What Will A Post-Trump GOP Look Like?

You probably never heard of him but, as the European version of Politico reported this week Joram van Klaveren converted to Islam. Why is that notable? He is a former member of Holland's parliament, elected on Geert Wilders' neo-fascist anti-immigrant, Islamophobic party, the PVV. How to think about this? Imagine Dana Rohrabacher, Rod Blum or Dave Brat announcing he had just converted.

Van Klaveren said he made the switch from critic to convert while writing a book about Islam. He told a Dutch radio interviewer that "During that writing I came across more and more things that made my view on Islam falter." He had been another garden variety PVV Islamophobe calling Islam a fake religion and spouting junk like "The Quran is poison. Now he says he was wrong and that it was PVV policy that "everything that was wrong had to be linked to Islam in one way or another."

Van Klaveren is the second PVV official to convert. The first was Arnoud van Doorn, who tweeted up a storm, including how: he "never thought that the PVV would become a breeding ground for converts."

Will we see Republicans revolting against Trumpism this way one day? Steve King wearing a serape and sombrero, riding a burro while munching pulled pork tacos? Kevin McCarthy using the millions of dollars in corporate bribes he takes to build mosques in Bakersfield, Tehachapi and at the gateway to Sequoia National Park? Who knows... Geert Wilders is almost as horrible as Trump. But... The Atlantic published a post by Ron Brownstein yesterday, Trump Is Walling Off the GOP that implies the GOP could wither away first. "The most misleading line," he wrote, "in Donald Trump’s State of the Union address this week might have also been the most revealing about how he is reconfiguring the Republican Party and reshaping America’s electoral alignment. 'Legal immigrants enrich our nation and strengthen our society in countless ways,' he declared at one point. “I want people to come into our country, in the largest numbers ever, but they have to come in legally.' Trump ad-libbed the part about 'the largest numbers ever,' but even the base claim-- that he supports legal immigration-- radically rewrites his record. Trump just last year supported legislation from Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa that would have cut legal immigration by more than 40 percent-- the largest reduction since the 1920s... Trump has used almost every administrative tool at his disposal to create more hurdles for legal immigrants. 'The idea that the administration is trying to increase legal immigration, or allow more of it, is just totally contrary to every proposal that they have put out here,' [David] Bier said in an interview. Trump was so determined to restrict legal immigration, he rejected a deal accepted by virtually every Senate Democrat that would have provided him with $25 billion for his border wall in return for a pathway to citizenship for the so-called Dreamers, the young people brought illegally to the U.S. by their parents."

Trump’s hostility to legal immigration, which he so aggressively sought to hide in his speech, is key to understanding the real implications of his immigration agenda. Once again on Tuesday, Trump signaled that he prioritizes no cause more than building a wall across the southern border, portraying his determination as a sign of his commitment to ensuring Americans’ security and upholding the rule of law. His praise for legal immigration, though distorting his record, provided a critical buttress for that case: It allowed him to suggest that his motivation for the wall isn’t resisting immigration per se, only illegal and dangerous behavior. The truth, though, is that the wall is itself only one brick in a much larger structure aimed at restricting most kinds of immigration.

“This administration and this president are opposed to all forms of immigration regardless of status, really regardless of the type of category that they enter under,” Bier said. “They have attacked them all; they have tried to prevent them from being able to come in. It’s not specific to any region of the world, even. It’s everyone coming into this country from abroad is a threat or a problem and needs to be stopped.”

Each pillar of this agenda faces opposition from a majority of Americans in polls. Surveys show that Trump has never persuaded more than 45 percent of the country to support the border wall, and that number stood at just 40 percent, with 60 percent opposing, in a Gallup poll released this week. National surveys, such as this week’s CNN poll, consistently find that two-thirds of Americans, an even more preponderant majority, oppose Trump declaring a national emergency to build the wall, as he’s threatened to do. Gallup this week found that four-fifths of Americans support a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants already in the U.S., an idea that Trump derides as amnesty.

