I’ve said it many times: the person who can master Donald Trump’s appeal to disaffected voters but without his serial mendacity, absurdly overblown rhetoric and tendency to go off on irrelevant tangents will have a real shot at the presidency. Trump won in 2016 despite those and many other detriments and four years later added about 10 million votes to his previous total despite a four-year campaign by much of the news media to get him out of office by fair means or foul. That election wasn’t “stolen,” but no one pretends that the commentariat or the press generally made the least effort to be “fair and balanced.”
So it’s no surprise that the Republican Party is looking ahead to a post-Trump future. Exactly when that will be, no one knows. Federal or state indictments may finally escort Trump off the electoral stage, but the movement to which he gives voice remains.
And it’s not just Republicans looking ahead; Democrats and the Left are too, and their efforts reveal a lot about how they intend to approach the transition of the GOP from Trump to post-Trump. For the last six years, Trump has given Democrats their best talking points and highest hopes of electoral success. So naturally, for them, a post-Trump world is fraught with peril; it needs to retain, if not him, then some reasonable facsimile thereof. Ergo, they need to brand as “Trumpists” all Republicans they view as possible threats to their future power. This New York Times article, entitled “Trumpism beyond Trump,” is a case in point.
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