Trump Didn't Make It Cool; He Just Exploited It

Republicans Hating their Own Party Predates Trump by a Decade

In a column in today’s Washington Post, Paul Waldman makes the argument that Trump “made it cool” for Republicans to trash their own party.

Running for president with well-placed criticisms of your own party is a tried-and-true campaign strategy, a way to appeal to moderates and independents while posing as an independent thinker not beholden to anyone. But this used to be done with subtlety and care, more through implied contrasts than direct confrontation.

That was before Donald Trump came along. As the 2024 GOP presidential primary gets going, it’s becoming clear that Trump has remade presidential politics in an underappreciated way: He has made it practically a requirement that GOP candidates campaign on open hostility toward their own party.

Recently, Trump declared that his victorious 2016 presidential campaign rescued the Republican Party from “freaks, neocons, globalists, open-borders zealots and fools.” These days, that has become standard-issue Trump rhetoric. But weirdly enough, other 2024 GOP hopefuls are now following suit….

…Trump took this to a new level. From start to finish in 2016, he berated the GOP — both its individual leaders and its collective identity. He promised to protect Social Security and Medicare, knowing that the GOP desire to undermine entitlement programs was deeply unpopular. He cast himself as a crusading outsider, the enemy of the entire bipartisan “establishment.”

Most of what Trump claimed was bogus: “Draining the swamp” only meant installing his own corrupt cronies in power, and his first policy priority was a gigantic corporate tax cut. Nonetheless, his rhetorical assault on the entirety of the D.C. elite conveyed the impression that he was somehow a full-fledged opponent of the Republican Party even as he led it.

Now, there is a lot of merit in what Waldman says. Trump did get as far as he did in the Republican Party for attacking leaders in the Republican Party as “the establishment.” There is certianly demonstrable proof that Trump’s idea of “draining the swam” was just to install more his own crew of swamp creatures all of whom were far, far worse than the “swamp” Trump intended to drain.

But did Trump make it “cool” for Republicans to hate on their own party? That’s a much harder argument to make.

The first time that it become “cool” for Republicans to do this in modern times was the birth of the Tea Party Movement way back in 2009. With the birth of that movement, you saw new candidates, new activists, and new leaders emerged who were fed up with their elected Republicans compromising too much and not doing enough to cut taxes and cut spending.

It was at this time that words like “establishment” and “RINO” first entered the everyday political vernacular for those on the right. Much digital ink was used accusing this person or that person of being an “establishment sellout” who worked too closely with Democrats. Hell, I wrote some of them.

Campaigns began to be predicated around that very idea. In 2010 in Maryland, a lot of those themes were prevelant in Brian Murphy’s campaign for Governor. From that campaign birthed the political and media career of Dan Bongino.

It was 2010, those first Tea Party movements and Tea Party campaigns, which generated the current group of “conservative” activists that currently populate Republican primaries.

Trump didn’t make it “cool” for Republicans to hate their own party. He was merely exploiting voters who already hated their own party for reasons both accurate and less so. Trump used their anger to propel himself to the nomination. He used their existing hate to fuel his rise, fuel his campaign, and fuel his administration.

In exchange, they got angrier, dropped their conservative facade to support Trump’s brand of left-wing statism.

Waldman cites Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley’s attacks as “following Trump’s lead.” But that’s hardly the case. Haley’s election as Governor of South Carolina in 2010 was one of the first big Tea Party success stories. DeSantis was a Tea Party style Congressman when he first entered public office.

Arguably, Trump followed the lead of Nikki Haley more than the GOP following Trump’s lead.

Politics didn’t start with Donald Trump, and Republicans eating their own didn’t either. To pin the idea of Trump maing Republicans hating the GOP “cool” isn’t a far criticism of Trump nor is it a realistic viewpoint of where Republican Voters have been for fifteen years.