Gallup has also found that support for legal immigration has steadily increased under Trump: In this week’s survey, the share of Americans who supported increasing legal immigration (30 percent) reached the highest level Gallup has recorded since it first asked the question in 1965, while the share of Americans who want to decrease legal immigration (31 percent) essentially matched the lowest level ever recorded, in June. The combined percentage of Americans who want to maintain legal immigration at its current level (37 percent) or increase it also matched the all-time high.

“In spite of Trump’s policies and rhetoric, more and more Americans support immigrants and immigration-- from citizenship for the undocumented to better pathways for legal immigration,” notes Ali Noorani, executive director of the pro-immigration group National Immigration Forum.

What’s more, the polling evidence clearly shows that Trump has built very little constituency for his wall beyond the hard-core base of Americans most resistant to immigration in all its forms. Seven in 10 Americans who believe that legal immigration should be reduced also support building the wall, according to detailed figures provided to me by Gallup.

But the wall is opposed by nearly four in five of those surveyed who want to increase legal immigration and by more than two in three who would maintain it at its current level. Similarly, Gallup found that three-fourths of Americans who back mass deportation of all undocumented immigrants also support building the wall. But among the clear majority who oppose mass deportation (roughly three-fifths of all Americans), 80 percent oppose its construction.

All this underscores how Trump, across a broad range of immigration issues, is steering the GOP toward the preferences of a distinct minority of Americans. And yet the evidence is also clear that Trump is systematically eradicating opposition to his agenda inside the GOP. More than four-fifths of Republicans in the House and nearly three-fourths of Republicans in the Senate voted for the massive cuts to legal immigration that Trump supported last year, though the bills ultimately failed. (Taken together, that was a much higher percentage than the share of Republicans who backed cuts to legal immigration the last time the party seriously proposed them, during the 1990s.) While many Republicans were initially skeptical of the border wall when Trump first endorsed it in the 2016 campaign, those voices have been almost completely silenced: Until the very end, hardly any congressional Republicans complained about his strategy of shutting down the federal government for five weeks to pursue funding for the barrier.

Republican senators have grumbled more loudly about the prospect of Trump declaring a national emergency to unilaterally fund the wall. But pressure on them to consolidate behind an emergency declaration is rapidly increasing, too: Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina this week warned that there will be a “war” within the GOP if Trump issues a declaration and Republicans don’t support him.

The party’s willingness to link arms behind Trump over the wall is especially striking, because the idea faces such preponderant opposition from all the groups that powered the big Democratic gains in November’s midterm elections: young adults, minorities, independents, and college-educated white voters, especially women. The party’s embrace of the wall is symbolic of its larger choice to follow Trump’s strategy of trying to squeeze bigger electoral margins out of groups that are shrinking in society: the blue-collar, evangelical, and rural whites who consistently express the most unease in polls about not only immigration, but also other types of social change, from increasing diversity to evolving gender roles.

“My own sense of it is people like Lindsey Graham are being exceedingly shortsighted,” says Pete Wehner, a senior fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center and a frequent Trump critic. “All they are looking at is the next day and the next week and the next month. If the Republican Party breaks with Trump in a fundamental way, there will be costs to it because it will be a divided party. What they are missing is the medium- and long-term damage in attaching themselves to Trump. He is leaving a crimson stain on the party. And instead of finding ways to remove that crimson stain, they are making it more indelible.”

The damage from that “stain” was evident in last fall’s House races, when Republicans were annihilated in metro-area districts that contain large numbers of immigrants, minorities, and college-educated voters. After the 2018 result, Democrats now control more than 80 percent of the House seats in which minorities exceed their national share of the population, and nearly 90 percent of the seats with more immigrants than average, according to Census Bureau figures. Fewer than one in 10 House Republicans now represents districts with more foreign-born residents than average, compared with about six times as many Democrats. Most of those diverse places moved sharply against Republicans in Senate and governor races, too.

...[T]he magnitude of the GOP’s defeat in House elections last fall suggests the size of the coalition that Trump is potentially solidifying against his party, particularly as the unprecedentedly diverse Millennial and post-Millennial generations grow as a share of the electorate. As Wehner noted, “the real problem” Trump is creating for the GOP is that “the very thing that alienates the Republican Party from most of the public is the very thing that energizes most of the base, which is cultural identity and ethnic nationalism.”

