The GOP’s ‘Utterly Dysfunctional’ Strategy of Babying Its Base
As long as Republican lawmakers support Trump’s hardline policies, they risk alienating their college-educated, and especially younger, voters.
With his policy of systematically separating children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border, Donald Trump finally extended his racially infused economic nationalism to a point that a critical mass of elected Republicans could not follow.
But the fact that many Republicans drew the line only at a policy is a powerful measure of how far Trump has already bent the party toward his “America First” vision, particularly on immigration. Even after Trump on Wednesday, the larger question is whether the opposition he provoked represents just a solitary speed bump in his reconfiguration of the GOP around nationalist themes, or the beginning of a broader pushback.
