John Rudoff/Sipa USA via AP Images
About 50 demonstrators protested Oregon’s coronavirus shutdown, at the governor’s mansion in Salem, Oregon, April 25, 2020.
As the ranks of the protesters against the murder of George Floyd grew to hundreds of thousands in the ensuing two weeks, the country saw the face of a young, racially diverse America determined to call out the racism shaping police misconduct. But those protesters were saying so much more. They were also calling out the racism at the heart of the deadly carnage from the pandemic and racism at the heart of the economic carnage. They were calling out a profoundly unequal America.
President Donald Trump was in a vengeful and dangerous mood. He was trapped in the White House, where the Secret Service sent him to a secure bunker; in return, he demanded a high fence be built around the White House compound. He demanded governors get tougher and claimed the right to use the U.S. armed forces to control domestic political protests. He told the country he was a “law and order” president and could use the “unlimited power” of the military. And on cue, his officers teargassed the peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square. An intimidating phalanx of police officers on horseback cleared the way for him to reach St. John’s Episcopal Church.
But most revealing was his tweet, “Tonight, I understand, is MAGA NIGHT AT THE WHITE HOUSE???” That was his call to his millions of followers to rally and defend his presidency.
The rallying to defend Trump was pathetic.
More than 2,000 miles from the White House, scores of residents armed with assault weapons did turn out to guard the streets of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, protecting against a rumored attack by “ANTIFA agitators” that, of course, never came. White nationalists outside Philadelphia conducted a mock police execution of George Floyd.
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Months ago, President Trump tweeted, “liberate” Minnesota, Michigan, and Virginia and “save your great 2nd Amendment.” The national conservative funding network and Fox News jumped in to promote the protests, but the hundreds who joined the capitol protests fell far short of the Tea Party protests against President Barack Obama that shaped our country and polarized politics for the past decade.
Watching this weak, but nonetheless intimidating, defense of the president led me to a new conclusion about the 2020 election: The main issue is not whether President Donald Trump will get re-elected, but how a Tea Party–dominated Republican Party reacts to its humiliating defeat.
Most observers understand that Trump’s 2016 win was improbable, requiring an inside straight of Electoral College state wins. His rallies that year displayed a white working-class revolt that made Trump and his bravado possible.
But what almost everybody missed was how divided the Republican Party had become and how trapped Trump was within his own bloc of evangelical and Tea Party loyalists. Everyone missed how insecure was Donald Trump’s hold on his own party, and how much of his politics is just bravado.
The right wing’s current pathetic defense of President Trump contrasts sharply with the Tea Party revolt against the election and re-election of President Barack Obama—a revolt against the first African American president and his multicultural coalition of women, millennials, blacks, and Hispanics.
Then, the Tea Party groups had genuine grass roots. More than 500,000 people joined over 500 rallies; 250,000 would join Tea Party groups. Most already belonged to pro-life, gun rights, anti-immigrant, or white nationalist groups. They gained momentum with funding from the Koch brothers and their allies, and from Fox News’s most prominent personalities broadcasting from their protests. The Tea Party leaders were replete with “birthers” who wanted to “take our country back.” The members were infused with a deep anti-Obama venom, deep racial resentment. Stopping Obama meant repealing Obamacare—the new federal entitlement to health insurance.
The marches and protests translated into organization that elected a whole class of Tea Party members to the Congress and governors’ offices. Two-thirds of the House members first elected in 2010 supported the Tea Party; they took office with a mandate “to go nuclear,” to stop government spending and repeal Obamacare.
The Tea Party wave elections allowed Republicans to gridlock government, to shut down the federal government time and again, to force the acceptance of spending caps and fiscal austerity that slowed President Obama’s efforts at economic recovery. They demanded votes to “repeal” Obamacare, and in the states, their leaders blocked all efforts to set up health care exchanges and expand Medicaid. Nationally, they blocked Obama’s efforts to pass comprehensive immigration reform, and in the states, blocked undocumented immigrants getting any public benefits.
What animated them most of all was the legal and illegal immigration of the past three decades—a surge that had been welcomed and legalized on a bipartisan basis by Republican presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush, working quite publicly with Ted Kennedy and Bill Clinton.
The right wing’s current pathetic defense of President Trump contrasts sharply with the Tea Party revolt against the election and re-election of President Barack Obama.
