Republicans’ final presidential debate before Monday’s Iowa caucuses might as well be a funeral for the pre-Trump GOP. Future historians may argue over when exactly the party surrendered to the insurgent, antidemocratic allies of Donald Trump, but even anti-Trump stalwarts like Sen. Mitt Romney acknowledge the party’s civil war is over. Trumpism has won.
What happens next will take the Republican Party into dark and anti-constitutional places. But the GOP’s sweeping transformation from the neoconservatism of George W. Bush into the fascist nativism of Trump is not without precedent. Some of the same fixers who began their climbs to power after Ronald Reagan ousted the liberal “Rockefeller Republicans” in 1980 still enjoy positions of influence in the party today. At least, they did until Trump came along.
Up until the moment of its collapse, the cult of Reagan appeared as strong as ever.
The MAGA revolution must be a bitter irony for those who spent decades building Reagan into the godlike figure he has become for many Republicans. It isn’t hard to see why that image appeals to a movement filled with people who believe Trump may actually be the risen messiah. That’s about to make life impossible for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, and any other Republican unwilling to swear loyalty to The Donald.
Up until the moment of its collapse, the cult of Reagan appeared as strong as ever. In the Bush administration, the son of Reagan’s vice president let Dick Cheney, one of Reagan’s earliest supporters in 1980, and other Reagan alumni steer the country. At the same time, then-congressman Mike Pence even co-sponsored a bill to boot Franklin D. Roosevelt off the dime in favor of Reagan. It became tradition for GOP presidential contenders to hoof it to the Reagan presidential library in California for a debate beneath Reagan’s glistening Air Force One jumbo jet.
Two decades later, Cheney is persona non grata in the…
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