There is a silver lining to Donald Trump bulldozing a major political party — Americans get a chance to see inside the wreckage of the old GOP.
Evangelicals claiming to uphold family values were long ago exposed as their principles fell away to allow them to justify support for a candidate known to talk of grabbing women and consorting with pornographic actresses.
But now Trump’s demolition of the GOP is nearly complete with news that he has put an end to FreedomWorks.
FreedomWorks once led roaring conservative opposition to President Obama’s health care plan, the Affordable Care Act. At Tea Party town halls organized by FreedomWorks, the principal complaint was that ObamaCare was big government interference in private sector health insurance.
Principled support for free market economics does not fit with Trump’s embrace of big tariffs.
Principled conservative opposition to big government also went out the door when Trump’s tax cuts helped to explode the national debt by $8 trillion.
FreedomWorks lost it all because the party is now defined by the Trump’s agenda. The organization got run over for refusing to “basically prostitute themselves,” to Trump, Matt Salmon, the former Arizona Republican congressman, recently told The Washington Post.
FreedomWorks’ leaders agree.
“If you are out of step with [Trumpism], how are you going to raise money,” asked Adam Brandon, the president of FreedomWorks.
Paul Beckner, a member of the group’s board, told Politico that “conservative donors” have gone from supporting right-wing principles to asking, “What are you doing for Trump today?”
The Trump bulldozer has also reduced to rubble the once-sacred GOP belief in the U.S. as a champion to the world for democracy. Trump wants no part of that and takes an isolationist approach, turning his back a conservative principle once held high by Republican presidents named Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush.
The principled GOP belief in America as a welcome home to people fleeing oppression is also on the trash pile. Trump long ago discarded Reagan and Bush’s effort to update the immigration system to welcome newcomers to a nation of immigrants.
FreedomWorks is just one of the right-wing groups being buried by Trump’s cult of personality.
Americans for Prosperity, the Koch-funded group, has also been reduced to an afterthought. The business-first group spent tens of millions of dollars supporting former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley’s bid for the GOP presidential nomination. Trump beat her and the group had nowhere to go.
The same goes for the Heritage Foundation, once the leading think tank on the right, framing policy decisions around conservative principles. Now they have been exposed as a Trump satellite, reduced to housing “Project 2025,” a group of Trump supporters writing plans for how Trump can gain maximum power over the government if he wins a second term.
Trump’s acolytes are using Heritage as a front while looking for ways to justify “turning Trumpism into a governing agenda,” as Robert Borosage put it in the Nation. Heritage, he added, is now just a Trump-approved site to “recruit, train and plant MAGA operatives throughout the government and arm them with clear marching orders.”
Several other formerly leading lights of the old party have abandoned past principles to join with “Project 2025.” The Claremont Institute, Turning Point USA and Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America are all part of this rush to identify executive orders that Trump can sign without congressional oversight.
“That’s really what our meat and potatoes work is — that playbook where we are doing diagnostics on each federal agency…[preparing] executive orders, or perhaps even regulations, new guidance,” the director of Project 2025, Paul Dans, told Semafor.
“Chapter by chapter, Project 2025 offers a how-to manual for the conversion of our democracy to an authoritarian style government,” Dick Hall wrote in a column for The Oklahoman.
In today’s Republican Party, there is little evidence that conservative principles matter to MAGA base voters consumed with grievance and anger. How else do you explain elected Republican members of Congress rushing to New York to show solidarity with Trump while he is on trial for falsifying business records to pay hush money to a porn actress?
Last week, a new group called “Our Republican Legacy” launched, in a last-ditch effort to counter the party’s abandonment of traditional conservative principles. The new organization highlights five principles of old-line Republican conservatism: the Constitution, union, fiscal responsibility, free enterprise and peace through strength.
Their supporters include former Vice President Dan Quayle, former Speaker John Boehner, Former RNC Chairman Michael Steele and scores of former Republican senators and congressmen.
“We can’t predict whether Trump will win or lose the election,” said Former Republican U.S. Sen. John Danforth, a founder of the new group. “But we can predict that he will lose much of his support either way. If he’s defeated in November, he’ll be seen as a two-time loser. If he wins, he’ll quickly overplay his hand and become even more indefensible.”
“For those who boast that traditional Republicanism is dead, we issue this challenge: Tell us — tell the nation — precisely how and why you disagree with this group’s five defining principles,” members of the group wrote last week in the Washington Post.
But rebuilding the party will be an uphill struggle while Trump has the bulldozer on full blast.
Juan Williams is an author and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.