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Under the Trump administration, the GOP-controlled Senate confirmed 174 district court judges, 54 circuit court judges and three Supreme Court justices — shifting the balance of the highest court to a 6-3 conservative majority. During his campaign rallies and events, Trump often likes to highlight the total, though he has exaggerated it.

In a 2022 interview with The Washington Post, McConnell recalled that Trump’s first candidacy had worried many conservatives at the time but that his Supreme Court list and picks had calmed their nerves and that his bargain with Trump had moved the country “right of center.”

McConnell and Trump have not spoken since late 2020, and Trump has repeatedly called for McConnell to be removed as the GOP leader of the Senate.

I’m cautiously optimistic that what’s happened over the last handful of election cycles makes that second option, at least to a degree, a real possibility. Not because of some magical Obama effect but because of something much more concrete: demographic trends have hit a tipping point where they appear to be a net loser for the GOP.

Does this mean the GOP is ‘racist’? No. At least not in its entirety. But it benefited mightily from it. What it means is that our politics is significantly framed around the politics of race and, on

t’s been a winning issue for the GOP for the 40 or 50 odd years since white Southerners moved into the Republican party and created a powerful electoral anchor for the party. They raised their sails to the winds of racial animosity and it worked in spades. For decades, you got more white votes pushing this brand of politics than you lost in minority votes. It was a good political bargain

The president was stammering and hesitant, and frequently looked out of his depth. Romney's performance wasn't brilliant, just good, but that made it brilliant relative to expectations. The greater shock, amplifying Romney's success, was that Obama was so bad.

Again and again, he missed open goals. He let Romney say that he, Romney, would take better care of entitlements than Obama would. Incredible. He watched as his attack on Romney's tax proposal kept bouncing off, until he looked feeble for repeating it. Why on earth didn't he force Romney to say which deductions would be removed to pay for the lower rates? He let Romney boast about his Massachusetts health care plan and in the same breath denounce Obamacare (to all intents and purposes, the same policy). Romney's argument about letting states be laboratories is tactically clever, and there's something to it, but surely Obama could have asked why Romney doesn't at least advocate Romneycare to the rest of the country. The president remembered to criticize insurance companies but (unless I missed it) forgot to mention that Obamacare is mainly about covering 50 million people who, you know, don't have health insurance. He let Romney attack him for failing to cut deals with the GOP, as though Republicans would have compromised if only they'd been talked to politely. In response, Obama meekly referred to Republican intransigence, but threw the comment away. That was a chance to lay the blame for paralysis in Washington on Romney's party, where it mostly belongs. And what about the 47 percent--about moochers, dependents, people whom Romney won't ever convince to be responsible, this nation of parasites? Hardly worth mentioning, I suppose.

All debates should be moderated this way. Step back and let the candidates argue with each other. It's revealing, much as Obama on this occasion may regret it.

the GOP is a failed state and Donald Trump is its warlord.

Historic party leaders - FDR, Reagan, possibly Obama - fuse party coalitions together on new and transformative terms. McCain or Romney may have failed to achieve that goal in its entirety. But Trump hasn't even tried. He's simply taken control of the largest constituency block and decided to rule it as his own.

Like warlordization in a state collapse context, Trump's action confirms the breakdown of institutional control but also makes recovery and unity even more difficult to recover.

Hispanic Republicans and conservatives are increasingly anguished over whether they can remain involved in this year’s presidential election as Donald Trump continues to launch attacks on prominent Latinos and makes little effort to win their support.

Many Hispanics active in national GOP politics have been hoping for months that Trump would tone down his broadsides against immigrants

there is little evidence that such a change is coming — leading some to abandon the presidential race or the 2016 elections altogether.

There are mainstream Republicans who are opting out, more than people may realize. The Stop Trump Movement boasts some major players in the GOP scene, people like Mitt Romney, George Will, Erick Erickson, David Brooks and Glenn Beck to name just a few. 

The more valiant among them take the threat of Trump seriously and are willing to admit the truth, such as Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal who told Fareed Zakaria over the weekend:

It’s important that Donald Trump and what he represents, this “ethnic conservatism or populism” be so decisively rebuked that the Republican party and Republican voters will forever learn their lesson that they cannot nominate a man so manifestly unqualified to be president in any way shape or form.

When you add up these excuses, what you see is a party full of lawyers and spin doctors defending the indefensible. They’re not rationalizing racism. What they’re rationalizing is holding their party together even if that means supporting a racist.

