Because he was an outsider, an amateur, and a nonpolitician, blowhard and showman Donald J. Trump won a stunning surprise election as president in 2016. He defeated 16 other Republican rivals (most but not all were career politicians) and routed a former cabinet member and first lady who had been active in politics since the late 1970s.
With his victory, outsider Trump even cracked the “Blue Wall,” winning in Midwestern states that Republican nominees for the office of president hadn’t carried in years.
But if Trump’s win was the result of his outsider status, that status was also the reason he lost so much two years later. In the 2018 midterm election, his party lost in many places it once carried, losing in states, in districts, and with demographics that his party had won in before.
And if he did win because he was a nonpolitician, that was also the reason Trump won as a minority president who lost the popular vote by almost 3 million votes and who never hit 50 percent approval in his first two years in office.
Even Richard M. Nixon, one of the most divisive of presidents, began his first term with the words “bring us together,” hoping perhaps to defuse the opposition. In contrast, Trump’s very first words were extremely provocative, and inflamed the ‘resistance’ that began the next day.
Those first days and weeks saw the start of the rallies, recruitments and fundraising efforts that two years later ended the careers of so many Republicans, cost Trump the House, and from now on every day will make his life harder.
With a word or a joke, he could have deflated the protesters’ rage and made them look silly. Instead he inflamed it and made his life worse. Does he connect the lost votes with his tweets, taunts, and tantrums? Does he even care?
Politicians know that one of their jobs is to nurture and grow coalitions, working out from their own base to people outside it, extending their lines of support. Trump, in contrast, seems to be trying to kill them, stressing the fault lines between Right and center, and his own narrow base and the world.
Many backers, who had argued for years that the GOP ought to care more about working-class people, seem to have hoped that if Trump won he could merge his support and ideas with those of traditional GOP voters to form a broad-based approach to a safety net program along conservative and limited-government lines. This hasn’t occurred.
Instead, Trumpism has been imposed on the Republican Party without melding with it, in a form of deference to the person who won the election, with no more behind it than that. Republicans were stunned in 2016 by his magical feat of breaking the Blue Wall and attaching states and constituencies that hadn’t gone red in decades. But this will do little good if he at the same time turns some red states purple, and some purple states blue.
As Ed Morrissey warns in “The Week,” Trump is visibly shrinking his party’s dimensions. “The problem for Republicans isn’t a lack of rallying around Trump, but a lack of appeal beyond a relatively narrow party base.”
The losses of Republican Reps. Barbara Comstock and Mia Love are the worst news of all for the party. These are precisely the people they shouldn’t be losing if they want to have life later on.
When your sink stops working, you call a plumber, not an appliance repairman. Republicans should try calling a pro who understands what he’s doing. Outsiders can be exciting, but sometimes they just aren’t suited to the task.
