Yes We (Still) Can: Politics in the Age of Obama, Twitter, and Trump

by Dan Pfeiffer

The Republican Party is now the Party of Trump. This may be a painful fact for the Republican lobbyists in expensive suits on K Street who believe in supply-side economics and worship at the altar of Ayn Rand. But it’s fact. The party of Reagan, Romney, and both Bushes is dead. All that’s left are Donald Trump, Breitbart, and a bunch of mini-Trumps. Even the Republican politicians who argued against Trump’s racism, mysogny, and indecency have fallen in line and become avatars of Trumpism (I’m talking to you, Paul Ryan). It’s a party based on the idea of white victimization and trolling for the sake of trolling. And the Republican establishment let it happen. They actually encouraged this transformation during the Obama era because they wanted to harness the newly found energy of the Tea Party and to placate those in their base who believed the worst lies they peddled about Obama. Trump is a symptom of the plague that has infected the Grand Old Party, but he is not the disease itself. Trump didn’t take over the party; he is the end result of a party that weaponized racial anxiety to motivate their base during the Obama era. The good news is that this is not a sustainable strategy in a country that is getting more diverse by the minute. Obama’s America is the future. Trump’s America is the last throes of a bygone era. But we have to survive it. And I don’t just mean that in the sense that we need to prevent the world from blowing up out of pique or incompetence or both.