Donald Trump has a rule at his rallies: for the fifty minutes before he takes the stage, the only music that can be played is from a set list that he put together. The list shows a sensitive side, mixing in Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” and music from “Cats” and “The Phantom of the Opera.” But it’s heavy on the Rolling Stones—“Sympathy for the Devil,” “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” and the famously impolitic “Brown Sugar.” The young volunteer in charge of music for one rally sent me the full Trump-curated playlist and asked for requests. “Remember,” he said, “the more inappropriate for a political event, the better.”
In mid-December, Trump brought his show to the Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport, in Arizona, where several thousand people crammed into an airplane hangar. The classic rock stopped as his Boeing 757, which has his name emblazoned on the fuselage in white letters, taxied toward us. “Ladies and gentlemen, the plane has arrived,” an announcer said, and the hangar filled with the patriotic chords of the theme from “Air Force One,” the Harrison Ford thriller in which Ford plays an American President who battles Kazakh hijackers. “Dude, that is so cool,” a young man behind me said to his friend as they watched. “Who needs Air Force One when you have your own airplane?” (According to a list of “Corporate Aircrafts owned by Donald J. Trump” in an appendix to Trump’s new book, “Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again,” Trump also owns a Cessna Citation X and three Sikorsky S-76 helicopters.)
A small segment of Trump’s audience has little interest in politics, or even in voting for him. They come to see a free live show by a famous political performance artist. At each of the four Trump rallies I attended this winter—in Arizona, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Mississippi—some people left after taking a few pictures with their phones, and the departures steadily increased as Trump rambled on about his lead in the polls and about various losers in media and politics. But most stayed, and often many more were outside waiting to get in or huddled around television screens in overflow rooms. Trump is a celebrity but he’s not just a celebrity. “Somebody said, ‘Oh, Trump’s a great entertainer,’ ” Trump would tell the crowd in Mesa. “That’s a lot of bullshit, I’ll tell you. We have a message, we have a message, and the message is we don’t want to let other people take advantage of us.”
Trump’s 757 passed the hangar and made a U-turn while Secret Service agents moved into position at the bottom of a stairwell. (The Obama Administration granted Secret Service protection at Trump’s request, following a process designed to offer early protection for the candidates deemed most likely to win the nomination. The only other Republican candidate awarded similar protection this election cycle was Ben Carson, whose campaign faded soon after.) The aircraft’s thick door popped open and the candidate appeared. Trump was wearing a shiny blue tie, and from a distance his head looked like a pumpkin-colored balloon on a blue string descending to earth. The announcer said, “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the next President of the United States, Donald J. Trump,” and the “Air Force One” music gave way to the rousing drum bursts of the anthem played at every Trump rally: Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It.”
Trump briefly greeted the crowd, and then left the stage to record an interview with Bill O’Reilly, of Fox News, at the rear of the hangar. The day before, at a feisty Republican debate in Las Vegas, Trump had clashed several times with Jeb Bush—Bush called Trump a “chaos candidate,” Trump described Bush’s campaign as “a total disaster”—and O’Reilly wanted to talk about it.
After seven months of Trump, many people who attend his rallies have seen his show before, and his fans mimic his putdowns and cheer their favorite lines. Sometimes Trump asks, “Who’s gonna pay for the wall?” and the crowd yells back, “Mexico!” At another rally, Trump shouted, “Obama—” He then paused for dramatic effect while nodding his head. He finished his sentence with “her.” When he repeated it, the crowd filled in the missing word: “Schlonged!”—a reference to Obama’s victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary. In Mesa, Trump told O’Reilly that Bush has “a very, very low number,” referring to the polls, prompting a man in the hangar to yell, “Zero-energy Bush!”
At many events for Presidential candidates, supporters are hyper-sophisticated about politics and speak in sound bites that echo those of the candidates. One of Trump’s great successes is in attracting people who are otherwise alienated from the political process. The diehard Trump fans I encountered were mostly newcomers. In Mesa, when Trump told O’Reilly that Charles Krauthammer, the well-known (to conservatives) columnist and Fox News commentator, was “a totally biased terrible guy,” a puzzled supporter in the crowd asked a friend, “Who is that? Was he in the debate?”
