Trump throws the GOP into an identity crisis - The Washington Post - 0 views
www.washingtonpost.com/...5-846c-10191d1fc4ec_story.html
gop election populism campaign 2016 politics
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Donald Trump — dismissed by GOP elders for months as an entertaining fringe figure who would self-destruct — has staged a hostile takeover and rebranded the party in his own image. What is being left by the wayside is any sense of a Republican vision for the country, or a set of shared principles that could carry it forward.
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“The main pendulum in American politics is no longer swinging from left to right. It’s swinging between insiders and outsiders,” said Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.). “It’s those in the political class against those who are not — that’s the divide in the country, in the party.”
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“Financial crises take 15 to 20 years to clear, as a historical matter, and after two or three years, wealthy people have recovered, but working people haven’t,” he said. “So the result is they turn to populist solutions, and that’s exactly what we’re seeing.”
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“What is happening now is bigger and less remediable in part because the battles in the past were over conservatism, an actual political philosophy,”
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Republicans are closely divided on the impact that Trump is having on their party image. In a December Marist poll for MSNBC and Telemundo, 43 percent of those surveyed said he is helping their brand, while 40 percent said he is hurting it.
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Porter predicted it will be transitory. He noted that the party had gone through a somewhat parallel identity crisis in 1940, when it nominated businessman Wendell Willkie, who only a year before had been a registered Democrat.