How Trump's Reaction to Charlottesville Threatens the GOP

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/how-trumps-reaction-to-charlottesville-threatens-the-gop/537162/

How Trump's Reaction to Charlottesville Threatens the GOP

Over and over again, the president has explicitly identified his party with white backlash—just as the most diverse generations in American history are gaining power in the electorate.

Ronald Brownstein 5:00 AM ET Politics


From his first days as a presidential candidate, the gravest political risk Donald Trump has presented the GOP is that he would stamp it as a party of racial and social intolerance precisely as the most diverse and inclusive generations in American history—the Millennials and the post-Millennials behind them—are growing into decisive roles in the electorate.

After Trump’s morally stunted response to the recent violence in Charlottesville, that wolf is now at the party’s door.

Trump’s election “may be one of the most costly presidential victories in history for a political party, because {it is leaving} a crimson stain on the party,” said Peter Wehner, the former director of strategic planning in the George W. Bush White House. “I don’t think it … will be easy to get away from.”

Through Trump’s first months, the danger of him branding the GOP as intolerant has steadily smoldered, as he’s rolled out polarizing policies on undocumented and legal immigration, crime and policing, affirmative action, and voting rights. He’s also moved to reverse protections for transgender Americans in schools and the military.

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In a measure of the growing headwinds the party could face, Kristen Soltis Anderson, a prominent Republican pollster who has written a book on Millennials, told me this week that the absence of effective resistance from party leaders or voters to Trump’s posture has left her increasingly pessimistic the GOP can set a direction that will appeal to young people like her.

“Given a lot of the data I’ve seen since the start of the Trump presidency, I wouldn’t blame a young person who is just becoming interested in politics who thinks the GOP … is comfortable with white supremacists,” she told me in an email. “Not just because of perceptions of what Trump believes, but because of the accurate perception that a majority of Republican voters stand with him, even on his most controversial views.”

Trump is immersing the GOP in the darkest impulses of America’s past precisely as the nation’s future is hurtling into view. For Republican leaders, the political, as well as moral, price of tolerating Trump’s intolerance is only likely to grow.