The Republican Party is in a state of transformation under President-elect Trump, conservative columnist Matt Lewis said on the Washington Examiner’s “Examining Politics” podcast.
Lewis said that Republican voters, even the more classically right-of-center among them, are giving Trump a wide berth ideologically as he stakes out his agenda and seeks to implement it. That means they might approve of Trump spending billions of taxpayer dollars on infrastructure, whereas another Republican president might not have been given the latitude to do so.
But Lewis also conceded that the GOP is in a period of change, and could end up re-organized as the party it used to before the late Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the Republican nominee in 1964, made it a conservative party.
“Republican voters are giving Trump a pass,” Lewis said, adding:
“If you take the Republican Party and the conservative party as we’ve known it all of our lives, it’s now much more nationalist, much more authoritarian and much more protectionist. … It’s a blend. … But in some ways this is a return to what the Republican Party was pre-Goldwater, pre-World War II.”
