Trump Did Not Invent Awful Republican Primaries

A reminder that the former president is a product of the party’s dysfunction.

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To read the coverage of the still-young midterm primary season on the Republican side is to read of royalty. Former President Donald Trump is “the Republican Party kingmaker” whose “endorsement is worth its weight in political gold” and who has “enduring power.”

Kingmaker Midas Trump’s enduring power, we are told, is the “cause of [the] unrelenting nastiness” between candidates and that even when the former president isn’t involved, the races “are mostly about Trump anyway.”

We are here reminded of one of the key rules of politics in the past seven years: The only reliable point of agreement between Trump, the political press, and Democrats is that Trump should always be the focus of the discussion. It needn’t be explained why a man who refers to himself in the third person would want it that way. But less obvious is why Democrats believe, often wrongly, that this works in their favor with voters. News organizations believe, often rightly, that Trump will drive traffic.

Trump is most certainly the single most influential individual in the Republican Party today, and his faction is quite powerful because of its cohesion and intensity. A shameless demagogue with followers of such zealous abandon that he can produce a savage mob to sack the Capitol is not someone to take lightly. But what so much of the discussion around Trump and the 2022 primaries forgets is that the “unrelenting nastiness” that we see not only predates his majesty of Mar-a-Lago, but that Trump himself was a product of it in the first place.

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  1. Avatar photo
    Tmcke

    We need to replace single party primaries with a single primary for all candidates. This is hte only was to get any moderation on the GOP side. And please dont complain that Dems are extreme. Some are but there a no equivalents to MTG or other similar performers. In fact Dems don't have an equivalent to Ted Cruz either.

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    Ben Connelly

    Good reminder. Trump was cause and effect. The primaries have been a crap show for decades.

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  3. Dan Crist

    The divisive Senate primary in Georgia was in 2014, not 2012.

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  4. Avatar photo
    Bill Nelson

    Democracy is swell, ain’t it? When you read de Tocqueville, you see his admiration for the decentralized federal system. But you can imagine how often there was unhappiness over the selection of a local magistrate. And many elections in our early history were quite messy. In John Adams first election, Hamilton manipulated the electoral vote so that Adams would win but not by enough to show him a popular choice.

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  5. Avatar photo
    Tyler

    [Adds “a pile of money big enough to burn a wet elephant” to personal aphorisms database]

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    BrettH

    I always enjoy your take, thanks brother Stirewalt.

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  7. Avatar photo
    Earl King

    The end of the cold war left little to champion beyond the usual, tax cuts, military funding or adventurism. While they could, they focused on Clinton and some culture wars. The War on Terror presented something else for them to champion.However after a number of years people in both parties began to understand that The War on Terror was just wack-o-mole. No winning, just an on going war against people who wear robes.

    Then Obama presented himself, likable but arrogant. Democrats eventually won the ObamaCare war, even though it was initially hated by the public.
    What next would be the unifying idea that all Republicans could rally around? America has gone insular before...wanting to wash its hands of foreign involvement. That is not new.

    Today other than a loathing of Progressive the ideology of anti Americanism, Race Wars, sexual identity.....There isn’t much to fight over except this. The idea that America needs to be fundamentally changed. The worlds greatest economy, the fountain of Democracy, fairness, welcomes immigrants....Seriously not that we are perfect, but given the differences in our politics and humans....We have come a long way. Why are we not able to get along better? What am I missing?

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    Bill Dyer (aka Beldar)

    It should go without saying that Democrat primaries can be just as vicious and awful. For a concentrated dose of proof thereof, I recommend Robert Caro's second volume in his series "The Years of Lyndon Johnson," entitled "Means of Assent." It's set in the period during which Texas was a one-party state controlled by Democrats, meaning the Democratic Party's primary elections made the general elections a foregone conclusion.

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    Rjosephpaquette

    In 2016, Trump did not get a plurality of primary voters.
    He should not have had a plurality of delegates.
    The fear of third party challenge and a brokered convention has lead party leaders (on both sides) to make some absurd rules.

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  10. Raincheck

    Thank you, for a little (recent) historical perspective.

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