Trump’s fans tend to express little regard for political norms. They cheer at his most outlandish statements. O’Reilly asked Trump if he meant it when he said that he would “take out” the family members of terrorists. He didn’t believe that Trump would “put out hits on women and children” if he were elected. Trump replied, “I would do pretty severe stuff.” The Mesa crowd erupted in applause. “Yeah, baby!” a man near me yelled. I had never previously been to a political event at which people cheered for the murder of women and children.
The racism of some Trump supporters has been well documented. At one rally in Las Vegas in mid-December, attendees punched a black protester while others yelled, “Shoot him,” “Kick his ass,” “Light the motherfucker on fire,” and “Sieg heil.” But most of the Trump supporters I encountered were people struggling to get by in an economy they no longer understand.
“We’re just tired of the actions of the government nowadays,” Karon Stewart, who is fifty-nine years old, told me after a rally in Mississippi. “The simple people pretty much have been forgotten.”
She said that she has followed Trump’s tabloid life on TV, and last year, when she heard him speak about politics, she registered to vote for the first time. She was not persuaded by arguments that Trump has been disrespectful to women and would have trouble running against Hillary Clinton. “I am a woman,” she said. “I wouldn’t vote for Hillary Clinton if she was the last person on the face of the earth. She is a disgrace to womankind.”
Stewart said that Trump supporters were misunderstood. “We’re not racist,” she told me. “We’re not prejudiced. We just love everybody. But we’re tired of being run over.”
She added, “My husband is in his fifties. He’s got one leg. But he gets out there and works two almost-full-time jobs, seventeen hours every day, Monday through Friday. And he works on the weekends. But there are people out there that we’re paying welfare who’ve got two perfectly good legs, and they just won’t get up off of their tushies to get a job.”
“That’s pitiful,” her husband, Bob, who lost his leg in a construction accident, said. “I think Trump will change that.”
On January 7th, Ted Cruz was standing in an airplane hangar near Webster City, Iowa, surrounded by reporters with cameras and microphones. He had arrived on a campaign bus painted black and stencilled with the phrase “Cruzin’ to Caucus.” Rather than a large team of Secret Service agents, he had two security guards, who were paunchier than Trump’s agents and wore Secret Service-style earpieces.
In traditional caucus style, Cruz was zigzagging through twenty-eight Iowa counties, visiting four or five towns a day. Trump relies on his celebrity to bring supporters out at large rallies; Cruz speaks to small crowds at Pizza Ranch restaurants and in school cafeterias, and he has an army of volunteers knocking on doors. Working the small towns can pay off. Although there are roughly six hundred thousand registered Republicans in Iowa, only a small percentage of them participate in the caucuses. In 2012, in a fairly typical showing, a hundred and twenty-two thousand voted. When the field is divided, a candidate can win the event with roughly twenty-five thousand to forty thousand supporters. At any given stop on Cruz’s bus tour, his audience might represent one or two per cent of the total number of caucus-goers he needs to defeat Trump.
Cruz is a true conservative ideologue. His father, a right-wing evangelical preacher, encouraged him to read classic libertarian economic texts, and in college, at Princeton, and at Harvard law school he participated in conservative politics. In 1995, he clerked for the former federal appellate judge Michael Luttig, then one of the right’s favorites, and the following year he clerked for William Rehnquist, the former Chief Justice of the United States*. When Cruz was Solicitor General of Texas, from 2003 to 2008, he turned the job into a tool of the conservative movement, inserting himself into fights over gun control, the death penalty, the display of the Ten Commandments on public property, and the influence of the International Court of Justice. After his election to the Senate, in 2012, he championed the Tea Party’s most high-profile causes, such as stopping bipartisan immigration reform and shutting down the government in a doomed effort to defund Obamacare.
The Trump and Cruz campaigns are approaching the G.O.P. primary, especially in Iowa, from sharply different angles, but both candidates are benefitting from a dramatic development: the Republican Party is no longer able to control its nominating contest. Into the middle of last century, the nominee was selected by party bosses at the quadrennial convention, on the premise that the professionals in the party knew who was most qualified and electable. “The parties do not need laws to make them sensitive to the wishes of the voters any more than we need laws compelling merchants to please their customers,” the political scientist E. E. Schattschneider argued in 1942, countering criticism that the process was undemocratic. “Democracy is not found in the parties but between the parties.”
