There will be a day after.
Since Donald Trump’s emergence as the leader of the Republican party, I have asked myself a question often dismissed by older party members: what will the Republican party look like the day after Donald Trump is gone? By gone I do not only mean, as in no longer president “gone”; more precisely, what aspects of the Trumpian legacy will be etched on the Republican party and its charter of principles for decades to come?
In one way or another, we have all contributed to the rationalization of the Donald Trump political phenomena, we have all tried to make sense of the fact that his candidacy was simply greater than the system; he was and is unmistakably inescapable on the US political arena. Trump’s unique way of doing politics one Tweet at a time, in addition to his off-the hip style of doing policy that if boiled down to its core basically consists of Republicans getting Conservative judges and massive deregulation in exchange for Donald Trump doing the presidency his way; has the outlines of a political bargain structure that could extend well beyond Trump’s time at the Whitehouse or the Republican party itself.
Perhaps this is the reason why I have become preoccupied with thinking about the future of the Republican party in a way that older party members seem to disregard freely. With God’s help and a bit of luck, I plan to be around for the next 50 years. What Republican party will I hand off to the next generation of Americans? What aspects of the Trump legacy will Republican members of my generation be compelled to overturn? Because it is clear that the Republican party of today takes more seriously engaging in culture wars than it does engaging in governance.
Although they were elected to reduce the debt and inject fiscal sanity into Washington, the Freedom Caucus today seems more preoccupied with drafting articles of impeachment on Rod Rosenstein the Deputy Attorney General, a man confirmed overwhelmingly by the US Senate and who the Trump Whitehouse itself praised multiple times in the past, for refusing to shut down the Russia Investigation at the request of Donald Trump. They have become the swamp. Rather than focusing their efforts on paying off the national debt—which under their watch now stands at 21 trillion dollars and lowering the deficit which is now projected to surpass a trillion dollars in the aftermath of the tax cuts signed into law in December 2017.
I make use of the Freedom Caucus as an example of a shifting in principles within the Republican party, principles which attracted hundreds of young people like myself into the party which are now being eroded or at the very least deprioritized from the party agenda. Principles like, supporting the assessments of our intelligence community, embracing the responsibilities that come with governing, free trade, pro-immigration, arguing in favor of limited government and restoring fiscal sanity into a federal budget which seems to only get bigger. I care more about these issues than I do for Boy Scouts of America dropping the word “boy” from their name. In my lifetime, I have seen the end of three presidencies, Bill Clinton, George W Bush, and Barack Obama. They had their time under the sun too. For better or worse, one-day Trump will no longer be president, we will no longer be able to hide behind his tweets let us not exchange our conservative traditions for political expediency.
