Ex-Sen. Cory Gardner (right) with he who shall not be named (left).
And as The Hill reports, the former President could end the GOP as we know it with one weird trick:
A majority of Republican voters said if former President Trump were to start a new political party they would likely join, a new Hill-HarrisX poll finds.
Sixty-four percent of registered Republican voters in the Jan. 28-29 survey said they’d join a new political party led by the former president, including 32 percent who said they would very likely join…
“If Trump were to split from the GOP and create his own party, polling suggests he might well create the second largest political party in the country, knocking the GOP down to third place,” [Dritan] Nesho added. [Pols emphasis]
Dividing the conservative coalition in American politics between the Republican Party as we knew it before Donald Trump and a new party devoted wholly to Trump’s cult of (such as it is) personality would be perhaps the greatest gift Trump could bestow on Democrats–no small feat after fueling backlash against the Trump-dominated GOP in the 2018 and again in the 2020 elections, and helping deliver the U.S. Senate to Democrats by effectively sabotaging the Georgia U.S. Senate runoff elections in January in a fit of pique over losing last November.
Divide and conquer was always Trump’s strategy. If these numbers spur Trump to action, Republicans who aided and abetted Trump’s rise to power may now be about to find out what “divide and conquer” looks like on the flip side.
Highly unlikely. Why wouldn't Trump simply take over the Republican Party?
The non-Trump Republicans are a very small part of the GOP. Moderate Republicans have been dying and moving to Unaffiliated.
The groups most screwed by this are large business and corporate interests. Conservative by nature, but half are Extraction industry, Libertarian and troglodytes, while the other half are your basic Corporate Capitalists.
The latter group will probably have to put all their eggs in the Democratic basket. But, where will Exxon and the Koch brother's go?
“Why wouldn’t Trump simply take over the Republican Party?”
Hasn’t he already?
Which makes one wonder why Trump would want to leave the party he already controls? Is Der Golfing Fuhrer upset that he doesn’t have 100% loyalty in the party? Or, does he want a new party so he can skim more money from the fund-raising?
You and I look at the QOP and we see an army of fawning toadies and sycophants — to whom Ttump should owe some small moral loyalty for their service. Ttump looks at this same group and sees losers who just failed him, whom he despises, and certainly doesn’t owe anything. (As he just told SAG “I made them/you great — you’ve done absolutely nothing for me. I quit.”)
He’s a celebrity in the QOP, earning a celebrity salary with celebrity benefits and fawning, but there’s already an existing and well-established infrastructure of grift-sharing with too many others in the party . . .
. . . In the Ttumpparty, he’d be not only a celebrity, but emperor and godfather — a MAGAPutin, if you will; with all of the income flowing to the top, as well as the power, and no obligations or expectations to share.
Plus, he’s pissed at the Republican party for his defeat and failure in his election and insurrection attempts — it’s all their fault, and they’re all gonna’ pay. Bigly. He’s gonna’ tear it down and kick those blocks all over the playpen, just like the terrible-two he’s always been.
Hype it, oversell it, exploit it, grift it, debase it, bankrupt it, and then blame its collapse on others and skedaddle as it gets torn down — rinse and repeat — that’s the Ttump business-model for everything, not just casino’s, country clubs, and spouses.
Big oil and big Pharma and the Street would stick with whatever wins on the right. The mere idea of any regulation or reduction in subsidy to them and theirs will kill any chance for them to do otherwise.
NPR noticed the upcoming party meeting in Colorado Springs.
GOP Divide Not Just A D.C. Drama: Post-Trump Reckoning Splits Colorado County
I see two good things coming out of this.
Election laws might have to treat more than 2 parties fairly.
Everyone left-of-Reagan can now freely leave the Democratic Party and create their own party which might actually represent them.
Its time for America to move out of the 18th century and end the two-party system.
I always thought Diogenes was the funny one. But if you are tryng to be funny- you win today.
Ending the two-party system means paralysis as long as you stick to single-district, first past the post, elections.
But the alternative, proportional representation, is worse. In its entire history, no party has had a majority in Israel. Extreme fringe groups, by providing the last two or three votes needed to control the knesset, paralyze that country and impose religious rules on a secular majority.
In contrast, the U.S.. had multiple parties in the 19th century.
The minority Whigs, Know Nothings, Free Soilers and anti-Masons came together in 1856 to build the Republican Party. Within a decade, they had abolished slavery, built a transcontinental railroad, opened the West with the Homestead Act and passed the Land Grant Colleges Act.
The two-party system works. But it takes two viable parties. If Trumpism continues to infect the GOP, the Democrats will get lazy.
Not if we uber-lefties have anything to say about it.
It also takes two parties willing to talk with one another rather than at one another. As long as the two parties are going to keep moving further apart, the 2-party system will stalemate.
I actually would like us to devolve into a 3-party system: the left, the right, and a centrist party to bridge the gap. That centrist party currently exists in the Alliance Party, but they have not shown the organizational ability yet to be a viable national party.
You don't get much more centrist than Steny Hoyer, Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden. A strong Alliance Party would probably replicate the British Liberal Party, splitting the majority left with Labor and installing the Tories as semi-permanent majority.