Ingrained habits, not Donald Trump, are the GOP’s real problem

Political analysts are discussing Donald Trump’s ascendancy mostly in terms of the presidential horse race. They’re missing the real story.

Despite his relentless spin to the contrary, the evidence suggests that Trump will lose badly to the Democratic nominee. While it’s bad for ratings, or subscriptions and clicks, to tell that story over and over again, the truth remains: Trump is not likely to occupy the White House in January.

{mosads}The kind of defeat the Republican Party is likely to face in November has provoked a variety of reactions from professional conservatives, including many of my Republican friends in the House. Chief among them, unfortunately, is denial — not of the electoral map, which they can read as well as anyone, but of how their party got here in the first place.

The conventional conservative analysis of the Trump phenomenon goes something like this: Voters are angry, Donald Trump is angry, so voters have flocked to Donald Trump. The appeal of his outlandish ideas is confined to the lifespan of his candidacy. Once Trump loses, it’s back to business as usual.

Conservatives who think this way will never win another presidential race.

This campaign season’s real lesson for the right goes well beyond this year’s election. Leading conservatives — people like Jonah Goldberg of the National Review, Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard and former RedState editor Erick Erickson — who now treat Trump as the entirety of the conservative movement’s problem are ignoring the decades that movement stalwarts and Republican Party standard-bearers have spent nurturing the same voter anger Trump is now channeling. Fixing what ails conservatism will mean critically examining deeply rooted mental habits, not just waiting for December to roll around.

Republican candidates have spent decades campaigning against impending left-wing tyranny. Again and again, often for short-term political gain, conservatives have stoked unreasonable passions and directed them at individual Democratic officeholders. From Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to President Obama, Democratic leaders have been vilified not just as politically suspect but as morally bankrupt, treasonous America-haters who have made this country weak. In supporting Trump and his political style, Republican voters have done no more than take their leaders at their word. 

Indeed, Republicans wondering what happened to their party must confront the fact that while their presidential nominee put birtherism on the map, he had nothing to do with the Benghazi myths that still circulate in the right-wing bubble, or the House majority’s failed “investigations” of Planned Parenthood, or the dismantling of public education, or the ongoing denial of climate change, or the crusade to strip voting rights from people Republicans dislike by claiming a nonexistent wave of voter fraud. The party that now accepts these as core tests of authenticity lost its way long before Donald Trump came along.

The point to understand here is that Trumpism and the Republican Party’s way of doing business are much closer than Republican stalwarts would like to admit. Consider the key features of that list — smearing the opponent, targeting groups for ridicule, denying the evidence in front of one’s nose, using government power to punish perceived enemies, dismantling institutions that have stood the test of time — and one realizes they perfectly describe the fears raised by anti-Trump conservatives about a potential Trump presidency. Up until now, many conservatives have been happy to embrace this political style.

Nevertheless, today’s anti-Trump right-wing pundits — the Goldbergs, the Kristols, the Ericksons — insist on handling Trump as a mysterious force that fell from the sky rather than the natural outgrowth of their own politics. They paint a picture that seeks to comfort conservatives in their moment of crisis rather than challenge them.

In their telling, Republicans just need candidates who aren’t Donald Trump — even if they propose the same policies. To take one much-debated example, Goldberg, in a May 18 piece headlined “Despite the rise of Trump, conservatism isn’t dead yet,” argued in a single breath that Trump supporters suffer from “power-worship” and that “a wall on the Mexican border” — which Trump advocates — is “sadly necessary.”

In other words, Trump isn’t wrong, he’s just the wrong messenger. As far as Goldberg is concerned, conservatives need to get through this election and then find a pro-wall candidate for 2020 who offers more public polish.

The Pelosi-hating, wall-building party that nominated Donald Trump this year will have the same problems in 2020 that it has today unless Republican leaders do more soul-searching than they’ve done thus far. Maintaining the same posture and waiting for the next election to come around won’t be enough. 

Grijalva is the co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.