In the nineteen-seventies, both parties changed their rules, transferring the decision-making power to voters in newly mandated state primaries and caucuses. Suddenly, almost anyone had a shot at the nomination, and political outsiders—George McGovern in 1972, Jimmy Carter in 1976, Ronald Reagan in 1980—flourished. Although voters felt empowered, some critics were concerned. In the early eighties, the political scientist Nelson W. Polsby warned that the quality and popularity of government would suffer if “persons unable to pass muster with their peers occasionally prove to be popularly attractive” and win their party’s nomination.
By the nineteen-eighties and nineties, party élites had managed to regain control over the process, and party insiders began crushing insurgent candidacies. The key to victory was the “invisible primary”—winning over major donors, interest groups, and elected officials in the year before the actual voting began. To many observers, the invisible primary resembled the old system. In “The Party Decides,” published in 2008, the political scientist Hans Noel and three co-authors showed that, since 1980, the best predictor of the Democratic and Republican nominee has been endorsements by elected officials.
Trump—a media-created populist who has no such endorsements and is despised by Party insiders—defies that theory. “If Trump wins, he’d be forcing himself on the Party,” Noel told me. Cruz, too, represents the kind of hostile takeover that Polsby warned about. He is the consummate political insider—a U.S. Senator from Texas with a long history of activism in the G.O.P.—but he is hated by Republican élites, and none of his Senate colleagues are backing him. The two candidates offer visions for the future of the Republican Party that are starkly different from one another and from what the Party seems to envisage for itself.
Pundits have taken to endlessly discussing the different “lanes” the candidates occupy, an idea best articulated in a new book, “The Four Faces of the Republican Party,” by Dante J. Scala and Henry Olsen. They describe a Republican primary electorate that, since the nineteen-eighties, has been divided into four well-defined groups: moderate and liberal voters, who make up twenty-five to thirty per cent of the electorate; somewhat conservative voters (thirty-five to forty per cent); very conservative evangelical voters (about twenty per cent); and very conservative secular voters (five to ten per cent). A successful candidate starts off by appealing to one of the lanes and then absorbs voters from one or more of the others as opponents drop out and their supporters look for someone else. Cruz is assiduously following this road map by presenting himself as the champion of the two “very conservative” voting blocs. He obeys every traffic sign and rarely veers left, hoping that later in the primary season he can expand into the other lanes.
The Iowa electorate is fertile ground for this strategy. Iowa is a Midwestern state with a Republican voter base that looks as if it were from Dixie. “Of the nine states with 30 per cent or more ‘religious right’ voters, only one (Iowa) was outside the South,” Olsen and Scala write. Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, and John Kasich, all of whom fare better among moderate Republicans, haven’t spent as much time in Iowa, and are hoping, at best, for a third-place finish there.
Their relative absence has allowed Cruz to emerge as Trump’s main rival. Trump sometimes stumbles through the subject of religion—he uses a family Bible too obviously as a prop and recently discussed a passage from “Two Corinthians” rather than “Second Corinthians.” Cruz speaks the language of evangelicals. In his Iowa campaign literature, he vows that on his first day in office, in addition to rescinding Obama’s “illegal and unconstitutional” executive orders and ripping up the Iranian Nuclear Deal, he will “investigate and prosecute” Planned Parenthood, tell the I.R.S. that the “persecution of religious liberty is over,” and begin the process of moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. (Conservative evangelicals are one of the most intensely pro-Israel groups in America.)
Trump, though, has effectively ignored the conventional wisdom about Republican lanes. He’s like a snowplow barrelling across the highway. State and national polls consistently show that he draws strongly from all four ideological segments of the party. His strongest supporters are less educated and less well off; his fiercest opponents are Republicans with advanced degrees and high incomes. Trump has turned what is traditionally an ideological fight into a class war.
“The biggest thing to understand about Trump is that he is effectively redefining the G.O.P. by asking a different question than the one the Party has been answering for fifty years,” Henry Olsen told me. Since at least the Goldwater nomination of 1964, he said, every nomination battle has aimed to answer the question “To what extent should the G.O.P. be the vehicle for the conservative movement?” In addressing it, the Republican primary electorate has always sorted along a spectrum based on ideology: moderates and liberals oppose the idea; very conservative voters, the kind that Cruz is courting, champion it; and somewhat conservative ones split the difference. Trump draws from all four factions because he’s uninterested in how conservative the G.O.P. should or shouldn’t be. “He is not trying to answer this question at all,” Olsen said. “Instead, he is posing a new question: to what extent should the G.O.P. be the advocates for those struggling in the modern economy?”
