A New Kind of Republican Party Is Forming at the National Convention

A new kind of Republican Party is revealing itself at its national convention.

All the hallmarks of a MAGA event are on display, from the massive Donald Trump iconography inside the convention hall to rhinestone Trump cowboy hats and red Trump and Vance signs.

But look closer and the party is changing — increasingly embracing economic populism at home and isolationism abroad, shifting its decades-old stance on abortion and growing not just suspicious but hostile to certain business interests.

Trump’s newly announced running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, said the Republican Party is in a “late Republican period” and that the party needs to “get real wild and real distant.”

And that’s exactly what’s happening in Milwaukee. It wasn’t just Trump’s selection of Vance, the Ukraine aid opponent who once said “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other.” It was also the party’s embrace of a watered-down abortion platform and the corporate bashing he heard on the RNC floor.

It is the result of a confluence of economic, demographic and cultural changes — including a newly ascendant labor movement, to which the GOP finds itself increasingly drawn, at least nominally. Together, these forces have only accelerated the GOP’s flirtation with party renewal.

“I think what we’re witnessing right now is a full-frontal assault on conservatism,” said Marc Short, who served as Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff from 2019 to 2021 and is so estranged from this new version of the party that he was advised to skip the convention. “And you can see the platform moving away from issues like life and traditional marriage, embracing tariffs across the board, but I feel like yesterday and last night went a step further when you have speakers who are basically saying that NATO was to blame for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and referring to job creators as ‘corporate pigs,’ and touting the national right to work.”

He said: “That’s a huge departure from where our party was and I don’t think it’s a recipe for success.”

Perhaps most shocking to some more traditionalist Republicans was the fiery speech by International Brotherhood of Teamsters President Sean O’Brien — the first Teamster to speak at an RNC in its 121-year history. In his remarks, he took aim at traditional economic conservatism, condemning the “corporate elite,” outlining the harms of Right to Work laws that make organizing harder and have been passed mostly in GOP-run states, and calling the Chamber of Commerce “unions for big business.”

David Urban, a former adviser to Trump’s 2016 campaign, told POLITICO that he looked at his CNN co-host David Axelrod, a former adviser to Barack Obama, and asked him off-air, “Am I at the right convention?”

O’Brien’s comments left some viewers — in the hall and far away — almost physically uncomfortable, even as they slowly began to embrace a new kind of Republican electorate.

“I was starting to squirm a little bit about some of this stuff, but I also know how you mix it up, and that’s what makes up my support,” said Sen. Mike Braun of Indiana, who is running for governor and is one of the wealthiest members of Congress. “And that doesn’t mean you take the most outrageous things he may have said, but you don’t discount some of the other things, and you find a new coalition.”

Or, as Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio put it: “I think President Trump has made our party what it always should have been, which is a populist party rooted in conservative principles.”

For years, the GOP has been undergoing a radical shift as a working-class party — all around the organizing principle of America First. At times during his presidency, Trump has returned to the GOP’s more traditionalist ideology on issues like tax cuts, which he slashed in 2017. But it was his selection of Vance that could ultimately cement the party’s trajectory toward a different point on the horizon.

“Vance was the most distinctive choice he could have made, in part to send a signal: I think the coverage accurately captured what we’re certainly hearing, which is that the business community, Wall Street and so on are deeply dismayed and concerned — as they should be,” said Oren Cass, a former economic adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns and a close associate of Vance who spoke with him last week.

In the years since, Cass, the founder of the conservative think tank American Compass, a group that aims to develop a new center-right consensus on policy, has envisioned “a multiethnic, working-class conservatism as the basis of a true Republican Party that could achieve a lasting governing majority.”

In Milwaukee, there were also traces of the old party on display. Nikki Haley, who championed a Reaganesque political agenda during her presidential campaign, was met with a barrage of boos as she took the stage to speak Tuesday night, even as Trump himself applauded.

“We must not only be a unified party, we must also expand our party,” Haley said. “We are much better when we are bigger. We are stronger when we welcome people into our party, when we have different backgrounds and experiences.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who ran to Trump’s right in the primary, was also booed. The reaction to Haley and DeSantis showed that while both candidates have criticized Trump from different policy perspectives, it is Trump’s personality — not his policies — that endears him most to the base. And Trump and his allies are persuading the Republican Party to move even further away from the old party orthodoxy than it did during his first term — at least, literally, on paper.

The GOP’s new platform is the best example of this. The platform now makes no mention of marriage between a man and a woman, a longtime cornerstone of the party’s principles. Instead, it talks about fostering “a culture that values ​​the sanctity of marriage” and “the fundamental role of families,” in what was widely hailed as a victory for pro-LGBTQ+ Republicans but a blow to the party’s socially conservative wing.

“This is a British Tory platform,” said former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania. “This is not a conservative platform. Trump is aiming right down the middle.”

And then there’s the issue of abortion. A contingent of anti-abortion delegates, citing the need to unite after the assassination attempt on Trump, abandoned their fight against changes to the party platform that they say roll back decades of GOP progress on the issue.

And most anti-abortion organizations have lined up behind the platform — in large part because it mentions the 14th Amendment, which conservatives have long argued protects life beginning at conception. Still, the document reflects Trump’s approach of leaving abortion to the states in the post-Roe era, a position that leaves abortion widely available in many states.

Convention delegates are largely embracing the former president’s views. Kip Christianson, a Minnesota delegate who was on the platform committee, described himself as “pro-life” but acknowledged that that is not the position in his state, where abortion is legal until the fetus is viable.

“This platform is a platform that is responsive and supportive of where America really is and where states like Minnesota really are. That’s all it is,” Christianson said.

He was outside the convention center on Tuesday, where the evening’s programming was just getting underway.

“We’re a big tent party,” he said.

Via News Agencies