Republicans’ final presidential debate before Monday’s Iowa caucuses might as well be a funeral for the pre-Trump GOP. Future historians may argue over when exactly the party surrendered to the insurgent, antidemocratic allies of Donald Trump, but even anti-Trump stalwarts like Sen. Mitt Romney acknowledge the party’s civil war is over. Trumpism has won.
What happens next will take the Republican Party into dark and anti-constitutional places. But the GOP’s sweeping transformation from the neoconservatism of George W. Bush into the fascist nativism of Trump is not without precedent. Some of the same fixers who began their climbs to power after Ronald Reagan ousted the liberal “Rockefeller Republicans” in 1980 still enjoy positions of influence in the party today. At least, they did until Trump came along.
Up until the moment of its collapse, the cult of Reagan appeared as strong as ever.
The MAGA revolution must be a bitter irony for those who spent decades building Reagan into the godlike figure he has become for many Republicans. It isn’t hard to see why that image appeals to a movement filled with people who believe Trump may actually be the risen messiah. That’s about to make life impossible for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, and any other Republican unwilling to swear loyalty to The Donald.
Up until the moment of its collapse, the cult of Reagan appeared as strong as ever. In the Bush administration, the son of Reagan’s vice president let Dick Cheney, one of Reagan’s earliest supporters in 1980, and other Reagan alumni steer the country. At the same time, then-congressman Mike Pence even co-sponsored a bill to boot Franklin D. Roosevelt off the dime in favor of Reagan. It became tradition for GOP presidential contenders to hoof it to the Reagan presidential library in California for a debate beneath Reagan’s glistening Air Force One jumbo jet.
Two decades later, Cheney is persona non grata in the GOP, exiled for the cardinal sin of criticizing Donald Trump. Also gone is Cheney’s daughter Liz, primaried out of Congress in 2022 by furious Trump-aligned voters. Pence had to flee the Senate floor as a mob of MAGA zealots threatened to hang him. None of those Jan. 6 rioters cared that Pence had been a good steward of Reagan Republicanism during his long political career. They only knew that he had betrayed Trump, and that alone merited execution on the Capitol steps.
A GOP prone to unthinking Reagan hero worship was also a party already primed for Trump’s resurrection of blood-and-soil fascism. Trump’s now-iconic Make America Great Again slogan hearkened back to the insurgent Reagan’s 1980 “Let's Make America Great Again” campaign — itself a jab at both Democratic President Jimmy Carter and the rickety Republican establishment Reagan’s new wave would soon send packing. When that wasn’t enough, Trump made it explicit, comparing his years as a Democrat to Reagan’s own years on the political left.
The remaining presidential contenders have certainly taken notice of the change in idols. In the first debate, Vivek Ramaswamy denounced the very idea of Reagan’s “Morning in America” optimism. DeSantis rejected calls from Republican strategists to embrace Reagan’s policy-driven campaign style, choosing instead to emulate Trump’s slash-and-burn politics.
Haley may be the most visible establishment Republican struggling for air, but countless others are suffering the same fate.
And gone from Haley’s speeches are the praises of Reagan and small-government conservatism that marked the launch of her campaign. In their place are Trump-like jeremiads about the mass deportation of undocumented migrants and resisting any and all gun control legislation in the wake of yet another mass shooting. Both stances would come as a shock to Reagan, who as president famously granted amnesty to over 3 million undocumented migrants and spent his political career regulating guns.
But those are yesterday’s values, washed away by a MAGA movement that demands complete alignment with Trump’s political values as a baseline for entering national Republican politics. Even Haley’s sudden transformation wasn’t enough: Trump-aligned groups were quick to slam her as “too liberal” for daring to claim that not all undocumented migrants are criminals.
Haley may be the most visible establishment Republican struggling for air, but countless others are suffering the same fate. Romney will not seek re-election this year, rather than spend another six years in political irrelevance. Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has headed for the exits as well. Both men are students of Republican political history. They understand that few Rockefeller Republicans survived the Reagan purge. Even fewer Reaganites will make it through Trump’s more twisted loyalty tests.
With loyalists dominating both houses of Congress and most red state governorships, Trump enjoys as much if not more power than Reagan ever did, despite an inferior electoral record. He has used that influence to wipe away more than a generation of Republican political theory and replaced it with an intellectual IOU. No matter how eloquently and brilliantly Haley makes her case, her constituency now exists only in history books and in the memories of exiled bigwigs. You don’t win elections by campaigning to ghosts.
Just like Reaganism, Trumpism will seem invincible until the moment it isn’t. Like all personality cults, its fall will come suddenly and the results will be unpredictable — both for the Republican Party and for our country. It’s tempting to say that anything must be better than the mask-off authoritarianism of Trumpism. The evolution of the GOP shows us that the worst may still be ahead.
