As G.O.P. Bends Toward Trump, Critics Either Give In or Give Up
Despite the fervor of President Trump's Republican opponents, the president's brand
of hard-edge nationalism — with its gut-level
cultural appeals and hard lines on trade and immigration — is taking root within his
adopted party, and those uneasy with grievance
politics are either giving in or giving up the fight.
In some cases, the retirement of an anti-Trump Republican could actually improve the Republican
Party's chance of retaining a seat.
Senator Jeff Flake's decision on Tuesday to not seek re-election was greeted with quiet
sighs of relief in a party anguished by his plunging
approval ratings.
But such short-term advantages mask a larger, even existential threat to traditional Republicans.
The Grand Old Party risks a longer-term
transformation into the Party of Trump.
"There is zero appetite for the 'Never Trump' movement in the Republican Party
of today," said Andy Surabian, an adviser to Great
America Alliance, the "super PAC" that is aiding primary races against Republican
incumbents.
"This party is now defined by President
Trump and his movement."
On Wednesday, Joe Straus, the speaker of the Texas House of Representatives, announced
that he would not run again, an indication that
the Washington fever was spreading.
Mr. Straus, a pragmatist with deep ties to the Bush family who had tangled with his state's
hard-
liners, delivered a plea that Republicans "appeal to our diverse population with an
optimistic vision," but he still chose flight over fight.
Mr. Straus's dash for the exits followed the retirement announcements of Mr. Flake,
Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee and
Representatives Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, Pat Tiberi of
Ohio and Dave Reichert of Washington State
— all members of the Republican establishment.
Many of those who remain will have to accommodate the president to survive primaries from the
pro-Trump right.
Already, in the high-
profile campaigns of 2017 — governor races in Virginia and New Jersey and a special Senate
race in Alabama — Republican candidates
are mirroring Mr. Trump's racially tinged campaign tactics.
And Republican officials are putting up with the sort of incendiary candidacy
that a party more devoted to nurturing a tolerant image might have rejected.
The reason?
Many of their voters prefer the Trump way.
"We're not an element," said Laura Ingraham, a pro-Trump talk show host.
"We're the party."
Ms. Ingraham, the author of a new book, "Billionaire at the Barricades," on the populist uprising
that helped elect Mr. Trump, said the
conservatism of market-oriented internationalism simply has little mass appeal.
"There's no constituency for open borders, endless war and these international trade
deals that are skewed against the United States," she
said.
As for the limited government pitch that defined Mr. Flake's career, Stephen K. Bannon, the
president's former chief strategist, scoffed.
"This thing they've got today doesn't work, it doesn't move with urgency," said
Mr. Bannon, who is now orchestrating an effort to defeat
Republicans deemed insufficiently loyal to Mr. Trump's agenda.
"It's very nice.
But it's a theoretical exercise.
It can't win national
elections."
Even some of the president's detractors on the right believe that the party base will
stick with him because they like his agenda.
"We have a leader who has a personality disorder," said former Senator Tom Coburn,
Republican of Oklahoma, "but he's done what he
actually told the people he was going to do, and they're not going to abandon him."
This grass-roots loyalty is why no prominent Republicans on the ballot next year have broken
with Mr. Trump — only lame-duck
lawmakers and Republicans out of office, such as former President George W. Bush, have been
harshly critical of him.
At the moment, congressional Republicans and Mr. Trump are trying to make common cause
of an overhaul of the tax code because they
see it as something of a temporary cure-all.
A bill-signing ceremony on taxes would hand lawmakers something to run on next year and
the
president a much-needed accomplishment.
"It stops the bleeding," said Senator Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina.
But even that holds risks.
A tax cut that skews heavily toward corporations and the rich would hardly dislodge the populist
view of a
Republican establishment beholden to its donors.
"I don't think the rank-and-file Republican believes that corporations are people,"
said Sam Nunberg, a former adviser to the Trump
campaign who has also worked with Mr. Bannon.
He was mimicking a Mitt Romney quote that earned Mr. Romney, the 2012 Republican
presidential nominee, ridicule for being out of touch.
On Wednesday, Mr. Trump painted a rosy picture of the party.
"We have, actually, great unity in the Republican Party," he told reporters before leaving
for a fund-raiser in Texas.
But even as Mr. Trump won repeated standing ovations from Senate Republicans on Tuesday
when he visited their weekly lunch at the
Capitol, the party's lingering tensions were also on display.
Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, a longtime member of the Agriculture
Committee, expressed concern about whether Mr. Trump would pull out of the North American
Free Trade Agreement, according to a
Republican present at the luncheon.
Less than an hour after Mr. Trump left the Capitol, Mr. Flake was on the Senate floor
delivering a 17-minute excoriation of the Trump era.
How aggressively the president pursues his platform on trade and immigration restrictionism
could test how strong his grip is on Congress.
For now, though, the vision for a more populist-nationalist party sketched out by Mr. Bannon is being
won as much through intimidation as
through actual purges in Republican primaries.
What Mr. Bannon is trying to do — and what Mr. Flake's retirement could further — is
strike fear in the hearts of Republicans who do not
display enough enthusiasm for the nationalism that Mr. Trump ran on.
"This should be a warning shot to any other 'Never Trumper' in the Senate today: Your
time is up," Mr. Surabian said.
That is playing out not only in the examples of Mr. Flake and Mr. Corker.
In Nevada and Mississippi, Senators Dean Heller and Roger Wicker have responded to Trump-inspired
primary threats by taking steps to
emphasize their fealty to Mr. Trump.
On Wednesday, Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, endorsed
former Judge Roy S. Moore in the Alabama
Senate race, praising Mr. Moore, a caustic social conservative, as "a tireless advocate
led by principle rather than politics."
Mr. Cornyn is
the highest ranking Republican to formally back Mr. Moore.
But accommodation is not giving pause to would-be rivals.
Danny Tarkanian, Mr. Heller's Republican challenger, said the conversation
among activists was no longer dominated by finding the most conservative candidates.
"The talk I hear is, 'Hey, who's going to support Trump's "America First" policies,'"
said Mr. Tarkanian, citing trade, military intervention
and what he described as "worrying more about refugees from other countries than our
own people."
In the House, some lawmakers who have previously spoken out against Mr. Trump, such as Representative
Martha Roby, Republican of
Alabama, are now working to repair their relationship with the White House.
"The message they're sending is: The way to survive is by accommodating him, changing
their tone and professing loyalty to Trump," said
William Kristol, the former editor of The Weekly Standard and a vociferous Trump critic.
The two governor's races this year also illustrate Mr. Trump's influence in the
party.
In Virginia and New Jersey, the establishment-aligned
Republican nominees for governor, Ed Gillespie and Kim Guadagno, are airing controversial
ads on immigration to both stir their base and
win over some independents concerned about crimes committed by those in the country illegally.
Mr. Gillespie, a veteran Washington
lobbyist who served in George W. Bush's White House, is also running ads extolling
his support for Confederate statues.
[Video: A campaign ad for Ed Gillespie, who is running for governor in Virginia.
Watch on YouTube.]
In the Senate, Republicans have made clear that they will welcome Mr. Moore of Alabama
— who has a decades-long history of making
inflammatory comments about gays, African-Americans and Muslims — to their ranks should he win
the special election in December to
fill the seat left vacant by Jeff Sessions, now the attorney general.
A handful of conservative writers have expressed concern about the
message that tolerating Mr. Moore sends, but no high-profile lawmaker has followed suit,
and a pair of Republican senators are even
hosting a fund-raiser for him next month in Washington.
And in Colorado, former Representative Tom Tancredo, who was shunned by the Bush-era
Republican Party for his harsh anti-
immigration views, is considering a comeback bid for governor in 2018.
Whether Mr. Trump permanently realigns the party around his style and platform may depend
on how much he remains true to what could
be called Trumpism.
Mr. Graham believes that the president is not as wedded to some of his nationalist policies
as his supporters want to believe.
"The best thing that could happen to Trump and the future of the Republican Party is
for Trump to fix a broken immigration system," Mr.
Graham said.
By calling last week to offer his support to a handful of Republican senators that Mr.
Bannon had named as potential targets, the president
demonstrated he would not blindly follow his former adviser.
Establishment Republicans are attempting to convince Mr. Trump that "if you join with
Bannon, you cut your own throat," Mr. Graham
said, because it could lead to an impeachment effort by a Democratic-controlled Congress.
But these arguments cause the early Trump enthusiasts only to roll their eyes.
The party establishment, these Trump backers say, wants to
govern as if the election never happened.
"They still think the election was about Trump's personality," Ms. Ingraham said.
"It wasn't.
It was his ideas."
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