Any Democrat who’s being honest, including President-elect Joe Biden, will admit that the outcome of the 2020 election was not a repudiation of President Trump’s agenda. It was a rejection of Trump, the person.
That’s why the opening pitch of Biden’s sleepy campaign wasn’t, “Here’s my platform to replace everything the president has done.” No, his theme was “restoring the soul of America,” a hazy concept that, at its core, was really a promise that Biden would be a quiet president who didn’t pop off on Twitter and didn’t have fights with the press (not that it would make sense for him to fight his most ardent supporters anyway).
Liberals in the media can’t bring themselves to acknowledge it, but Trump did not land in the White House by accident. The reality TV businessman who had never held public office before won the presidency against all odds because he had a message that worked. It motivated reliable Republican voters, new voters who had no party allegiance, and a substantial number of voters who had twice elected Barack Obama.
This is why it would be the dumbest move in the history of politics for any Republican with presidential aspirations to think for one second that success in the future doesn’t depend on retaining all of those same voters, plus, hopefully, bringing in more who accept Trumpism so long as it leaves out Trump.
My colleague David Drucker reported Thursday on one Republican in the House who has already figured this out.
“The Trump agenda was what was popular — not Trump the man,” Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana told him. Banks is the incoming chairman of the Republican Study Committee, and he said he wants to lead the effort to have the party “marry” so-called compassionate conservatism with the Trump agenda. “How do we fold all that together,” he said, “into a winning party, a winning message, a winning agenda?”
This shouldn’t be difficult. It should be very easy. It can, in fact, be done in two easy steps.
First, do the simplest, most obvious thing: Remain loyal to Trump’s most popular issues, which were the commitment to putting the interests of citizens ahead of the rest of the world’s and fight against the erosion of American industry through better international trade policy. There was also the promise to keep us out of new wars and take more seriously the existential threat posed by China. These aren’t controversial positions for Republicans to take. They’re now requirements.
Second, do the harder thing: Resist the lure of becoming a celebrity for the media. In fact, do the opposite. That’s not to say repeat what Trump did and take a blow torch on Twitter to every journalist who asks a critical question. But every Republican should learn from Trump that to be a viable candidate is to be popular not with the media, but with the voters. The media will hate Republicans no matter what, and it will never change. The media will always call politically effective Republicans racist, xenophobic, misogynistic bigots. There’s no way around it — only through it. That means refusing to apologize and declining to beg for mercy for simply holding positions that are popular with people who the media also hate — which is roughly half the country.
That’s it. That’s how you keep Trumpism without Trump. That’s how they win elections.
