End of an era: It’s time for the Republicans to break up 

The Republican Party was deep in crisis even before the House plunged into leaderless paralysis earlier this month. Prominent establishment figures have recently made a variety of high-profile political exits, either through voluntary retirement for lawmakers like Sen. Mitt Romney or by ouster in the case of former Rep. Liz Cheney. Now Republicans’ MAGA chaos has some lawmakers weighing whether they even want to remain in politics.  

It’s no longer newsworthy to talk about a Republican Party in crisis. The crisis is crystal clear, visible even to senior party leaders, including Rep. Kevin McCarthy, who savaged his own party’s inability to lead. McCarthy griped to reporters the House leadership crisis reflected “very poorly. Very, very poorly, from every respect” on his colleagues. 

House Republicans’ inability to elect a new Speaker is just the latest symptom of a terminal rift between old-school Republican leaders and a Trump-led MAGA movement in near-total control of the party’s political and legislative machinery. There’s no sewing this rift back up. The best thing for the GOP’s warring factions would be, to borrow a phrase from firebrand Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a “national divorce.”  

Despite the often shifting alliances of a GOP in flux, it’s easy to see where the centers of power rest — and where they don’t. The Trump machine and its MAGA voters represent the only legitimate authority on the far right. The House Freedom Caucus represents its legislative arm, complete with a press operation that rivals and frequently outperforms the Republican National Committee itself. The most prominent young Republican voices now hail almost exclusively from the party’s MAGA wing — the product of a years-long effort by far-right groups like Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point.. 

That the RNC has become a largely irrelevant part of the Republican Party’s messaging apparatus is both embarrassing to the party and a sign of just how fully Donald Trump’s army of far-right messengers have stolen eyes and donor dollars away from RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel. Turn on Newsmax or OAN and you’re more likely to see and hear Trumpworld talking points than you are to catch a mainstream Republican lawmaker touting stale RNC lines.  

The MAGA movement’s standard-bearers are more than happy to destroy Republicans’ 2024 electoral chances in pursuit of something larger: a party purged of “RINOs” and voices critical of the Freedom Caucus’s radical legislative goals. With separate communications networks, legislative goals, operational structures and fundamentally conflicting worldviews, the GOP and the MAGA movement increasingly resemble two different nations under one fraying flag. 

“MAGA is that flag, The Republican ‘establishment’ must rally to it or die,” former Republican Rep. Denver Riggleman tells me, in just one of many fatalistic messages I received from the current and former GOP lawmakers and staffers I contacted. Like many, Riggleman accepts that Trump’s MAGA movement won. “That fight was done long ago,” Riggleman remarks.  

Across the establishment GOP’s largely losing back-and-forth with the MAGA movement, they’ve routinely miscalculated on one critical aspect of MAGA values. At the heart of the failed McCarthy approach to power-sharing was the idea that old-guard Republicans could strategically compromise the party’s values to appease Trump-aligned fundamentalists. That bargain implies anyone in the MAGA movement is interested in working with Republicans like McCarthy in the first place. They aren’t, and never have been. McCarthy’s misguided idealism cost him his job and potentially doomed the entire party.  

Rep. Matt Gaetz and other MAGA lawmakers long ago made clear that they believe the current Republican Party has irrevocably failed. To the party’s hardliners, the only remaining solution is to strip the party down to its baseboards and rebuild the whole thing in Trump’s political image. That new Republican Party is not conservative, nor is it grounded by any coherent morality or value system. As McCarthy and a growing list of Republican Speaker-hopefuls have discovered, it’s also an insular and extremist movement uninterested in any compromise with a GOP they abhor. 

If the GOP’s dwindling number of old-guard Republicans are serious about freeing their party from the corrupting grasp of Trump’s MAGA mercenaries, a split remains the most symbolically and politically effective tool for getting the job done. The Republican Party is in dire need of a refounding, and that can only happen if the party can rediscover its core principles without the anchor of Trumpism around its neck.  

As our nation races towards what is likely to be one of the most acrimonious presidential elections in modern history, Trump’s MAGA movement is mutating into its most virulent form. House Republicans’ paralyzed Speaker race has given some lawmakers the courage to finally voice long-held frustrations against both the Freedom Caucus and the MAGA movement writ large. Those duty-minded Republicans have an obligation to expel the extremists from their party — before they cause even greater damage next year. 

Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.