The Sundering of the GOP

Negative coverage is having an adverse effect on Donald Trump’s image, and association with the mainstream media’s villainous Trump caricature is having an adverse effect on Republican Senate races.

Unfortunately, the never-ending vitriol of the GOP’s NeverTrump faction only emboldens the liberal media in its proudly biased and intellectually dishonest coverage of Trump’s campaign.

“You can criticize him sharply and be applauded, both publicly and privately, by senior Republican figures.”

“The media has felt increasingly free to cover Trump as an alien, dangerous, and dishonest phenomenon,” wrote Ezra Klein for left-wing Vox. This toxic image of Trump seems to be poisoning the prospects of Senate Republicans.

According to the data-analytics website FiveThirtyEight, six of the eight GOP Senate candidates are polling worse now than they were before the Republican National Convention.

“While Republican Senate candidates had been up by an average of a little more than 1 percentage point before the conventions in these eight states, they are now down by a little more than 1 point,” FiveThirtyEight’s Henry Enten wrote.

“That is, Republican Senate candidates in key states are still running ahead of Trump, but that cushion may no longer be enough to win now that Trump’s fortunes have worsened.”

Trump himself has realized the part this negative coverage has played in affecting his campaign prospects, and has been increasingly critical of that coverage on Twitter and during campaign stops.

What Trump may not realize, however, is the extent to which his enemies within the GOP are aiding his enemies in the mainstream media in the creation of their Trump-shaped boogeyman.

According to Klein, there are “four main reasons a different set of rules have emerged for covering Trump,” the first of which is “both sides do it.”

“You can criticize him sharply and be applauded, both publicly and privately, by senior Republican figures,” Klein wrote. “The most despairing, hysterical commentary I’ve heard about Trump this cycle has been from Republicans speaking off the record,” he continued.

“In this way, the ‘evenhanded’ view of Trump that emerges from traditional reporting is that he’s a dangerous maniac — Democrats say it, and so do many top Republicans.”

Indeed they do. The election hasn’t even occurred and centrist Republicans like Lindsey Graham are already blaming Trump for the party’s loss.

“The reason I think we’re going to lose is because the demographic meltdown that came from harsh rhetoric and policies by Mr. Trump, making every problem we had in 2012 worse,” Graham said Tuesday. “It’s not about me not voting for Donald Trump — I’m not voting for Hillary Clinton — it is about America is changing and the party is being left behind.”

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But the truth is that Establishment Republicans like Graham and ardent NeverTrumpers like the National Review editorial board are concerned not with a changing America but with a changing GOP. Their anti-Trump fanaticism is so strong they would see the GOP destroyed rather than lose their control over it.

The fact is that the GOP has never been a conservative party — the modern American conservative movement began in the 1950s, a full century after the Republican Party was founded.

The Republican Party merely co-opted the conservative movement — but it was never of the conservative movement and never served the conservative movement. The success of Donald Trump is simply a reflection of the very conservative GOP base realizing that fact.

A Trump loss will only give the forces of the status quo within the GOP an excuse to purge the party of any remotely conservative, populist, or nationalist politician and policy.