The Republican party continues to delay rethinking its future. Trump’s election was a hilarious repudiation of the results of the 2012 post-election autopsy report, which recommended that donors take more control of the party’s agenda away from voters. Both that establishment-driven agenda and the populist one that found a vessel in Trump seem to be dead ends.
There is no set of ideas that will magically reconcile all the disparate factions of the GOP. And if there were, merely exorcising Trump from the American scene would not make it materialize. Republicans will find ideas to implement after they assemble a coalition and begin to ruminate on that coalition’s interests. I don’t see Kasich, Sanford, Weld, or Walsh adding very much to that process.