Reagan legalized millions of the undocumented, the first President Bush joined with Kennedy to massively grow legal immigration, and George W. Bush tried to pass comprehensive immigration reform. Even after the 2012 election, the Republican National Committee and establishment Republican leaders in the Congress still called for immigration reform.
Imagine the building anger in Tea Party ranks when they watched the metropolitan elites and national leaders of both parties take irreversible actions that grew the percentage of foreign-born Americans every year, and saw that a growing majority of Americans since Obama’s re-election welcomed a multicultural America replete with and open to immigrants.
These trends divided the Republican Party, one half of whose supporters backed the Tea Party movement in public polls in 2010. At an earlier point, these Republicans would have backed Pat Buchanan; later, they embraced Donald Trump.
America’s two political parties are now defined by the choices they made as America moved away from the traditional strictures on blacks, women, and immigrants. The modern Republican Party built its base in the white South, later expanding it to the deeply observant Appalachian regions and rural parts of the country. Largely ignoring the divisions in Republican ranks, the party’s presidential nominees took pains to show they were champions of white people in the battles over civil rights and affirmative action. They scorned the sexual revolution, opposed abortion, and opposed women breaking free of the patriarchal family to achieve equality. The Republican Party would become the home of many observant Catholics, particularly in the Midwest.
But on immigration, its national leaders pulled away from the Republican base that was increasingly anti-immigration and -immigrants. Reagan in California and the Bushes in Texas were open to Mexican immigrants and showed that Republicans could compete for their votes.
For a time, the GOP establishment fought the Tea Party in the Congress, and as late as 2013, the official Republican National Committee postmortem on Obama’s re-election asserted that passing comprehensive immigration reform was required if the Republicans hoped to compete nationally in future elections.
In my first polls of Republicans’ base voters in 2013, the Tea Party–supporting coalition formed 44 percent of the Republican Party base. Those scorning the GOP establishment were the most pro-life, anti–gay marriage, pro-gun, anti-Obamacare and –big government, and anti-immigration.
The largest bloc fighting the GOP establishment and Obama was the evangelicals, who made up 29 percent of Republican identifiers. They felt most threatened by a country where two-thirds would soon accept gay marriage as legal. They cheered the Tea Party protests and takeover of health care town halls. Finally, somebody had said, “enough,” and stood up to the GOP establishment.
The Tea Party supporters were 25 percent of the base. They were pro-life and against gay marriage, but they were most animated by their hatred of immigration, big-government bailout of the banks, Obamacare, and by threats to the Second Amendment.
In its entirety, however, the Republican Party could not have been more divided, as at least as many voters opposed this Tea Party bloc as supported it. Moderates made up a quarter of the GOP base in my first surveys after Obama’s re-election. They were socially liberal, mostly women and college graduates. Nine in ten moderates thought it was OK for people to have sex without forming a long-term relationship, while seven in ten evangelicals said no.
John McCain’s openness to immigration and bipartisan civility made him the Tea Party’s principal enemy within the party. The McCain secular conservatives formed nearly 20 percent of the base—and they were defined by their contempt for the incivility of the Tea Party.
The remaining Republicans were the observant Catholics who formed 16 percent of the base. They could break either way before Trump won them over.
Donald Trump determined that he would lead this deeply divided party into the 2016 election—and the fragility of his hold on this party defined his ugly battle for the nomination and has continued to define how he’s governed as president.
Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo
Protesters who identified themselves as Tea Party Patriots demonstrated against Obamacare outside the Supreme Court, March 26, 2012, as the Court began hearing arguments on the president’s landmark health care legislation.
Trump looked defiant and confident going down the escalator at Trump Tower in July 2015. He intended to woo the party’s Tea Party base that was the most hostile to Obama and immigrants. He talked about trade, immigration, Obamacare, and the useless politicians who sold out the country to foreigners and let Mexico send us its murderers and rapists. He made no mention of abortion. His was a nationalistic cry against the elites and GOP politicians who had betrayed America and its working people.
Trump’s surge into first place in the primary was produced entirely by his newfound Tea Party base.
But Trump couldn’t get anywhere near a majority of the primary vote and delegates without winning over the evangelicals. Trump was secular to his bones, had been pro-choice and had said positive things about Planned Parenthood. But reversing field was no barrier to Trump. He embraced Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate and announced his pro-life Supreme Court short list. Evangelicals had loved Trump’s visceral attacks on Obama and immigrants, but that wasn’t enough. They always expected to be betrayed by a GOP establishment that was always letting social liberalism advance.
