Republicans deeply anxious that Trump is ruining GOP brand [View all]

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Republicans deeply anxious that Trump is ruining GOP brand

By Katie Glueck

August 16, 2017 6:21 PM
WASHINGTON


If Donald Trump’s campaign stomped all over the Republican Party’s 2012 plans to build a more diverse movement, his refusal now to squarely blame white supremacists and neo-Nazis for Charlottesville violence has destroyed those efforts entirely.

Following defeat in the 2012 election, the Republican National Committee released an “autopsy report” offering recommendations for growing the party and improving its dismal standing with minorities and young people. Trump ignored much of that guidance and won anyway. But after the president this week insisted that there were “very fine people” among those who violently marched at a white supremacist rally, many Republicans fear that Trump is reinforcing the same negative perceptions about the party that they have spent years working to combat.

“Our plan is to reach out and talk to people who haven’t always agreed with us,” said Emmanuel Wilder, a North Carolina-based activist with the Young Republican National Federation. Trump’s comments, he said, make it that much harder. “It’s a major step back. The fact that the head of the party cannot call a spade a spade, it hurts…it’s near impossible for us to try to explain. It’s not really explainable.”

Added a dejected Republican state party chairman, “If he intended that — that’s almost so crazy that it’s sad. And of course, it’s counter to what the Republican Party has been trying to do, and sincerely so by most of us, for years: to let people of all races and backgrounds and socioeconomic circumstances know they have a home in the Republican Party.”

Interviews with a dozen Republican operatives and activists around the country revealed genuine frustration—and for some, disgust—over Trump’s repeated suggestions that there is an equivalence between the neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members and white supremacists who marched in Virginia this weekend, and those who turned out to protest them, even as a woman died after a white supremacist rammed a car into a group of the counter-protesters.

“He is destroying the GOP one day at a time, one reckless statement and action at a time,” said Sally Bradshaw, a longtime adviser to Jeb Bush who co-authored the “autopsy” report and went on to leave the party over Trump. “Why would anyone consider supporting a political party when the leader of the party is anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-woman, and anti-black? He makes me sick.”

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