Jonathan V. Last writes:

Donald Trump is the past, present, and future of the Republican Party. And that is because the GOP is no longer a traditional political party designed to win elections so that it can enact a policy agenda. It is a personality cult built around grievance.

To understand its true nature, you must first understand how weak Trump was as an electoral force.

It is devilishly hard to unseat an elected president. Trump is only the third elected president to be defeated since Hoover. His overperformance of polling expectations has obscured how far he ran behind statewide Republican candidates across the map: Trump ran 7 points behind Susan Collins in Maine, 4 points behind Mike Rounds in South Dakota, and 2 points behind Cory Gardner in Colorado.

There are a handful of spots, such as North Carolina, where Trump ran with, or slightly ahead, of the statewide Republican. But those are the exceptions. Trump was—as he has been since 2016—an electoral albatross for the Republican Party.

A rational political party would see the Trump presidency as a mistake and attempt to pivot away from it as quickly as possible. Some people—such as George W. Bush or Mitt Romney—are attempting to move on from the president. But the main body of the GOP is not. They are standing by Trump, either openly and defiantly, or meekly and abstractly, using dog whistles like wanting to count “legal votes,” because as much as party elites might want to jettison Trump, neither Donald Trump nor the base of Republican voters will let them.

Donald Trump will be the first former president not to retire, more or less, from political life since Teddy Roosevelt. He will not repair to Mar-a-Lago, watch Shark Week, and get to work on his memoirs. He has neither the financial nor psychological ability to do so. Instead, Trump will tweet. He will call into the cable shows. He will cultivate an army of followers who can be mobilized and monetized. What he will do with these followers is unclear, but also beside the point. Whether he starts Trump TV, a new vitamin business, or a 2024 campaign, he will want mastery over as large an audience as possible.

There are still people who believe that the party can go back to what it was in 2014. These people are living in a fantasy.
And that is why he refused to concede the election. His next move requires exporting tens of millions of followers with him to his new venture, and the way to do that is to keep pushing the notion that he was not defeated, that he has the secret truth, and that he will share it with his chosen elect for $9.95 a month. [Continue reading…]