral votes. The Trump movement was not large enough, however, to keep him in office this pandemic-afflicted year.

Mr. Trump drove past the Washington crowd on Saturday as his motorcade carried him to his golf course in Virginia. He revels in the applause of his admirers and they return the love by turning up for his rallies.

The Republican Party will need a program and a presidential candidate that can win in 2024. As Mr. Trump lost the election this time and will reach the age of 78 in 2024, they probably need to find someone else. As long, however, as he stays in the game, even from outside the White House, and keeps his personal following – those 88 million Twitter followers, for instance — he will be difficult to push aside.

Mr. Trump has transformed the Republican Party into a party of white nationalism, opposition to immigration, opposition to international trade, opposition to international institutions. His administration pulled out of the World Health Organization in the middle of a pandemic, pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade treaty, pulled out of the Paris Agreement on climate change. He has done his best to paralyze the World Trade Organization.

He stitched together a coalition of conservative evangelical Christians, gun-rights advocates, anti-immigrant campaigners who fear their nation’s inevitable demographic shift, and people who believe the U.S. government is run by a clandestine pedophile ring. The party’s challenge over the next few years will be to reach beyond these narrowly focused groups and assemble a new coalition with a new set of causes.

President-elect Joe Biden will need all his bipartisan bargaining skills to win support for his plans in what might turn out (based on two January runoff elections in Georgia) to be another Republican-majority Senate, and a House of Representatives with a reduced Democratic majority. As long as Mr Trump continues to dominate the Republican Party, he will be able to stand in Mr. Biden’s way.

But if that makes him a problem for Mr. Biden, he will be a much bigger problem for Republicans who want to take their party down a new path. Eventually, the Republicans will have to court increased support among Black and Latino voters, among young people, among suburban women and other identifiable groups who deserted the party in this election.

If Mr. Trump keeps his party wedded to the combative style and the America-first agenda that failed in this election, he may prove to be the ally Mr. Biden needs to make him look good and brighten the Democratic Party’s electoral prospects.