Despite his bravado during the State of the Union, Trump already has conceded that he will, at best, win funding for a wall in designated areas, not the massive concrete barrier he once proposed across the entire Mexican border. But the biggest takeaway from this week’s speech is that Trump may be systematically walling off the GOP from the places in America that are most powerfully forging the country’s future.

Who will pay the price? Of course the one everyone wants to see pay the price is McConnell, who's up for reelection and will have a tough opponent in uber-popular sports-talk radio host Matt Jones. And there's the #2 sack'o'shit, John Cornyn (who Texas Dems want to see Beto to take on. But the more likely GOP victims of Trumpism will be Martha McSally (AZ), Cory Gardner (CO), Sudan Collins (ME), Joni Ernst (IA), Thom Tillis (NC) and possibly David Perdue (GA-- especially if Stacey Abrams takes him on).

In the House... did you notice yesterday that Rob Woodall (R-GA) announced he's retiring next year? Expect lots and lots like that. (Walter Jones of North Carolina has also announced he's retiring, as did Utah's Ron Bishop.) Other walled-in Republicans who will make great targets next year include 4 each in California-- LaMalfa, McClintock, Nunes and Hunter-- and New York-- Zeldin, King, Katko and Collins; Mike Bost and Rodney Davis in Illinois; obviously Steve King in Iowa; Fred Upton and Tim Walberg in Michigan; Don Bacon in Nebraska; Brian Fitzpatrick, Scott Perry and Mike Kelly in Pennsylvania; and an astonishing TEN seats in Texas! For starters.

This morning Gabriel Sherman asserted at Vanity Fair that Trump is hated by "everyone inside the White House." He wrote that "Morale inside the White House, never high to begin with, has turned particularly bleak, according to interviews with 10 former West Wing officials and Republicans close to the president. The issue is that many see Trump himself as the problem. 'Trump is hated by everyone inside the White House,' a former West Wing official told me. His shambolic management style, paranoia, and pattern of blaming staff for problems of his own making have left senior White House officials burned out and resentful, sources said. 'It’s total misery. People feel trapped,' a former official said. 'Trump always needs someone to blame,' a second former official said. Sources said the leak of Trump’s private schedules to Axios-- which revealed how little work Trump actually does-- was a signal of how disaffected his staff has become."

White House Communications Director Bill Shine has told friends he’s angry that Trump has singled him out for the bad press during the government shutdown. “Bill is like, ‘you’re the guy who steps on the message more than anyone,’” said a Republican who’s spoken with Shine recently. Economic adviser Larry Kudlow has told people he’s probably got six months left. “Larry’s really tired of it all,” a source close to Kudlow said.

What’s driving a lot of the frustration is that Trump, now more than ever, runs the West Wing as a family business. Four sources said the only White House advisers he truly consults are daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner. “This is a family affair, and if you’re not in the family, you’ve got problems,” a former official said. The special privileges and access afforded to Kushner and Ivanka have been alienating Trump’s acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney. “Mick is not entirely thrilled with the family,” a Republican close to Mulvaney told me. Multiple sources said Mulvaney is looking for a way out of the West Wing. He’s said to be interested in a Cabinet position, either at the Commerce Department or Treasury, and he’s reportedly been pursuing the University of South Carolina presidency. A senior White House official recently lobbied a friend of Mulvaney’s to convince Mulvaney to stay.

In the meantime, Mulvaney is working to stave off another political crisis before Trump either shuts the government down again or declares a state of emergency to fund his southern border wall. One source briefed on the internal debate said that Mulvaney is advising Trump to accept less than his demand of $5 billion and make up the difference by shuffling money around the existing budget. “Mick wants to re-program existing funds,” the source said. Trump has insisted he won’t compromise, but he faces no good options, with a G.O.P. revolt likely if he goes the national-emergency route. “Trump is going to declare whatever happens a victory,” a former West Wing official said.

Perhaps Trump can bring back the A-Team?