Markos Moulitsas: Trump trashing the GOP

In 2012, after losing the popular vote for the fifth time in the last six presidential elections, Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Reince Priebus penned a famous post-mortem.

“Public perception of the Party is at record lows,” he wrote. “Young voters are increasingly rolling their eyes at what the Party represents, and many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country. When someone rolls their eyes at us, they are not likely to open their ears to us.” 

{mosads}Priebus lamented that “too often Republican elected officials spoke about issues important to the Hispanic community using a tone that undermined the GOP brand within Hispanic communities.” 

Beyond Latinos, the report conceded that the GOP lagged with women, Asians and African-Americans. And despite noting that “we also have a youthful RNC Chairman, Reince Priebus,” Priebus admitted that young people weren’t flocking to the party.

Among conservatives, the report was met with instant hostility.

“They think they’ve gotta rebrand and it’s all predictable,” snorted Rush Limbaugh, mocking conclusions such as “they gotta reach out to minorities. They gotta moderate their tone here and moderate their tone there.” Republican candidates and elected officials gave it the cold shoulder.

The GOP wave in 2014 appeared to vindicate the party’s rejection of Priebus’s warnings. But 2014 was a midterm election, and smart Republicans know that changing demographics are their greatest enemy — particularly in presidential election years. 

As the post-mortem noted, “in the past six presidential elections, four have gone to the Democratic nominee, at an average yield of 327 electoral votes to 211 for the Republican. During the preceding two decades … Republicans won five out of six elections, averaging 417 electoral votes to Democrats’ 113.” 

The trend is unlikely to abate without a wholesale revamp of the GOP’s approach to the growing swath of voters who aren’t older white men. 

And there’s no hope of that happening now, not with the emergence of Donald Trump as the GOP’s leading light. 

Conservatives who drooled at (staged) pictures of Russian President Vladimir Putin hunting a bear now have their own arrogant strongman to swoon over. Establishment Republicans have been relegated to the single digits in the polls, while Trump lights Priebus’s 2012 prescriptions on fire. Trump has explicitly set out to offend and denigrate women, Latinos and African-Americans, and the GOP base adores him for it. 

Yet rather than ostracize Trump for the damage he is doing to his party, Priebus has abandoned his previous plea for tolerance and inclusion. “I think [Donald Trump] brings a lot of interest to the Republican field.” he said with a straight face. “I think it’s a net positive for everybody and I also think it’s an indicator that there’s a lot of folks out there that are just sick and tired of Washington. I think Donald Trump’s tapped into that.”

If only Trump were an anti-Washington populist, his candidacy wouldn’t be killing the GOP brand. Trump is tapping into the xenophobia, racism and sexism that Republicans have long spoke of through coded messages but pretended didn’t exist. And he’s doing so openly, in a way that is impossible to disguise.

So it’s fitting that Priebus spent weeks trying to fully pull Trump into the GOP with a loyalty pledge, rather than excommunicate him from the party. 

He had no choice. Trumpism is simply overt conservatism, and there’s no further reason to deny it. 

Moulitsas is the founder and publisher of Daily Kos.