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The former president’s intuition of political red meat struggles for government and policy-making has left leaders in a state of confusion about what they stand for.
By Jonathan Martin and Nicholas Fandos
WASHINGTON (AP) – Republican lawmakers are adopting voting restrictions to pacify right-wing activists who are still dealing with the lie of former President Donald J. Trump says a largely favorable election has been manipulated into opposing them. Leaders are attacking Trumpian fashion opposed to business, baseball and the media to attract many of the same conservatives and voters, and debates about the length and scope of the government have been overshadowed by the kind of cultural warfare clashes the king of the tabloid press has enjoyed. .
That’s Mr. Trump who’s remade.
As G. O. P. Leaders and donors gather for a party retreat in Palm Beach this weekend, with a parallel to Mar-a-Lago for a reception with Trump on Saturday night, the former president’s widespread influence on Republican circles revealed a party deeply driven by a defeat. headline — a strange turn of occasions in American politics.
Expelled from Twitter, discreetly despised by the timid Republican leaders and reduced to receiving pleas in his tropical exile in Florida, Trump has uncovered tactics to exert near-gravitational control over a leaderless party just three months after the Capitol attack his detractors hoped to marginalize the guy and tarnish his legacy.
His preference for interacting in the political struggles of red meat that governing and making decisions has left party leaders in a state of confusion about what they represent, even when it comes to business, which was once the business of Republicanism. obviously shows what the far right is opposed to and how it intends to fight.
Having literally abandoned their party’s classic schedule last year to welcome Trump, Republicans have organized around opposing perceived excesses on the left and borrowed their tactics from the razed land as they fight. Senator Mitch McConnell, the leader of the Republican minority, criticized corporations this week for sideding with Democrats in the vote restrictions backed by the Republican Party, only after he appeared to recommend that he seek to get companies to abandon politics altogether.
They do little to offer contraarguments to President Biden about the reaction to the coronavirus, his broad proposals for social coverage, or, with the vital exception of immigration, maximum political problems, but Republicans seek to move the debate to more inspiring problems and unify within his coalition and may help them convince Democrats.
Republicans have therefore embraced fights over potential small problems to make a broader argument: by emphasizing the removal of the publication of a handful of Dr. Seuss books insensitive to racism; The rights of transgender people and the will of large establishments or corporations such as Major League Baseball and Coca-Cola to ally with Democrats over the right to vote, the right seeks to paint a country with the influence of elites obsessed with identity policies.
This is a markedly different technique from the last time Democrats had full control of the government, in 2009 and 2010, when conservatives exploited the Great Recession to stoke anger against President Barack Obama and federal spending for medium-term gains. Biden, a veteran of white politics, is not a failure for the party’s far-right base and is unlikely to polarize more with the country as a whole.
“2010 the varnish of philosophical and ideological coherence, however, we don’t even bother to communicate it now,” said Liam Donovan, a Republican lobbyist. “Trump made complaints that they were an entry snack. “
While this technique would probably not be the political equivalent of a well-balanced meal, a long-term recovery plan, that doesn’t mean it’s not a bad strategy for good fortune in the 2022 elections coming out of the House and Senate.
Even Democrats see the threat that Republican messages about cultural issues will impact a broad segment of voters. who simply set their eyes blank when Republicans lament “the cancellation of culture. “
“Republicans raise those cultural disorders to unite their party and divide ours,” he wrote in an essay. “Therefore, we will have to vigorously reduce the verbal exchange with the economic disorders that unsote our party and divide yours. “
Lifelong Republicans don’t deny it much. “Democrats did the only thing I never thought I’d do to get there so temporarily: they took Republicans to look away from what divides us and gave us a look at the genuine opposition,” he said. Ralph Reed, Republican strata.
This assessment would possibly be too positive given that Trump is still eager to get a refund against his intrapartisan critics, with a series of questionable and Democratic primary elections in a position to reap the rewards of an economic recovery.
But there is no doubt that Republicans are demonstrating around a taste for post-Trump politics that makes this prefix redundant.
In particular, they are willing to highlight immigration at a time when there is an influx of undocumented immigrants at the border, which in addition to signing Trump, also has the most powerful cultural resonance with its predominantly white base.
An NPR/Marist survey last month found that while 64% of the independent electorate approved Biden, 27% supported their immigration technique.
