What Happened to the GOP? (Atlantic)

[W. Niederhut]

I Thought I Understood the GOP. I Was Wrong.

Story by Stuart Stevens

 

July 17, 2024

 

What happened to the Ohio GOP? For generations, it was the epitome of a sane, high-functioning party with a boringly predictable pro-business sentiment that seemed to perfectly fit the state. Today, it has been remade in the image of native son J. D. Vance, the first vice-presidential candidate to sanction coup-plotting against the U.S. government.

In a speech to the Republican National Convention tonight that was virtually devoid of policy, he railed against corrupt elites and pledged his fealty to the man he once compared to heroin, suggesting that the American experiment depended on former President Donald Trump’s election.

But don’t make the mistake of thinking this transformation was the result of a hostile takeover; that implies there was a fight. The truth is that the old guard surrendered to forces contrary to what it had espoused as lifelong values.

Ohio was the home of Standard Oil, Dow Chemical, Goodyear Tires, and Procter and Gamble. Garrett Morgan, a co-founder of the Cleveland Association of Colored Men, devised an early version of the stoplight, a symbol of a state that thrived on normalcy. The Wright brothers invented the airplane in Dayton.

The Taft family defined the Ohio Republican Party. Cincinnati-born President William Howard Taft went to Yale, belonged to Skull and Bones, and was anointed by Theodore Roosevelt to succeed him. He trounced the populist William Jennings Bryan. His son Robert was “Mr. Republican,” a senator from 1939 until his death, in 1953. His son Robert Jr. followed him to the Senate. His son Robert III was Ohio governor from 1999 to 2007. That’s a 100-year run of one family dominating the state Republican Party. There’s nothing else like it in American politics. You could argue that this dynasticism was stifling, but you could also say that it was the result of a desire for stability above all else.

I first worked in Ohio for then-Representative John Kasich of Columbus. His parents were killed by a drunk driver in 1987 while leaving a Burger King. The son of a mailman, in Congress he became a powerful member of the House Budget Committee and voted for the assault-weapons ban and NAFTA. He was solid, funny, normal. Once, we sat around in his small house in a very middle-class neighborhood and listened to his impressive rock-record collection. He loved Creedence Clearwater’s “Fortunate Son,” embracing it as the anthem to his American story. He’d join in on the line “I’m no senator’s son,” laughing with joyous pride. We parted ways in 2000 when he ran for president, and I moved to Austin to work for George W. Bush, grandson of a senator and son of a president. Kasich lost that race but went on to serve two terms as Ohio’s governor, from 2011 to 2019.  

Later, I worked for Rob Portman, who embodied the Republican establishment in Ohio and nationally. A congressman from Cincinnati, he directed the Office of Management and Budget under George W. Bush, and was elected to the Senate in 2010. In vice-presidential-debate prep sessions that I moderated for Dick Cheney, he played Joe Lieberman and John Edwards, and later Barack Obama for Mitt Romney’s presidential-debate preps. As Bush’s trade representative, he opposed tariffs and promoted NAFTA. He founded the Senate Ukraine Caucus and traveled to Ukraine frequently. I’ve visited Ukrainian American clubs with him, and felt the passion he has for a country fighting for its freedom.  

In the 2000 and 2004 Bush campaigns, I focused on Ohio, which we narrowly won both times. And I focused on the state again in Romney’s 2012 campaign, when we lost it by three points. I assumed that the Ohio Republican Party would continue along a Kasich-Portman trajectory that valued reasonable, conservative governing, a process that by definition demands compromise. I was wrong.

When Kasich ran in the Republican presidential primary in 2016, he did win Ohio; it was the only state he won. Once most of the leading Ohio Republicans chose to accommodate Donald Trump, ordinary voters soon followed, delivering him the state in the 2016 general election and again in 2020 by large margins. No one thinks Trump needs Vance to repeat his victory in November; the former president didn’t choose Vance to appeal to some new or contested constituency. Vance is Trump’s instrument to fundamentally alter American society. He is Project 2025 personified, and has the intellectual and verbal skills to defend it far better than Trump. He’s argued against no-fault divorce and has implied that women should be required to carry pregnancies to term even in cases of rape or incest. He’s said he doesn’t “really care what happens to Ukraine.”

