Why the Old GOP Establishment Mattered

The realities of an unconstrained Trump are sinking in.

I’ve long argued that the best thing Donald Trump did, in his first term in office, was delegate the big stuff to the GOP establishment he thoroughly trashed during his presidential campaign. Despite all the anti-establishment bluster that won him the Republican primary over an impressive group of GOP governors and members of Congress, Trump mostly filled his cabinet with those very types of people — traditional Republicans who, along with a traditionally Republican House and Senate, authored and executed traditionally Republican policies.

Sure, there were some deviations from Republican orthodoxy under Trump, but most of it was rhetorical, or amounted to rebranding efforts, instead of substantive policy changes.

Of course, this deficit of procedural disruption wasn’t from a lack of trying on Trump’s part. During those first two years especially, there was lots of internal tension between the president and his crew. Key advisors worked hard to constrain Trump’s worst instincts, talking (and sometimes tricking) him out of godawful ideas, including a cyber-partnership with Russia, inviting an Islamic terrorist group for a sit-down at Camp David, shooting protesters in their legs, illegally obstructing the Russia investigation, and apparently even nuking hurricanes.

What the establishment couldn’t do is muzzle Trump. They couldn’t tamp down his narcissism, his combative and vindictive nature, his rhetorical missteps, his straining of relationships, and the needless cultural polarization he stoked. But they could (and did) manipulate Trump into a largely pre-Trump-GOP foreign-policy (thanks to people like Gen. Jim Mattis), a pre-Trump-GOP tax policy (thanks to Paul Ryan), and a pre-Trump-GOP judiciary (thanks mostly to Mitch McConnell).

It was an exhausting effort, but the country was better off from the guardrails they supplied… because whenever Trump was left to his own devices, the results were almost always bad.

I’m talking about initiatives like his first trade war, which despite being relatively tame in comparison to the one he’s waging now, was an abject failure.

I’m talking about him freeing 5,000 jihadi prisoners at the Taliban’s demand, as part of a doomed Afghanistan-withdrawal policy.

I’m talking about him attempting to extort a foreign ally for U.S. political dirt, turning pandemic press conferences into clown shows, and conducting a “stop the steal” campaign that ultimately led to a deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

It should go without saying that these ambitions were not at the behest of the GOP establishment. Just the opposite, in fact. Trump’s advisors largely tried to talk him down from them (the ones they knew about, anyway). Some even resigned in protest. And when Trump ran for president again last year, there was a reason 40 of his 44 cabinet secretaries, his vice president, and all of his chiefs of staff from his first term refused to support him.

Yet the fruit of those people’s work, before they reached their breaking point, contributed to the belief among millions of voters that, prior to the pandemic, everyday life in America seemed pretty good. Inflation wasn’t a concern, the southern border wasn’t in total chaos, and foreign conflicts weren’t center-stage. Nostalgia for those times was apparently strong enough to not only repress from memory the extraordinarily bad stuff that Trump did, but dismiss a number of the crazy ideas he ran on in 2024.

But now, as we’re seeing in new polling, they are remembering. Or maybe they’re learning for the first time that it really does matter who a president surrounds himself with. Republican officials and advisors willing to push back against Trump in his first term, and guide him away from truly terrible ideas, don’t really exist this time around. Heck, it’s hard to even find them in Congress, after Trump spent his four years on the sidelines (during Biden’s term) working to end their political careers.

In other words, Trump is today’s GOP establishment.

So, instead of Paul Ryan-esque fiscal legislation, we get bipolar trade-war buffoonery that sends shock-waves through the economy, and drives Americans’ cost of living even higher.

We get Trump’s longtime slobbering affection for Vladimir Putin not only regularly drawing Russian propaganda from the mouth of a U.S. president, but driving U.S. foreign policy on Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine.

We get a weird personal obsession over annexing other countries (perhaps even by force) — a fixation so perverse that it’s dismantling longtime, mutually beneficial relationships with our allies.

We get criminals, who committed violence in Trump’s name, freed from prison. We get corrupt politicians spared from legal prosecution.

We get blatant acts of political retribution, including the firing of law-enforcement officers who merely did their job, the punishing of legal firms, the suing of polling companies and media organizations, and the removal of federal security-protection from former Trump officials at risk of foreign assassination.

It took less than two months for all of this, and for Trump’s approval rating to go underwater as a result. His loyalists, of course, are blaming everyone but him for that (when they’re not declaring the numbers “fake”). But by design, this is all Donald Trump and his whims — effectively unrestrained, unadvised, and uncensored. The inner-party political guardrails are gone.

One can only imagine what things will look like two months from now.