Are tonight’s Iowa caucuses the nail in the coffin for the Republican establishment?
If the polls are right and former President Donald Trump wins big, it will stamp the end of the conservative movement that had defined the GOP since President Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980.
Leading conservatives such as the Republican governors of Iowa and New Hampshire are ignored by today’s Trump voters. Nor does it seem to matter to them that Iowa’s top evangelical leader is also endorsing a Trump opponent.
And it makes no difference that movement conservatives of the last 40 years, from Chris Christie to Bill Barr, Liz Cheney and Mike Pence, are shouting that Trump is sinking the party fast in terms of election wins and state party organizing.
Christie, the former New Jersey governor, made it clear in December that the party’s decline under Trump is a slow-motion disaster.
“If Trump is our nominee,” said Christie, who dropped out of the GOP race last week, “we will not only lose the presidency again, but we will lose both houses of Congress, and we will lose races up and down the ticket. And this isn’t speculation.”
The wreckage is everywhere.
Look at the damage done to Americans for Prosperity, arguably the most potent of conservative, grassroots organizations. Backed by conservative billionaire Charles Koch, the group is putting its money and might behind Nikki Haley’s bid for the GOP nomination.
Endorsing a Trump opponent was the “worst strategic decision” in the history of right-wing political activism by Koch, one political operative told Semafor.
A top AFP official in New Hampshire resigned and warned there will be more “attrition,” from the Koch network.
Those Trump fans are splitting from a fountain of money that fed conservative politics from the 1980s through the 2010s.
That GOP breakdown under Trump is also eating away at the GOP’s state parties.
“In Arizona and Michigan, two states where the GOP presidential candidate will likely have to win a majority of suburban voters to get back in the White House, the state Republican parties are running critically short on money,” Newsweek reported last week.
The Arizona party had less than $14,800 in the bank at the end of August, according to the Arizona Mirror.
Newsweek reported that the Michigan “Republican Party had $93,000 in its bank accounts as of July 2023…” Internal reports, disclosed to reporters, show the party approaching “the brink of bankruptcy.”
This losing dynamic for the GOP is also evident in Washington.
In keeping with Trump’s stated desire for the U.S. economy to crash this year, the Republican majority in the House is refusing to hold to a deal agreed to by the last two GOP speakers to fund the government. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) was reduced to pleading with his House majority last week that the deal is “the most favorable budget agreement Republicans have achieved in over a decade.”
That failure to govern in the best interest of the nation has led to a rush of GOP retirements from Congress.
Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) left last November and said that working in the GOP House majority meant dealing with Trump followers and the “many Republican leaders [who] are lying to America, claiming that the 2020 election was stolen.”
Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.) bluntly stated that the GOP-led House was “failing the American people,” and that her colleagues were “like a theater full of actors in the circus.”
Since Congress reconvened this month, even more House Republicans have thrown in the towel.
Reps. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-Mo.), Larry Bucshon (R-Ind.) and Greg Pence (R-Ind.) — the brother of former Vice President Mike Pence — announced their retirements in the new year.
“I am disappointed in us not getting anything done in 2023. Absolutely,” Rep. Pence said in announcing his departure. “The contention in our party is definitely a contributing factor,” he explained, giving an indirect reference to the damage being done by Trump.
Their departures come after several House committee leaders left late last year, including Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), who headed the Financial Services Committee; and Rep. Kay Granger (R-Texas), who headed to the Appropriations Committee.
This year, Rep. John Curtis (R-Utah) and Rep. Bill Johnson (R-Ohio) have also announced that they are leaving, the former running for Senate and the latter quitting early to take a university presidency. They evidently concluded that life is better outside of a House GOP majority that is defined by Trump extremists in the Freedom Caucus.
It is time to start talking about the stakes of having a two-party system where one party has been completely subsumed by Trump’s authoritarian cult of personality.
A chilling indicator of what that might look like is Trump’s sanctioning of political violence. Just last week, he referred to the Jan. 6 rioters as “hostages.” A CBS news/YouGov poll published last week shows 30 percent of Republicans approve of the actions of the Trump-inspired mob that forced its way into the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. In January 2021, 52 percent of Republicans said they “strongly” disapproved of the effort to interfere with Congress certifying the results of the 2020 election. Today, only 32 percent say they “strongly disapprove.”
Half of Republicans surveyed now say the riot was about “defending freedom” and “patriotism.”
We are watching the death of the Grand Old Party as Trump barrels through Iowa on his way to the GOP nomination.
Juan Williams is an author and a political analyst for Fox News Channel, and author of “What the Hell Do You Have to Lose?”