Robert Reich: The Tragic Death Of The Republican Party – OpEd |
Robert Reich argues that the Republican Party has abandoned limited government and fiscal restraint for total loyalty to Donald Trump, whose approval stands at 33 percent with 66 percent disapproving.
He cites the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation’s 2024 refusal to honor Liz Cheney and Chris Sununu’s willingness to back Trump despite January 6 and legal cases as evidence that institutional fear and electoral calculation have supplanted principle.
Reich traces the party’s decline to Nixon’s coalition strategy and the purging of members who rejected the 2020 election claims, concluding that only electoral defeat of Trump-aligned lawmakers could allow the GOP to rebuild as a governing institution.
The Republican Party once stood for limited government, active opposition to Soviet aggression, and a balanced budget. Now it stands only for Trump and his authoritarian neofascism, demanding total loyalty to him.
Yet Trump’s approval among U.S. adults now stands at 33 percent, with 66 percent disapproving; 52 percent said they disapprove strongly. (That approval rating is 4 percentage points lower than in July and 8 points lower than at this point last year.It’s lower than at any point in his first term.)
In other words, the Republican Party has tied itself to Trump, but the vast majority of Americans believe Trump a failure.
So where does that leave the GOP? Nowhere. The GOP is dead.
The death of the Republican Party is tragic to me personally. I got my first job in government in Republican Gerald Ford’s administration. I argued Supreme Court cases in Ford’s Department of Justice. Years later, as secretary of labor under Bill Clinton, I worked closely with Republicans in the House and Senate to enact the Family and Medical Leave Act, raise the minimum wage, and protect workers’ pensions. My father was a Republican who voted for Dwight Eisenhower for president in 1952 and 1956. His father, my grandfather Alexander Reich, was a Republican who voted for Alf Landon for president in 1936 and Wendell Willkie in 1940.
Gerald Ford is as far from the current Republican Party as was or is any Democratic president. Sad to say, in 2024, the board of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation declined to present the Gerald R. Ford Medal for Distinguished Public Service to former Wyoming representative Liz Cheney out of........