Donald Trump Is Turning Wedge Issues on His Own Party

[applegrove]

Donald Trump Is Turning Wedge Issues on His Own Party

By Brian Beutler at the New Republic

https://newrepublic.com/article/134348/donald-trump-turning-wedge-issues-party?utm_content=buffer75913&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

"SNIP...........


Depending on your perspective, this has always been Trump's immediate threat or promise—that he might strip bare the pretense that high-minded, philosophical conservatism, rather than ethno-nationalist grievances, are what drives Republican politics. His dumbfounding response to the massacre in Orlando exemplified his potential to break the GOP, but it was only the latest indication.

.......


Trump has convinced the vast majority of Republican voters to fall in line behind him, and thus behind a political persona and policy agenda that are orthogonal to the party establishment’s conception of itself. He has the power; they are stuck with him; but it is an exceedingly poor fit, and the relationship between the two seems fatally unstable.

Most Republican leaders expected (or hoped or prayed) that, once victorious, Trump would move in their direction, if not substantively then at least temperamentally. But those Republicans were essentially asking Trump to abandon the qualities that drove his early political success and swap them out for qualities that in his mind define the losing candidates in the primary he won, and the Republican nominees whom Barack Obama defeated handily. This would be the right way of thinking if Trumpism had a wide general-election consistency.

But Trump has lost the plot. He is following instincts that are serving him poorly. Republicans would be perfectly happy with Trump if his rhetoric and policies divided Democrats from one another, even if in deploying wedge issues, he occasionally veered from GOP orthodoxy. Instead, he is uniting the Democratic coalition faster than Hillary Clinton could have hoped, and tearing his own party apart


.............SNIP"

[Zorro]

1. Trump owns the Republican Party

and Dems need to hang that albatross around the neck of every Republican politician this election cycle.

[applegrove]

2. Yup.

[Adsos Letter]

3. .

"...he is uniting the Democratic coalition faster than Hillary Clinton could have hoped, and tearing his own party apart"

I believe this was his goal from the outset. It's The Producers writ large.