Given Kasich’s son-of-a-mailman ethos and Portman’s substantive focus on serious policy, I have a difficult time imagining a political ticket more repugnant to them than Trump-Vance. But these onetime giants of the Ohio GOP have proved unable to steer their party, and now J. D. Vance is its face.

Kasich put up the strongest resistance, but it was ineffective. He refused to support Trump when he won the nomination in 2016. In 2020, he endorsed Joe Biden. After Trump received a Department of Justice letter notifying him that he was a target in the January 6 investigation, Kasich urged his co-partisans “to stand up and say something. And I’d like to see the donors step up and help them. The problem we have now is many people don’t want to make a winner; they want to be with a winner,” Kasich said.

In 2016, Portman was running for reelection in the Senate and tried to stay away from Trump, kayaking Ohio rivers while the Republican convention was held in Cleveland. After the Access Hollywood tape came out, Portman announced that he would not support Trump but added, “I will be voting for Mike Pence for president.” That was a head-scratcher. In 2020, he endorsed Trump. After January 6, he voted not to convict Trump in his Senate impeachment trial. And when Vance ran to replace Portman, the retiring senator remained neutral in the primary and then endorsed Vance.

Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, profiled two years ago in The Atlantic as “The Last of the Establishment Republicans,” has avoided confrontation with Trump. He says he will “support the nominee” in 2024 (though he notes that he will focus his campaigning efforts on local races).  

On one level, this is politics as usual. Supporting your party’s nominee is not odd. Nor is staying out of a primary to replace you. Mitt Romney became the first senator in U.S. history to vote to convict a member of his party in the first impeachment trial, so Portman not voting to convict in the second was perfectly conventional, even if seven Republicans broke the other way. But it is precisely politics as usual that allowed the Trumpification of the Ohio GOP.

Could the trinity of Kasich-Portman-DeWine have saved the party if they’d persisted? We’ll never know. But the emergence of J. D. Vance, the first Ohioan to be on a national ticket since John Bricker ran with Thomas Dewey in 1944, has a Guns of August feel: that of powerful players sliding into a war no one desired or imagined. The once staunchly midwestern, mainstream Ohio GOP has now given us the first vice-presidential nominee who has pledged not to follow the Constitution if it stands in the way of political victory.

As historians frequently observe, autocrats are skilled at using the tools and benefits of democracy to end democracy. In the preface to their brilliant How Democracies Die, the Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt wrote, “Blatant dictatorship—in the form of fascism, communism, or military rule—has disappeared across much of the world. Military coups and other violent seizures of power are rare. Most countries hold regular elections. Democracies still die, but by different means.”

If 2024 becomes a turning point in America’s slide from democracy to autocracy, the Ohio Republican Party will serve as a case study of how well-intentioned people let the legacy of the American experiment slip through their fingers.

Edited July 18 by W. Niederhut

[W. Niederhut]

2024’s “New Trump” is like 1968’s “New Nixon,” and Other Bogus GOP Rebrands

Donald Trump’s call for national unity after months of vowing vengeance recalls GOP presidential campaign rebranding in earlier turbulent eras

Steven Rosenfeld

 

July 18, 2024

 

Within a day of a failed assassination attempt, Donald Trump presented himself as a new uniter of a politically divided nation. “In this moment, it is more important than ever that we stand United,” Trump wrote on Truth Social a day after the shooting.

Trump repeated that call as the Republican National Convention opened and then, without intended irony, announced his choice of Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance as his vice presidential nominee. A day before, Vance had blamed President Joe Biden and his campaign for inciting the assassination.

“The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” Vance wrote on social media. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

What we are seeing is the latest version of presidential campaign rebranding that has been a staple of GOP campaigns for more than half a century. George W. Bush and the GOP labeled the belligerent Texan a “compassionate conservative” and “a uniter, not a divider.” Ronald Reagan — who first used the slogan “Make America Great Again” — called for “Morning in America.” Once in office, he set out to dismantle federal regulation of corporate America and social safety nets built over half a century by his predecessors, Democrat and Republican.

And now Trump — a threat-wielding presidential candidate, prone to musing about shooting protesters and calling his political foes “vermin” — has become a national unifier?  