At a personal lunch last month, the same day The House Democrats passed the Democrats stimulus bill, Biden, Senator Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican at McConnell, predicted with a little luck that entry to the border would be the party’s price ticket to return to most.
“I think it’s a central factor in the 2022 crusade, in the component because I’m not sure Joe Biden is strong enough and has the political will to do what’s obligatory and the border,” Biden said. subsequent interview.
It’s just the Conservatives who are concentrating on the border. Rep. John Katko, a moderate Republican from New York representing a district in the northern state that has been very popular with Biden, warned that sudden increases in immigration would be “suspended” around Mr. Biden’s neck, Biden, if he wasn’t paying attention.
“It’s not a smart challenge for other people in the suburbs; it’s not a smart challenge for moderate Republicans; this is not a smart consultation for moderate Democrats; it’s not a smart challenge for the self-employed,” he said.
With much to gain by blaming Democrats for the factor, Republicans have virtually defected from a comprehensive immigration deal, despite the business lobby’s arguments.
But that’s not the only factor Republicans are uncomfortable with the industry, even though they’re selective in their election.
McConnell, for example, continues to delay the 2017 tax cuts, which have lowered the corporate rate, as the crown jewel in the party’s legislative achievements during Trump’s years, and is highly unlikely to sign up for a union picket line in the short term.
But he obviously sees political merit in confronting the major leagues and the titans of companies, such as Delta and Coca-Cola, who denounced georgia’s vote bill, an intervention that itself would have been in an era before Trump.
“Companies will have serious consequences if they find a way for far-left mobs to take over our country outside the constitutional order,” he warned this week, adding that he had no challenge with corporations that proceeded to fund candidates.
Other members went even further and threatened the antitrust exemption enjoyed by professional baseball, a clearly Trumpian retribution tactic.
A recent party vote indicates that, more than any other problem, the Republican electorate is thirsty for candidates who “will not back down in a fight with democrats,” a location he revealed in a G. O. P. ballotArrayEchelon Insights earlier this year.
People who have climbed the ladder on the right “feel that the life they have experienced is fast becoming,” said Kristen Soltis Anderson, the Republican researcher who led the investigation, in an interview with Ezra Klein.
Republicans have tried to stoke fears, exercising liberal positions on problems such as the police or transgender rights as poles of cultural warfare, even if that means renounging certain conservative values. In Arkansas, this week, an initiative through conservative lawmakers to ban transgender youth from receiving drugs or gender-related surgery came to a veto through Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who argued that the bill would “establish new popular legislative interference with doctors and parents” and made no exceptions for young people who had already started hormone treatments. he ahead of his party’s lawmakers and Mr. Trump assaulted him as a “light RINO. “
However, it is the will to interact in fierce political combat that is highest in the party right now.
“It’s the hallmark Republicans look for in their leaders,” said Reed, the Republican Party. Il said that in an earlier, less tribal era, the party would have given up the bill dividing Georgia that restricts access to “After business and media surrounded cars, we would have called the legislature, made some corrections, and moved on,” he said. “Now we just dig. “
G. O. P. ‘s converting culture is obviously shown in Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis is presidential wood, almost entirely because he has put together a critical media policy of his coronavirus management.
DeSantis’ genuine reaction to the crisis is not what delights conservatives; it’s more the way he gets angry at skeptical coverage, just as Trump did when he ex exalted “fake news. “The most recent example came this week when “60 Minutes” launched a segment suggesting that DeSantis had miscrafted Publix grocery stores, which are ubiquitous in Florida, vendors of the coronavirus vaccine after the company paid him $100,000.
DeSantis did not cooperate with CBS on the play, but with the sympathy of other Republicans, he cried badly in the segment after its broadcast and was rewarded with a coveted full-time interview on Fox News to file his complaint.
“It’s the center of the GOP coups right now: the media has replaced Democrats as an opposition,” said Scott Jennings, a Kentucky Republican strata. “The platform is what the media is opposed to today, I’m for it and whatever it is for, I oppose it. “
This has led to a chemistry in the capital, where several business-oriented Republicans are becoming increasingly politically homeless, including the Chamber of Commerce, which infuriated Republican lawmakers approaching Democrats, but is now dismayed that Mr. lord. Biden.
“This is a moment,” said Tony Fratto, a former Bush managementman who supported Biden but represents business consumers concerned about a tax increase. “I don’t know where to go, but a lot of other people don’t feel comfortable. “with the existing holiday situation. “
Except, perhaps, for a retired florida man.
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