Where Were You The Night the Republican Party Died?

NEW YORK—Where were you the night Donald Trump killed the Republican Party as we knew it? Trump was right where he belonged: in the gilt-draped skyscraper with his name on it, Trump Tower in Manhattan, basking in the glory of his final, definitive victory.

“I have to tell you, I’ve competed all my life,” Trump said, his golden face somber, his gravity-defying pouf of hair seeming to hover above his brow. “All my life I’ve been in different competitions—in sports, or in business, or now, for 10 months, in politics. I have met some of the most incredible competitors that I’ve ever competed against right here in the Republican Party.”

The combined might of the Republican Party’s best and brightest—16 of them at the outset—proved, in the end, helpless against Trump’s unorthodox, muscular appeal to the party’s voting base. With his sweeping, 16-point victory in Tuesday’s Indiana primary, and the surrender of his major remaining rival, Ted Cruz, Trump was pronounced the presumptive nominee by the chair of the Republican National Committee. The primary was over—but for the GOP, the reckoning was only beginning.

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But unity may not be so easily summoned. As Trump’s hostile takeover of the party drew to a close, many of its leaders, particularly members of the conservative intelligentsia, were in revolt. George Will had denounced “collaborationists” who sided with Trump, branding them “ineligible to participate in the party’s reconstruction.” David Brooks had proclaimed “a Joe McCarthy moment,” adding, “People will be judged by where they stood at this time.” They had stood athwart Trump’s nomination, yelling, “Stop!”—but the Republican voters had ignored them, and now they feared their party was lost.

Could it ever be regained? Many partisans surely would rally around the nominee like they always did, not seeing what was supposedly so world-historically terrible about Trump, or seeing his opponent as a greater evil. But to the anti-Trump faction, the GOP they cherished for decades as a vehicle for right-of-center ideas seemed to be no more. It was likely too late for a third-party candidate to swoop into the breach. With Trump’s nomination, the old party establishment went into exile, perhaps never to return. On Twitter, conservative operatives, writers, policy wonks and talk-show hosts gravely lined up to turn in their Republican registrations. “I am a fiscal conservative and I am a social conservative,” declared blogger Ben Howe. “That will not change. But I will not vote for an egomaniacal authoritarian.” The New York Daily News’s cover showed a red, white, and blue elephant in a casket.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/the-day-the-republican-party-died/481176/