The Republican Party's war within

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THE REPUBLICAN CIVIL WAR: A Global Politico Special Report Why is President Trump attacking Mitch McConnell and the Republican congressional leadership of his own party? Can the Republican Party survive a president who came to office convinced that bashing his own team’s powerbrokers was just as much a reason for his victory as his attacks on the Democrats? For this week’s episode, we convened two groups — top Washington insiders like Heritage Action’s Michael Needham and former top advisers to 2016 candidates Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush versus pro-Trump bomb throwers like Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach and Roger Stone, a Trump friend of decades — to lay bare the fault lines of a party divided.

Stone made lots of news, advising Trump to “throw Mitch McConnell and the boys over the sides so fast it would make your head spin,” urging him to fire national security adviser H.R. McMaster and even attacking McConnell’s wife, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao. “Will these quislings that he has appointed,” Stone asks, “take him down?”

At the same time, the insiders complained about “the lack of presidential leadership,” Trump’s intemperate tweets and the fact that he cares more about his own brand than his party’s success. “There is a real governing problem,” says Alex Conant, a Republican consultant and former top Rubio campaign adviser. “Look, I don’t care what the issue is, you cannot pass massive pieces of legislation without presidential leadership. There is no example in American history of major legislation passing without the president of the United States dragging it across the finish line. We just haven’t seen that at all from President Trump yet.”

COLUMN: http://politi.co/2uGtEhQ PODCAST: http://bit.ly/2wJ99m2

One thing they can all agree on: “Trump’s nomination,” as Stone put it, “was the hostile takeover of the Republican Party.”

THE BACKSTORY: A year ago, I met with this same two groups of Republicans on the eve of the GOP convention in Cleveland, and already it was clear that his candidacy constituted a major internal rupture. Would it lead, I asked then, to “ruin or renewal” for the Republican Party?

At the time, of course, few expected Trump to win in November. Indeed, some of the GOP establishment types I spoke with back then worried about whether their party was on the verge of a historic defeat, fearing it was poised to lose not only the White House but perhaps even both houses of Congress. Their mood was nothing less than despondent.

The pro-Trump outsiders were far more upbeat about the party’s prospects, seeing Trump not only as a potential winner but one who could expand the party’s base to white working-class Democrats, and use Trump’s celebrity appeal to shake up a bunch of Beltway bandits who preached policies the Republican base cheered but had no real intention of implementing them. STORY: http://politi.co/2a5cS3f

Reading that conversation a year later, I was struck by how politically prescient it was – and the extent to which it anticipated, correctly, Trump’s disdain for the party whose standard he would bear. We are now seeing what that means for the president, who came to power after what Stone called his “pox on both your houses” campaign feeling no loyalty at all to the Republican hierarchy he now has to work with.

Here’s the full 2016 conversation here [link to last year] – and this year’s governing-is-hard version [link to this year’s full transcript]. I found it to be thoughtful, surprising – and inevitably contentious – about not only our divisive new president but over even basic definitions of what Republicanism is today, and how to remake the party of Ronald Reagan for an anxious new America. It’s not on its face about international affairs – but there’s no more important global story right now than the emergence of Washington as perhaps the world’s leading source of geopolitical uncertainty. COLUMN: http://politi.co/2uGtEhQ

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