Far-right GOP skeptics may soon have a state’s worth of Senate power (fear rising!)

An underappreciated aspect of Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency was how he co-opted the Republican Party’s power as his own. He had flirted with independent bids in the past, back in the era when Ross Perot had made that seem something close to viable. In 2016, though, he found actual success not by opposing the GOP from the outside but from the inside — casting the party as rotten and ineffective as he gobbled up its supporters and worked his way through its creaky system. The establishment was slow to realize what was happening and slower to figure out a way to block his path, and that was that.

Ultimately, Trump didn’t have any grand vision for what to do with the party he’d co-opted. His efforts were in service of himself, not any ideology more robust than what a weekend Fox News anchor might articulate. This was often useful to the party establishment, which had a president who’d nominate whichever judges the party establishment wanted and champion whatever legislation it presented him.

As Trump leveraged his fame and wealth to seize power, billionaire investor Peter Thiel was by his side. Watching. People tuning in to the 2016 Republican convention would have seen Thiel giving an awkward, generic speech about patriotism and Hillary Clinton and probably assumed he was just another one of the random people selected to testify to Trump’s business acumen.

“Ultimately, Trump didn’t have any grand vision for what to do with the party he’d co-opted.”

“Co-opted” ??? ROFWL - Rescued the GOP party from the GOP elite would be more like it, as the GOP elite - in 2016 - was about to throw it away, where they would have seen the grass roots of the party abandon them for the last time. Trump ended that and you saw the grass roots of the GOP come back to supporting GOP candidates again. Not only that, you saw the diversity of GOP candidates expand like crazy. Since Trump “minorities” have flocked to the GOP, to be in a party that does not pander to their “demographic” but instead stands up for values they, as individuals, share. Finally, Conservative “minorities” have a party they can embrace.

Saying Trump “co-opted” the GOP is like saying Obama (also a Washington D.C. outsider, in spite of his brief did-nothing Senate term) “co-opted” the Dims. Billary Inc. even then was the “elites” favorite, not Obama. It’s all very laughable.

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