How Trump hijacked the Republican Party

Washington, D.C. - Donald Trump is the Republican Party. This is a common refrain within the GOP's current status quo, either said with pride or cynicism depending on one's political position.

At the recent Republican National Convention in mid-July, attendees described their party leader as someone who speaks in an unfiltered way, unlike typical politicians, and who listens to and stands up for those who have been left behind. It is a description at odds with what his critics see as a conman born with a silver spoon in his mouth. These two starkly different visions of the same man have existed for nearly a decade. 

Since becoming president in 2016, and even after being defeated in 2020, there has yet to emerge another viable party leader. This has allowed for a quick falling-in-line by Trump's opponents in the 2024 presidential election, permitting him to bring in his daughter-in-law as the head of the Republican National Committee and instilling an overall sense of uncertainty about the future of the GOP, and, more broadly, American democracy.

A weakened party vulnerable to a hostile takeover

"To get into a party, there has to be a hole that you can enter. The Republican elites got way out of sync with their electorate," Morris Fiorina, a professor of political science at Stanford University, tells The New Arab.

"It's a question of the elite going to sleep and thinking they had the libertarians, the Christians and the businessmen," he says. "But Trump had good political instincts. He saw a market."

He adds, "The basic thing is that the Republican elite found an opening, and they found out in the primaries that the opening was big. It was a hostile takeover".

When the celebrity businessman descended the golden escalator in his Manhattan tower in 2015 to announce his intentions to run for president, many took it as a joke.

Comedians hosted him on their late-night shows and many mainstream news networks aired his rallies in their entirety, the spectacle a boost for their ratings. For months, the Huffington Post put campaign coverage of Trump in the entertainment section, saying that they didn't see him as a serious candidate. 

Not only was Trump a serious candidate, but he would become the leader of one of the most significant political movements in modern US history, with an endurance that continues to perplex many observers.

"There was a pretty widespread view that he was going to lose and that this was a fever, that the fever was going to break. Clearly, that hasn't come to pass," Matt Feldman, professorial fellow at the University of York and director of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right, tells TNA.

"It's no longer possible to say it's a fever after eight years of Trumpism."

Resentment in the Rustbelt

Though few predicted Trump's 2016 win, there were some early and, largely in hindsight, obvious signs that huge swaths of rural America were ripe for a new direction, whatever that might be. 

The post-industrial Upper Midwest, called the Rustbelt for its history of manufacturing and steel, exemplified this brewing resentment of largely white working-class residents.

Though Joe Biden was able to flip back most of the Rustbelt when he unseated Trump in 2020, albeit by narrow margins in the electoral college, Ohio stayed with Trump.

"Ohio has become a Trump state. It was taken over from the establishment Republicans. Anybody he endorses here wins," Paul Beck, professor emeritus at Ohio State University, tells TNA.

Barack Obama won Ohio in both 2008 and 2012 after he campaigned on a message of hope. Trump was then able to flip not only Ohio but the entire Rust Belt as well as several other neighbouring Midwestern states.

The concept of the Obama-to-Trump voter might seem odd given their diametrically different policies. However, with Hillary Clinton leading the Democratic ticket, many voters saw an elite politician whose husband, Bill, was behind the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which many blame for the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs. 

Moreover, in coal country, she made the mistake of saying she wanted to put a lot of coal miners out of business, a gaffe that Trump was quick to capitalise on, even though coal was already getting phased out.

Trump, Professor Paul Beck says, has given a voice to many people's deep-seated resentment of the elites, despite being an elite himself. He has capitalised on the region's growing poverty, and along with it a loss of hope. He has been able to tie this decline in living standards to an influx of non-white immigrants, despite most new immigrants not moving to rural areas or working in manufacturing.

Beck, who hails from a small town in Indiana, has seen firsthand the decline of living standards in the rural Midwest. Almost no one from his childhood remains in his hometown and the few who do struggle with poverty. There is nostalgia for a time when good jobs were plentiful and there was more hope for a good life.

"It's tough. You can understand and sympathise," Beck says. "You might not agree that people should vote for Trump, that he is the solution for their resentment. But he has been able to draw upon that resentment."

"Donald Trump is the Republican Party. This is a common refrain within the GOP's current status quo, either said with pride or cynicism depending on one's political position"

The deterioration of US political culture

James Zogby, a veteran pollster and president of the Arab American Institute, says he has seen signs of growing political deterioration and polarisation since the 1970s.

This has taken the form of new social movements and the subsequent political backlash, continued polarisation in the 1980s and 1990s with neoliberalism and culture wars, and further divisions following the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

Then in 2008, with the financial crash resulting in millions of Americans struggling to pay their mortgages, it was the first time that the majority of Americans believed that not only were they not better off than their parents, but that their kids would not be better off than them.

"It was the death of the American Dream. We're not going to get better," Zogby tells TNA. "There was a cultural dislocation. With the evangelical movement, people wanted to find something they could anchor their lives to."

After Obama campaigned on a message of hope, Trump followed with a message of fear and anger, blaming immigrants for people losing their jobs, changing their country, and threatening their way of life.

In 2020, though Biden was able to win back some of the Rustbelt, Trump's base remained solid. The former president's supporters were loyal enough to storm the Capitol in January 2021, and the Republican establishment missed an opportunity to vote to impeach him, thereby allowing him to run for a second term.

Trump's 2024 Republican primary saw the establishment falling in line far faster than in 2016, with his main opponent Nikki Haley not coming close to beating him in any major states, compared with 2016 when he saw close primary races in multiple states.

It was a sign of Trump's strength, but also a sign of how weakened US political parties have become, Zogby believes.

"Political parties have died," he says. "There was a time when the parties were real, with precinct captains and elected chairs. Now, you're on a mailing list of a virtual organisation that raises huge amounts of money every cycle, instead of party leaders being able to say: we won't do that."

Ronna McDaniel, who resigned as chair of the Republican National Committee in 2024 when Trump wanted to install his daughter-in-law Lara in the position, "saw the writing on the wall. His power is fear," says Zogby.

"It's a ratings game, not politics. The checks on personal power that came from having a real organisation that brought stability have devolved over the last 30 to 40 years."

As Trump continues his 2024 presidential campaign with less than a hundred days to go, he continues to use similar rhetoric as he did in 2016, making one shocking bigoted statement after another that dominates one news cycle after the next.

This time, however, he appears to be bolder, recently telling a gathering of right-wing Christians that if they vote in this election they won't have to vote again. And now he has a much stronger support system in place, from his family running the RNC to the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, which provides a blueprint for gutting the federal government and filling it with loyalists.

Feldman, who sees him as a danger to democracy, believes Trump could be more effective if elected for a second term. "He's learned the ropes from the last time," he says.

Brooke Anderson is The New Arab's correspondent in Washington DC, covering US and international politics, business, and culture.

Follow her on Twitter: @Brookethenews