President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania head to the Inaugural Parade reviewing stand from the White House in Washingtion, D.C., Jan. 20, 2017. Trump was sworn-in as the 45th president of the United States earlier in the day. U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class Patrick Kelley.
At The American Conservative, Pat Buchanan writes that Donald Trump won the presidency by saying goodbye to the free trade, open borders, amnesty pushing, regime change threatening ways of the GOP. Pat wonders how the Bush-Boehner style Republicans can ever return from their defeat. He writes (abridged):
“There is no Republican Party. There’s a Trump party,” John Boehner told a Mackinac, Michigan, gathering of the GOP faithful last week. “The Republican Party is kind of taking a nap somewhere.”
Ex-Speaker Boehner should probably re-check the old party’s pulse, for the Bush-Boehner GOP may not just be napping. It could be comatose.
Consider: that GOP was dedicated to free trade, open borders, amnesty and using U.S. power to punish aggressors and “end tyranny in our world.” That GOP set out to create a new world order where dictatorships were threatened with “regime change,” and democratic capitalism was the new order of the ages.
Yet, Donald Trump captured the Republican nomination and won the presidency—by saying goodbye to all that.
The world is changing. NATO and the EU are showing their age. Nationalism, populism and tribalism are pervasive on the Old Continent. And America’s willingness to bear the burden of Europe’s defense, as they ride virtually free, is visibly waning.
It is hard to see why or how Republicans are ever again going to be the Bush-Boehner party that preceded the rise of Trump.
What would be the argument for returning to a repudiated platform?
Trump not only defeated 16 Bush Republicans, he presented an agenda on immigration, border security, amnesty, intervention abroad, the Middle East, NAFTA, free trade, Putin and Russia that was a rejection of what the Bush-Boehner Party had stood for and what its presidential candidates in 2008 and 2012, John McCain and Mitt Romney, had run on.
If the Republican Party is “napping,” let it slumber on, undisturbed, for its time has come and gone. We are in a new world now.
Read more here.
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