Throughout his campaign, Trump has made much of the dangers posed by immigration and political correctness. But central to his platform is his insistence that Americans are being cheated. To protect themselves, he says, they need to hire someone who will cut them a better deal. Domestically, he argues that undocumented immigrants are causing the wages of middle-class workers to plummet, and that campaign donors are bribing politicians—except Trump, a billionaire who can’t be bought. His foreign policy, such as it is, is guided by the idea that America is besieged by a long list of adversaries. He customizes his us-versus-them argument to every issue. At rallies in New Hampshire and Iowa, he warns voters that the two states might lose their status as hosts of the first two Presidential nominating contests. “There’s a big movement to put you at the back of the pack,” he said in New Hampshire recently. (In reality, there is little momentum for any movement to change the primary calendar.)
On January 2nd, Trump staged a rally at the Mississippi Coast Coliseum, in Biloxi, a gambling and resort town on the Gulf. The venue was adjacent to Beauvoir, the estate where Jefferson Davis lived after the Civil War. At Trump events, the press is confined to a section that is surrounded by metal barriers, preventing journalists from mingling with the crowd. To avoid that, I waited in line for almost three hours with Trump supporters. Popular buttons and stickers included ones that say, “If she can’t please her husband, she can’t please the country,” “Bomb the hell out of ISIS,” “Up Yours Hillary,” and “Trump That Bitch.” A middle-aged man in front of me joked to his friend, “If they turn the entire Middle East into a parking lot, are we still going to have to take our shoes off at the airport?”
By emphasizing class issues over ideology, Trump has been able to smuggle into the Party all sorts of heretical views. On foreign policy, where he has been especially ignorant of basic facts, he has questioned America’s security commitment to South Korea and Japan, shown little interest in having America engaged militarily anywhere in the Middle East, and embraced Vladimir Putin while condemning Angela Merkel. He vows to protect Social Security and Medicare, using language similar to that of Democrats, and he promises to invest in a large infrastructure program, a major Obama and Clinton priority. He has abandoned the Party’s free-trade fundamentalism and threatened trade wars and tariffs against countries that don’t do America’s bidding.
Every attempt by frustrated opponents to attack these policies as outside the conservative mainstream has failed. The attitude of many Trump fans can best be summed up by Ann Coulter. “I don’t care if @realDonaldTrump wants to perform abortions in the White House,” she tweeted after reading Trump’s immigration policy paper.
Trump knows enough about the conservative movement to speak its language fluently on certain issues—he is a Second Amendment purist, for example. At one rally, he imitated the Paris terrorists methodically killing unarmed innocents—“Get over here, boom. Your turn, get over here, boom”—and argued that if the Parisians who were murdered at cafés and at the Bataclan had been armed they could have saved themselves. But, unlike Cruz, he generally doesn’t use the traditional language of the right. At his rallies, he speaks in a rambling style; he seems to be constantly reminding himself of stories and outrages to share. In Biloxi, he sometimes appeared to be having a conversation with himself— asking a question, answering it, then second-guessing himself with a shrug and a note of uncertainty.
When he talks about current events, he’s akin to your uncle in Queens who just read that morning’s New York Post and wants to tell you about every outrageous news item. “We built a forty-three-million-dollar gas station in Afghanistan and it doesn’t even sell the right gas!” Trump told the crowd in Mesa, without providing any additional context. He was outraged about alleged ISIS cell phones carried by Syrian refugees (“Who pays their monthly bill?”) and cited a doctor friend who is leaving the profession because of Obamacare (“The guy’s got more accountants than nurses!”). Noting that Nabisco is moving a factory from Chicago to Mexico, he announced, “I’m never eating Oreos again.” All these outrages occur because we’re “led by the stupidest people.” Trump promised, “We’re not gonna let that crap happen.”
On campaign stops, Cruz talks about specific issues that resonate with conservative constituencies: Planned Parenthood, religious liberty, Obamacare. Trump touches on the same subjects, but they often seem like afterthoughts. “Obamacare is a disaster,” he told the crowd at a rally in Hilton Head, South Carolina, on December 30th. “We are going to repeal it, we are going to replace it. There are so many great things we can do on health care. So many good things. And it will cost you much less money, and it will be great.”