Trump has never wavered from his anti-Obama and anti-immigrant Tea Party, anti-government instincts, but he has always had to remind the evangelicals that he was fighting for their priorities and values, too. Trump can’t waver on abortion, Obamacare, or immigration—lest they be sold out again.
But even the unified bloc of Tea Party and evangelical voters in the 2016 nominating battle formed less than half the party. By the time of his nomination, he’d also won over pro-life Catholics who like his America First agenda. With that, Trump had his working majority—a small working majority.
But Trump has never won the full-throated support of his own party, despite the enthusiasm of his Tea Party rallies—then and now, it is all bravado.
He won only 55 percent of Republican primary voters in 2016—and none of his primary opponents endorsed him at his nominating convention. No former Republican presidents attended either. Like the rest of the world, they thought Trump would be vanquished by Hillary Clinton.
Trump has never won the full-throated support of his own party, despite the enthusiasm of his Tea Party rallies—then and now, it is all bravado.
When candidate Trump won the Electoral College without a plurality of the popular vote, President Trump determined to govern as an uncompromising, Tea Party/evangelic/pro-life conservative who would never sell out his base on immigration, Obamacare, or abortion. His goal was building a clear and punishing majority within his own party, not the country. His strategy was rooted in his insecurity, not his firm hold on a loyal party.
Accordingly, Trump has executed his strategy with little nuance. He appointed the former leader of the House Freedom Caucus, Mick Mulvaney, to lead the Office of Management and Budget and, eventually, to be acting chief of staff. He chose Cabinet secretaries who promised to hollow out the departments they would lead.
He wiped out every sign of climate science in the government. He withdrew America from the Paris climate accord because the Tea Party viewed it as an elite hoax to expand government, and evangelicals, as an elite intrusion on God’s role in the planet’s future.
He gave evangelicals and “William Barr” Catholics an assured social-conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court and up and down the federal bench.
He fought to repeal Obamacare but was blocked by two moderate Republican pro-choice women senators and John McCain. His efforts deepened Trump’s support in the pro-life and observant bloc that formed 60 percent of the party by the end of his first year. That change in Republican composition allowed him to vanquish his opponents in any primary.
And Trump most defiantly and consistently moved to stop Muslim and Latino immigration. He began his Muslim ban and construction of that “impenetrable” wall along the Mexican border. He sent troops to the border to stop bus caravans traveling from Central America, separated refugee children from their parents, and created new camps on both sides of the border. The pandemic enabled Trump to effectively end immigration altogether.
But all this has come at a cost to Trump’s political prospects: His relentless, venomous base strategy has created a bloc of Republican refugees who have nothing but contempt for his armed Tea Party, anti-stay-at-home protesters.
The proportion of Republicans who call themselves moderates has dropped from 23 percent in 2018 to only 16 percent now. When the McCain conservatives are added to those moderates, they now constitute 35 percent of the party, down from 41 percent two years ago. That leaves President Trump with a secure hold over his enthusiastic base—but as I wrote in March in The Atlantic, the Republican Party is “a diminished party” that is “shedding voters.”
When Trump took office, about 39 to 40 percent of Americans identified with the Republican Party. That fell to about 35 to 36 percent. Today, in the wake of the George Floyd protests, Republican identification has fallen to 33 percent.
The final push that has driven onetime Republicans from the party’s ranks came after the pandemic struck with godly force. In a moment of nearly dark humor, Trump was required to lead a historic expansion of the federal government, and set the template for people’s every movement and every stage of the economic closures and reopenings. He appeared every day in a press conference, surrounded by unwanted experts from the deep state.
So, it was no surprise that he threw out the CDC’s proposed detailed regulations to reopen the economy.
It was no surprise he promised to never return to stay-at-home orders, even as America faces a second wave of COVID-19.
It was no surprise he ordered all governors to reopen churches as essential services.
It was no surprise he used this moment to bar all immigration.
It was no surprise he tweeted in support of anti-stay-at-home protesters.
And it was no surprise he tweeted it was “MAGA NIGHT AT THE WHITE HOUSE.”
But these are very different times. Only 15 percent of Americans and a third of Republicans like the state-at-home demonstrators. Over 60 percent want their governors to modulate how they open their states. A stunning 65 percent support the Black Lives Matter protesters.
President Trump is trapped by a pandemic and protests that only magnify his insecurity and weak hold on his own party—and by his need to provoke a Tea Party to make its last stand.