To protect this man, Republicans have discarded every principle. The party of conservatism celebrates disruption. Absolutists who insist that their presidential nominee treat the unborn as equals require no such commitment to Mexican Americans. Moralists who spent the Clinton administration preaching about character treat persistent race baiting as a matter of communications strategy. Some Republicans discount Trump’s slurs as old news while others discount them because he’s a nice man who otherwise never talks that way.

Party leaders agonize over the nominee’s commitment to entitlement cuts but treat racism as a detail. Politicians who brag about saying “radical Islamic terrorist” get cute about the meaning of “racist.” The chairman of the committee investigating Hillary Clinton becomes a permissive subjectivist. A senator who ran for president opposing his own immigration bill develops a deep commitment to his promise to support Trump. The Senate leader who set out to thwart a newly elected president in 2009 suddenly preaches the primacy of the people’s will.

If the Journal really wants to understand the rise of Trump, they’d do well to look closer to home. For years, congressional Republicans, Ryan foremost among them, have championed a Wall Street Journal–approved policy agenda that grass-roots Republicans have found doesn’t address their concerns.

for decades, the Journal has insisted the GOP make tax cuts for high earners a centerpiece of its economic agenda, despite the fact that support for this position is neither broad nor deep.

In the Journal’s ideal world, the GOP would largely abandon social conservatism and instead offer tax cuts for the rich, open borders, and deep cuts in programs like Social Security and Medicare. There is no longer any doubt that this generation of Republican voters has thoroughly repudiated the newspaper’s worldview.

Noting that he’s “representing many millions of people,” he told Chris Cuomo: “If you disenfranchise those people, and you say, ‘I’m sorry, you’re 100 votes short’…I think you’d have problems like you’ve never seen before. I think bad things would happen.”

It’s hard to say whether this is intended as a threat or a prediction. But the unsettling fact of the matter is that there is no particular reason to rule out the former — that it was indeed intended as a tacit threat, as least of a certain kind. Trump has been playing a clever little game where he hints at the possibility of violence while stopping short of explicitly threatening it — yet he also doesn’t denounce such an outcome as unacceptable, so his hints effectively function as a threat.

If the worst enemies of conservatism were to construct a Frankenstein figure that represents the worst elements of right-wing politics, Donald Trump would be it. But it is Republicans who are giving him life. And the damage is already deep.

Frank championed the narrative that working-class Americans vote against their economic interests, having been lured into the GOP tent largely with what he sees as insincere religious rhetoric. “The people at the top know what they have to do to stay there,” writes Frank, “and in a pinch they can easily overlook the sweaty piety of the new Republican masses, the social conservatives who raise their voices in praise of Jesus but cast their votes for Caesar.”

However compelling this dichotomy may be, it is a false one. As a researcher and social scientist, I have found that economic perspectives are indelibly tied to religious cosmologies. Voters need not choose between God and mammon. Instead, they tend to see their money, the market, and the economy as a reflection of their God.

we often assume that working-class evangelicals struggle to either prioritize their economic interests or remain committed to their religious ethics.

Pew Research just released some new polling that confirms the GOP is seen as far more uncompromising and ideologically extreme than the Democratic Party, while Dems hold a big edge on which party is concerned with the needs of ordinary people:

These days, the GOP tone and agenda are set by a voting bloc of mostly white, blue-collar workers whose sensibilities skew more toward NASCAR than golf. In a general election, the party's most reliable supporters are white voters without college degrees. And they increasingly control the contest for the White House nod: In 2008, according to a tabulation of exit-poll data acquired by the National Journal, blue-collar workers made up 51 percent of all GOP primary voters.

"Ten years ago a Republican primary was decided by who has the best resume,"

"Having broader experience was considered a big plus, but we've seen this shift over the last several years. There is this populist strain going through the Republican primary electorate, and now it's less about experience and it's more about being an outsider. It's less about being qualified than who is more angry and more likely to ruffle feathers."

Not caring about those contradictions, not caring about racist provocations is rooted in the nature of Trump's campaign. He doesn't have to get 50% of the national electorate. He doesn't even have to get 50% of the GOP electorate. He's dominating the field with 20% to 30% of the GOP vote by owning the part of the GOP base (the lion's share of it) who feel aggrieved and threatened and crave and respect dominance.

Normally candidates, as we know, simply don't do this. Ever. But to do so you need to be able to not just act fast but act fast again and again to control the tempo and pace of the news conversation so you're on to the next punch or the one after that before your adversaries have even responded. You also need to be experienced in the tabloid news culture and be totally in tune with your target audience. All of these combined are allowing Trump to act faster and thus more totally dominate the progression of the news conversation than any candidate has ever.

He's operating at a speed and mobility that the other campaigns are not able to react to effectively no matter what they do. Not with this electorate. A national electorate would be a very different story.