Every Trump event features three set pieces. First is his recitation of his poll numbers. “We have to go through them,” he said at one rally. If he wasn’t winning, he added, “I wouldn’t be talking about them.” This may be narcissistic, but it’s also strategic. There is a well-documented bandwagon effect in politics: undecided voters who don’t have strong feelings about candidates often flock to the person who appears most likely to win.
Next comes Trump’s assault on the media. This too is strategic, serving to disguise the degree to which he has mastered the form. “I have a mutually profitable two-way relationship with the media,” he writes in “Crippled America.” “We give each other what we need.” At the Mesa rally, he went out of his way to criticize several commentators who are regularly critical of him on Fox News, one of the most important sources of news for Republican voters. Trump mocked George Will, the conservative columnist. “You fall asleep listening to this guy,” he said. “If he didn’t wear the little spectacles, he wouldn’t even be bright—nobody would think he was bright.” He continued his pummelling of Krauthammer (“He’s terrible. He is so unfair to me. He is the worst”) and opened a new front against Stephen F. Hayes, of The Weekly Standard. “I’ve never even heard of this guy. When my name is mentioned, it’s like he’s aboil. He goes crazy.”
He pointed to the press section and derided “all those sleazebags up there.” At other stops, he calls the travelling press “scum.” The crowd always turns and boos the reporters, who are isolated in their metal pen. One young journalist who travels with Trump told me that she’s grown accustomed to hearing him use the same words—scum and sleazebags—to describe ISIS terrorists and American reporters. In Biloxi, Trump spent several minutes berating a cameraman who refused to cut away from him and pan the crowd, as he had demanded. “That guy right there has not moved that camera,” he said. “It’s disgusting.” He tried several times to move on to other topics, but kept returning to the cameraman. “I’d fire his ass right now if I could,” he said.
Such attacks also help to inoculate him. Much of what Trump says is factually incorrect. At the fact-checking Web site PolitiFact, a majority of the Trump statements investigated have been rated “mostly false” (seventeen per cent), “false” (forty per cent), or “Pants on Fire” (twenty per cent). The more that Trump can discredit the press in the eyes of his supporters, the less they will believe it when the media point out his flaws, such as his claim, in November, that on 9/11 he saw TV footage of thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheering as the Twin Towers collapsed. Tammy Murphy, an ardent supporter I met after a rally in Nashua, New Hampshire, on December 28th, said she first became aware of Trump in 2012, when he promoted the notion that Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate was fake and that the President had likely been born in Kenya.
“I just loved his message, and everyone made fun of me,” she said. “The birth-certificate stuff, I loved. I watched all the YouTube videos on it, and what he was saying made sense.” Most New Hampshire voters make up their minds in the final days of the campaign, but Murphy, who said she doesn’t trust the mainstream media and often tweets at the “Today” show for its unfair coverage of Trump, told me that she was committed to voting for him. “I’m dead set unless I find out something down the line,” she said. “But I’m not going to believe what the media tells me. I have to hear it from him. The media does not persuade me one bit.”
The third set piece at a Trump rally is his broadside against political opponents. In New Hampshire, he turned his attention to Chris Christie. Other candidates might seize on an ideological weak spot, such as Christie’s previous support for gun control or Planned Parenthood. Trump started by noting Christie’s chummy relationship with Obama when the President visited the storm-ravaged Jersey Shore in 2012 (“He was like a little boy—‘Oh, I’m with the President!’ ”), New Jersey’s precarious finances (“a disaster”), his unpopularity (“the people in New Jersey want to throw him out of office”), and how unlikely it was that Christie’s aides didn’t inform him of the plot to create a traffic jam at the George Washington Bridge (“Does anybody believe that?”). In the middle of his anti-Christie tirade, someone in the crowd yelled, “Give him a hamburger!” Trump laughed and repeated the line.
In January, Trump started in on Cruz. While preparing for a rally in Burlington, Vermont, he took to Twitter and television and managed to turn the conversation into a debate about whether Cruz, who was born in Calgary, Canada, in 1970, is “a natural-born citizen” and eligible to be President under Section 1 of Article Two of the Constitution. (The rally itself became infamous when, as a group of protesters was led away, Trump shouted, “Throw them out! Throw them out into the cold! No coats! Confiscate their coats!”) On January 7th, even John McCain, who was born in what was then the Panama Canal Zone and faced similar questions in 2008, when he was the Republican nominee, jumped on the issue, noting in a radio interview that Cruz’s eligibility was a legitimate question. Trump suggested that Cruz go to federal court and seek an opinion to put the matter to rest.
