“For a party that’s all sensitive about the left canceling them,” lamented Michael Steele, the former head of the Republican National Committee, “they do a pretty good job canceling their own.” In interviews with more than a dozen prominent Republicans - including former members of Congress, my fellow ex-administration officials, recent party leaders and political strategists - I heard a common theme: In today’s GOP, intimidation has supplanted open discourse.
to ongoing efforts aimed at silencing those who break with Trump, the party’s lingering figurehead.Įvan McMullin and over 150 other conservatives threaten to leave GOP without reform The danger of bringing religious zeal to the political realm
What began as a philosophical cleavage has now turned into a militant fight over personalities, from a barrage of violent threats against establishment Republicans who brought down their own president.
In the past year the GOP civil war has gone from figurative to physical. But these were mostly ideological spats - disputes over policy within a political party struggling to evolve - and seem quaint when compared to the current state of affairs.Īs the former Trump administration official known as “Anonymous,” thanks to the op-ed I wrote for The New York Times announcing a resistance within Trump’s own administration, I can tell you things have gotten worse.
Fights between so-called “rational” and “radical” Republicans broke out with the rise of the tea party movement in 2009 and continued throughout the Obama presidency, as establishment GOP elites were pitted against a raucous right wing. The seeds of today’s split in the Republican Party were sown before Donald Trump declared his lofty and once-laughed-at ambition to become president.
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