And it can’t win.
And it can’t win.
I t’s time to retire “RINO.”
That means “Republican in name only,” of course. It’s a stale epithet. Mildly clever in its origins, it referred mainly to elected Republicans in Washington who posed as conservatives for their home-state constituents (“severely conservative” as the squishy Mitt Romney described himself), but who, at best, mounted little meaningful resistance to the progressive ascendancy and Leviathan’s expansion.
RINO is inapposite with the Republican Party having become the Trump Party. Indeed, it’s the Republican Party that is now “Republican in name only.” No longer are we talking an entity that is substantively the Republican Party — meaning the politically and ideologically conservative major party in the United States. A party wedded to that orthodoxy no longer exists, so it is irrational to speak of RINOs who feign allegiance to the orthodoxy.
Behind the curve and unable to help himself, Trump still revels in rebuking RINOs. He is now using the slur even against Kayleigh McEnany, his former press secretary — who is sympathetic to him. (Since Trump started losing with numbing regularity seven years ago, McEnany is, oh I don’t know, maybe the zillionth erstwhile ally who has pleaded with him to stifle his pathological nastiness and endeavor to expand his appeal.)
There is nothing funny about Trump’s lack of grace in victory after Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary. What is funny, though, is that the guy who’s been marking his territory for a half century with gleaming, gaudy “TRUMP” emblems has not yet branded one on the GOP, in recognition of its no longer being the old party, much less grand. In 2024, for the reasons Noah Rothman expertly gleans from the results in New Hampshire and Iowa, Trump’s is the Small New Party.
It’s all his, and good luck with that. But he can’t win with it. I thought it would take longer into the campaign cycle to illustrate this fact, but it’s already plain.
Take Iowa and New Hampshire. Many analysts appear to be evaluating his two wins as if we were talking about a normal primary season, in which largely unknown quantities vie for voters’ attention and allegiance. In those circumstances, getting 50 percent of the vote is scintillating success. But that’s not this race.
As the most known quantity in history who has already been president for four years, Trump is running as a quasi-incumbent. Indeed, in the eyes of what is now the Trump Party, in which it remains an article of faith that the 2020 election was stolen, he is the incumbent. When incumbents seek reelection, they should get close to 100 percent of the vote from their own putative supporters. Trump is barely getting half — 51 percent last week in Iowa, 54 percent in New Hampshire (where independents as well as nominal Republicans were eligible to vote).
In a normal primary, the presumption is that virtually all of the candidates are broadly acceptable to the party; ergo, in the primary one has the luxury of voting for one’s preference, then in the general election one votes for whoever won the primary and got the party’s nomination. To the contrary, when the race features the incumbent, we know the incumbent is going to be the nominee in the general election; hence, the primary is nothing more than an indicator of the incumbent’s support among presumptive supporters.
Close to 50 percent opposition from presumptive supporters is bad news for the former president. Remember, that’s now, when things are going as well as they’re going to go. Democrats haven’t even started the messaging onslaught against Trump that is coming — to say nothing of the criminal trials.
Trump has the devoted support of the Trump Party. But it is small. Traditionally, Democrats have had a numerical advantage over Republicans; that has evaporated, but mainly because more Americans now identify as independents (41 percent) than as Republicans or Democrats (about 28 percent each). But the important point is this: Because of its comparatively modest size, the Republican Party — which has won the popular vote for president just once since 1988 — had to attract Democrats and independents.
The new Trump Party is significantly smaller than the Republican Party as it existed prior to Trump’s emergence. So what does Trump need in order to be competitive in November? That’s easy. Even more than the old Republican Party, he needs disaffected Democrats, independents, and non-Trump Republicans.
And what is he doing to get them? Get them? He’s purposely alienating them.
Trump is the impetus that keeps disaffected Democrats in the Democratic fold. Nearly two-thirds of independents voted against him in New Hampshire — a continuation of his hemorrhaging of their support from 2016 to 2020. And the reason the Republican Party no longer exists as such is the approximately one in five Republicans who want nothing to do with Trump — the ones he belittles as RINOs.
The RINO insult is incoherent. Most of what Trump labels RINOs are what, until recently, we thought of as actual Republicans. They are on the outs now because (a) they won’t join the Trump personality cult and, (b) to the extent there is an ideological “Trumpism” (as opposed to one man’s eccentric, reactive views), they won’t swallow its heresies from traditional conservatism (e.g., big intrusive government, runaway spending, unsustainable entitlements, protectionism, skepticism about America’s leadership in the world, embrace of anti-American dictators while vilifying American political rivals, and the promise of a Democrat-style retributive-justice system rather than a traditional American justice system that reveres equal protection under the law).
For us neo-RINOs, it’s no longer plausible even to rationalize, as I did in 2020, that keeping Trump in power made sense because he’d installed strong Republicans in key administration positions. Now, he is out of power and would have to assemble a new government; at nearly 78, he is even more undisciplined and erratic than before; he has tempestuously destroyed relationships with many of his best advisers; there is no assurance that he would attract the same kind of talent again; and even if he could, he’d be a lame duck from Day One.
Democrats are widely unhappy with Biden, but in the end they will come home to whoever the nominee is (likely the aging, declining Biden, or some other prominent Democrat if he can’t make it). They won’t come out for the president in 2020 numbers, but the numbers will be more than sufficient to win. Biden will spend the next nine months mostly out of sight and earshot — to avoid his characteristic gaffes and to keep the spotlight on Trump. Otherwise, he’ll soften his rhetoric, pretend to be a centrist, preach bipartisanship, use taxpayer funds to buy votes, and try his (now limited) best to attract the non-Democrats he needs. He won’t be very effective, but a little will be enough because he’ll be the only one trying.
Trump is obviously hell-bent on chasing away the voters he needs. By now it’s manifest: He’d rather be worshiped by a small grievance community than do the hard work of winning grudging support from non-acolytes. He will thus continue bleeding independents and hardening the opposition of about 20 percent of erstwhile Republicans. Moreover, if he is convicted of a crime between now and Election Day, a very real possibility, he will not be able to retain even the insufficient support he has now.
This is less about Trump than about the Republican Party. If it were still vibrant, the elders would insist that it nominate someone who can beat Biden — a weak president who is eminently beatable. But that party is a memory.
The newer, smaller Republican Party, the Trump Party in all but name, will not return its hero to the Oval Office. If Trump accomplishes anything, it will be to convert RINO from a punch line to a badge of honor.