Of course, Trump’s call for national unity is hardly credible. As many pundits, including non-MAGA Republicans, have noted, Trump has ceaselessly filled the airways with violent rhetoric in the years since his first presidential run in 2016. “Fascism feasts on violence,” David Frum, a former speechwriter for Republicans, wrote in The Atlantic. “Now the bloodshed that Trump has done so much to incite against others has touched him as well.” Indeed, Vance himself once compared Trump to Nazi Germany’s Adolph Hitler — before becoming a Trump cultist.

After losing his 2020 re-election, Trump became even more extremist, as he plotted to overturn that election and incited a riot at the Capitol. In the 2024 campaign, Trump has vowed vengeance against his opponents. Biden’s dismal June debate performance just served to distract from yet another tsunami of Trump lies and threats.

The “new Nixon” seems to have presaged the “new Trump.” The country is already hearing this marketing from Trump and MAGA Republicans at the Republican National Convention. The key question, of course, is will sufficient numbers of American voters believe it?

The instant rebranding by Trump resembles one of the more notorious presidential rebranding efforts in modern American history — also in an era of great domestic unrest and upheaval. 

The year was 1968. In April, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. In June, Robert Kennedy — the father of the 2024 independent candidate, whose leaked recent chat with Trump has raised eyebrows — was killed in Los Angeles. The Democratic National Convention in Chicago drew anti-Vietnam War protests and violent crackdowns. Amid the turmoil, operatives for the Republican nominee, ex-Vice-President Richard Nixon, set out to rebrand their fierce anti-communist law-and-order man as a peacemaker. 

The “New Nixon,” as his handlers labeled him, claimed to have a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam — not much different from Trump’s claim he would force Russia to end its war in Ukraine. Nixon also went after campus protests, chiding university officials for not punishing and expelling students and faculty. That’s not unlike today’s GOP attacks on college and university officials who have not forcibly shuttered anti-Gaza War protests.

“The candidate had rebranded himself as the ‘New Nixon’ with a fresh personality,” Heather Hendershot, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor of film and media studies and author of When the News Broke: Chicago 1968 and the Polarizing of America, wrote in a 2023 perspective in The Washington Post. 

“Nixon’s ads were relentlessly stimulating and relatively disengaged from facts and figures, proving definitively that a presidential candidate could succeed on TV by showing viewers not what to think but how to feel,” she continued. “That approach had been sporadic in earlier presidential campaigns, but it would become the new normal.”

The “new Nixon” seems to have presaged the “new Trump.” The country is already hearing this marketing from Trump and MAGA Republicans at the Republican National Convention. The key question, of course, is will sufficient numbers of American voters believe it?

In 2022’s general election, women, especially suburban women, supported Democratic candidates over MAGA Republicans in several of 2024’s presidential battleground states. In  Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Nevada they elected Democratic governors, attorneys general, and secretaries of state. 

Will the Supreme Court’s unraveling of abortion rights — enabled by Trump-appointed justices — hold sway again this fall? Will the dismantling of democratic norms by his appointees — placing any president above the law and blocking federal prosecution of Trump’s constitutional violations — persuade voters that Trump’s threat to American democracy and constitutional norms is real? Or might large numbers of Americans be persuaded that there is a “new Trump” — a kinder, gentler, caring, healing Trump — as many 1968 voters believed that there was a “new Nixon?”

There is no “new Trump.” As Hendershot noted, the candidate’s personality doesn’t change. There are only new claims in campaign messaging — where governing with the consent of the governed is replaced by conning with the consent of the conned. 

In 1968, Nixon’s con game triumphed. He was elected president in a landslide with an Electoral College margin of 110 votes. 

2024’s “New Trump” is like 1968’s “New Nixon,” and Other Bogus GOP Rebrands - WhoWhatWhy

Steven Rosenfeld is a longtime national political reporter. Most recently, he has specialized in election administration and disinformation. He has covered those topics for Washington Monthly, The New Republic, L.A. Progressive, AlterNet and others. Previously, he covered money and politics for National Public Radio, Monitor Radio, and Marketplace.

Edited July 20 by W. Niederhut