Oren Cass, executive director of the conservative think tank American Compass, said Thursday that if President Trump loses his reelection bid, the Republican Party’s takeaway should not be that “the old GOP formula” was the key to electoral victory.
Asked in a Hill.TV interview what Republican “tastemakers” would, and should, learn from a Trump loss, Cass responded, “What they should learn is that Donald Trump was not a very effective political vessel, and not an effective leader of a government.”
“In particular, the way he has governed in the past few years doesn’t actually align with what made him popular in the first place,” Cass said, noting the president’s frequent failure to answer questions about his agenda in a second term.
“The idea that, well, Donald Trump’s failure proves that the old GOP formula was really the right one and we should just go back to it … obviously there are people who want to go back to it and so they will make that argument, but I think that’s obviously an incorrect conclusion and it’s also just a losing conclusion,” Cass said.
“What we need to do is learn from what happened in 2016, learn from what Donald Trump did show, which is that there are very serious problems in the country that politicians are not addressing and that there’s a real constituency and coalition for a different approach on the right of center that the GOP orthodoxy was not addressing,” he added.
Watch a portion of the interview below.
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