Cruz was in Iowa that day, on his “Cruzin’ to Caucus” tour. He was accompanied by Representative Steve King, an immigration hardliner, and Bob Vander Plaats, a power broker among Iowa’s religious conservatives. Last year, they, along with Steve Deace, a popular and inflammatory talk-show host, endorsed Cruz, and their presence was calculated to show Iowans that the hard right was solidly behind his candidacy. On the stump, Cruz delivers every sentence, no matter how generic, as if he imagines himself reciting the Gettysburg Address. “What we’re seeing here in Iowa is conservatives coming together,” he told the press at the stop in Webster City. “If conservatives unite, we win.” The assembled reporters ignored the statement and asked about Trump’s birther charges.
“I’m not going to be taking legal advice anytime soon from Donald Trump,” Cruz said. “My response when Donald tossed this attack out there was simply to tweet out a video of Fonzie from ‘Happy Days’ jumping a shark and to move on. These attacks—this is the silly season of politics.” Despite their differences, Cruz and Trump appeal to some of the same elements of the G.O.P. electorate, and Cruz assumed that embracing Trump was smarter than trying to take him down. Trump would fall on his own, the thinking went, and when he did his former supporters would flock to Cruz, the only candidate who ever showed Trump any respect. In Webster City, Cruz stuck to the plan, refusing to counter-attack.
“I think there is no doubt that the Washington cartel is in full panic mode,” he said; donors and other Party élites, fretfully debating whether they were more scared of Trump or Cruz, were terrified that they had been unable to control the nomination process. “This election cycle is playing out differently than the way the cartel had counted on, which the grass roots are deciding.”
Cruz walked into an adjacent hangar and gave his stump speech. King and Vander Plaats stood behind him. A small crowd was seated on metal folding chairs, which Cruz’s security guards later used as a barrier to prevent reporters from getting too close to the candidate. After each applause line, he robotically switched the microphone from his left hand to his right, placed his left hand in his pocket and nodded his head until the applause subsided, and then reversed the motions. When Cruz was a child, he memorized the Constitution, and in college he was a national debate champion. His Iowa stump speech was almost identical—word for word and gesture for gesture—at two different stops that day: the same jokes, the same dramatic pauses, the same microphone shuffling and head nodding.
After he finished, he took questions from the audience. One man asked about legislation to ban sharia law in Iowa. He had heard, on Deace’s talk-radio show, about an alleged incident in Des Moines where a Muslim man tried to behead a young woman who refused to wear a burka. Cruz promised that he would protect Iowans from sharia. “What you’re describing here, sadly, there have been incidences across the country,” he said. “And in my view, under no circumstances should sharia law be enforced in the United States of America.” The crowd erupted in cheers.
But to win in Iowa Cruz needs everything to go just right. Even vanquishing Trump might not be enough. Iowa’s recent winners have had trouble expanding their appeal. Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas who won Iowa in 2008, and Rick Santorum, the former senator from Pennsylvania who won there in 2012, were quickly overwhelmed in subsequent contests by the strength of the moderate and somewhat conservative voters, who backed McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012.
At one stop, a few hours after the press conference at which Cruz addressed his Canadian birth, Vander Plaats argued that Cruz could win Iowa—and the nomination—if the right consolidated around him and the broad middle of the party remained hopelessly divided. “The establishment has a traffic jam in their lane right now,” he said. “Praise the Lord that they have a traffic jam in their lane, because I think conservatives are now uniting around this guy”—he pointed at the senator—“Ted Cruz.”
For all the hazards facing Cruz, on the eve of voting in Iowa, it is he, one of the most hated men in Washington, who has emerged as the candidate best positioned to bring down the anti-establishment Trump. In New Hampshire, a third candidate might emerge from the crowded field, but on February 1st the Republican nominating contest will begin as a match between Cruz and Trump.
In the unlikely event that Cruz wins the nomination, he will find it difficult to gain the loyalty of other elected officials and Party leaders, and he will make a poor opponent for Hillary Clinton. His nomination will be akin to Barry Goldwater’s victory in 1964, or, on the Democratic side, McGovern’s victory in 1972. Both Senators were too far outside the mainstream to win in a general election. Cruz would likely lose, but he wouldn’t necessarily destroy the G.O.P. in the process. However much his colleagues dislike him, he’s still one of them.
