The old Republican establishment still doesn't get it, does it? Many Republican candidates and critics remain dumbfounded that Donald Trump's plague of indictments and abundance of personal shortcomings have not loosened his grip on the party. But working-class Republican men and women do not have the luxury of a nonstop anti-Trump sideshow. They are losing their children to woke educators, their freedom of speech to political correctness, and their communities to evaporating law enforcement. They fear they are losing their country. And only one blue-collar billionaire has stood up for them. Lecturing these despairing voters that they need to hate Trump is just a way for yesterday's Republican leaders to avoid culpability. Trump filled the vacuum these Republicans left, and his critics will not displace our former president until they fill that vacuum better than he has.
Who failed so miserably for all those years when Republicans could have provided an alternative to the decline of America? Was it Donald Trump? No, it was the old Republican establishment. But railing that Trump is a bad man and voters should hate the bad man allows them to feel noble about themselves instead of confronting their failures.
Trump rose to political prominence in 2016 because he was the most effective messenger of conservative, blue-collar ambitions. Only Trump took on the establishment interests of the big business lobby that had infiltrated the D.C. beltway. Only Trump recognized that the establishments of both parties had merged. No one was as effective in linking illegal immigration and free trade deals to the loss of good-paying blue-collar jobs, joyfully lampooning the legacy media, and articulating common-sense cultural positions. His example empowers those who will follow him, demonstrating that being laughed at for telling big truths is not politically fatal. Now, there is no going back, despite the pleas of Sen. Mitch McConnell and others in the protected class.
Former senator Fred Thompson's dad used to tell a story about a friend whose wife hit him in the forehead with a two-by-four for cheating on her. The fellow noted, "I'd never had it explained to me that way before." Trump is the Republican party's two-by-four. His methods are, at times, crude and blunt, but they cut through the clutter and make a lasting impact. Ron DeSantis' fight with Disney, Bud Light's plummeting sales, and congressional Republican investigations into BlackRock show businesses can no longer offend red America's values or take the Republican party's pro-business posture for granted.
Republicans are still conservatives. The Republican Party has not suddenly become the party of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. The GOP still embraces lower taxes and less regulation as the best ways to increase productivity and economic growth, but these goals are not their only priorities. Republicans have seen their voices silenced by Big Tech, their elections tilted by big media, and their jobs shipped away by big corporations. They now recognize that big government is not the only powerful institution that can take their freedom away.
Senators J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) have proposed policies to help working families by reducing the costs of birth and child care. Even as Republicans campaign on their traditional concerns with excessive government spending and borrowing, they have also adopted Trump's once-revolutionary commitment to protecting earned entitlements like Medicare and Social Security. Senators Rick Scott (R-Fla.) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) have filed legislation following Trump's lead in breaking with Republican orthodoxy on prescription drug pricing to ensure American patients do not pay more than their counterparts in Europe and other industrialized nations.
Republicans have been so afraid of socialism that they failed to see the danger of globalism and co-opted capitalism, which find it easier to advance their interests in partnership with the all-powerful state. Trump's cultural and economic populism, often expressed as nationalism, offers middle-class America an alternative. It protects the working man, the foundation of our self-governing republic. Workers overly dependent on big government or big business make good subjects afraid to challenge the status quo, not good citizens invested in making the sacrifices and tough choices necessary for a society's success. Central planning, whether done by big government or big business, remains anathema to conservatives, who instead prefer policies that empower a bottom-up approach to solving the nation's problems.
We can see the hunger for Trump's "America First" nationalism in the growing bipartisan demand to prioritize supply chain resiliency, onshoring, and friendshoring over corporate America's focus on reducing costs. President Joe Biden, Trump's once and likely future election opponent, included "Made in America" onshoring and nearshoring provisions in his signature Inflation Reduction Act's green energy subsidies and attracted Republican support for government subsidies for domestic semiconductor manufacturing facilities in his CHIPS and Science Act. These trends converge with a growing bipartisan concern over vulnerabilities created by excessive dependence on China; the rise of China's economic, military, and diplomatic strength; and past policies that enabled that growth. Sen. Hawley and several House Republicans have cited the need to pivot America's focus to China as their rationale for opposing increased military funding for Ukraine, in contrast with the Cold War focus on countering Russia as America's defining foreign policy challenge.
Remember when the Democratic Party defended the working class, protecting both their paychecks and their culture? That was yesterday. Today, Republicans are adopting more populist policies as they become more dependent on working-class and rural voters to win elections. There is a limit to this policy swing, as the party's conservative principles exert a strong inertial force rejecting big-government activism. Trump's signature tax cut legislation, for example, did include a large reduction in corporate tax rates. Republican candidates hoping to succeed Trump will have to go beyond attacking woke social policies and repeating Reagan-era pieties, however. They'll need to grow comfortable addressing middle-class voters' economic anxieties. Like Trump, they will learn to harness populist energies while staying true to conservative skepticism of big government.
Meanwhile, despite the old establishment's incredulity and a ticker-tape parade of indictments, Donald Trump isn't going anywhere. And if Republican insiders who prowl the dark caves of our nation's capital hate Donald Trump, they should feel free to advance better arguments for middle-class America than he does. No one but the establishment itself has ever stopped them from taking a crack at that.
Bobby Jindal was governor of Louisiana, 2008-16, and a candidate for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. Alex Castellanos is a Republican strategist, a founder of Purple Strategies and a veteran of 4 Presidential campaigns.
The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
