Joshua Green writes:

Steve Bannon’s arrest on charges that he defrauded donors to a right-wing immigration group for $1 million marks the end of a political era—the era when a Trumpian admixture of economic populism and nativist immigration policy looked as if it could, as Bannon once put it to me, deliver the Republican Party “a hammerlock on the Electoral College.”

At the time he made this assessment, in the days after Trump’s 2016 victory, it seemed entirely plausible that Bannon, Donald Trump’s campaign chairman and future chief strategist, was right. Before Trump, the GOP had imagined its future lay in purging its racist fringe and soft-pedaling its brand of laissez-faire economics to a diversifying nation that had spurned the 2012 Republican ticket of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. The Republican Party “autopsy” conducted in 2013 after their loss warned that the GOP risked falling into oblivion if it didn’t present a more welcoming face to immigrants, minorities, and young people.

Trump, of course, egged on by Bannon, instead offered a turbocharged anti-immigrant nationalism that promised to revive working-class fortunes, a message that resonated particularly among Rust Belt voters who’d previously voted Democratic. He was certain that Republican Party leaders would recognize this. “What Reince [Priebus] and Paul Ryan realize now,” Bannon told me after the election, “is that our message was the right one and that it’s gonna deliver Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania to the Republican Party for a generation.” This was the Trump hammerlock.

Had Trump delivered on his promise and instituted the kind of working-class populism Bannon was espousing in 2016, he’d likely be in a better position than he is today. Certainly, Bannon would be. But that never happened. “There was only a plan to get elected,” says Sam Nunberg, a former Trump staffer. “There was never a plan to govern.” [Continue reading…]