Trump is not. Some prominent Republicans fear that a Trump nomination would fundamentally alter the identity of the Republican Party, even if he goes on to lose the general election, which seems likely. The Party would become more downscale, a potential asset if it meant drawing in disaffected Democrats, but also more alienating to non-whites, who represent the largest source of potential growth in the electorate. It would be defined by ethno-nationalism at home and an anti-interventionist retreat from America’s obligations abroad. The last major figure in Republican politics who came close to Trump’s brand of nationalism was Pat Buchanan, the former Nixon aide who ran for the Republican Presidential nomination in 1992 and 1996. Buchanan was driven from the Republican Party by mainstream conservatives, who called him an isolationist and an anti-Semite; in 2000, he captured the nomination of the Reform Party. If Trump wins the nomination, it will be his opponents who are driven from the Party. Bill Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, recently asked his Twitter followers to help him come up with the “name of the new party we’ll have to start if Trump wins the G.O.P. nomination.” Trump’s supporters are active on social media: the first response to Kristol was “Sore Losers.”
Those most opposed to Trump are Republicans with higher incomes and more education. A Republican Party under Trump might see a rise in its share of the white working-class vote, but it would also see an exodus of white-collar professionals. Peter Wehner, one of George W. Bush’s senior aides, recently wrote in the Times that he couldn’t support Trump under any circumstances.
“Mr. Trump’s virulent combination of ignorance, emotional instability, demagogy, solipsism and vindictiveness would do more than result in a failed presidency; it could very well lead to national catastrophe,” he warned. “If Mr. Trump heads the Republican Party, it will no longer be a conservative party; it will be an angry, bigoted, populist one. Mr. Trump would represent a dramatic break with and a fundamental assault on the party’s best traditions.” Similarly, Michael Gerson, George W. Bush’s longtime speechwriter, noted in the Washington Post, “If Trump were the nominee, the G.O.P. would cease to be,” because “Trump would make the G.O.P. the party of racial and religious exclusion,” and thus “break it to pieces.”
Last Tuesday, Sarah Palin, the pre-Trump embodiment of populist Know-Nothingism in the Republican Party, endorsed Trump. The same day, seventy-four-year-old George Will said that if the general election pitted Trump against Clinton, “this will be the first election since God knows when” in which “there is no real conservative candidate.”
Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Trump’s rise is that the arguments from people like Kristol, Wehner, Gerson, and Will, who have spent their lives trying to define conservatism, have had so little impact. “Republicans Have Overestimated the Conservatism of the Base,” blared a recent headline in National Review bemoaning the victory of Trump’s populism. In The Week, conservative columnist Michael Brendan Dougherty recently wrote, “What so frightens the conservative movement about Trump’s success is that he reveals just how thin the support for their ideas really is.”
Even if Trump disappears, Trumpism won’t. A billionaire who flaunts his wealth, Trump is thriving as a populist even at a time when the economy is growing and unemployment is low. Last week, National Review published twenty-two essays by leading activists and thinkers on the right, arguing that Trump wasn’t a real conservative. Maybe not, but that appears not to matter to a large portion of the Republican electorate. Rather than deliver ideological lectures, the G.O.P. needs to find a candidate and an agenda that can realistically address the economic anxieties of its base without succumbing to Trump-style bigotry.
After Trump’s rally in Biloxi, I talked to Joanna Patterson, who is forty-four years old. She said that she and her husband, Paul, who is forty-five and used to watch Trump on “The Apprentice,” are deeply religious Pentecostal Christians who follow the teachings of Christ’s Twelve Apostles. “We don’t believe that a woman should cut her hair. We’re like Kim—”
“The one that wouldn’t do the marriage licenses,” her husband interjected.
“Kim Davis?” I asked, referring to the Kentucky official who refused to issue same-sex marriage licenses last year.
“Yes,” Patterson said. “We’re the same thing as her.” Patterson said she can pick out other Apostolics, especially women, by the way they dress—long skirts, no makeup—and she was pleasantly surprised to see that there were many at the Trump event. She conceded that Trump was not religious and hadn’t shown a commitment to any of the social issues she cared about. But she liked him because he showed “strength” and says “whatever he wants to say without having someone buffer it for him.” She explained that forthrightness, more than any particular issue, was at the foundation of her own religion.
“We like raw truth,” Patterson said. “Tell us what we need.” ♦
*An earlier version misstated Rehnquist’s former position.
