Donald Trump is behind.

He trails in the pivotal postindustrial swing states
and is treading water in the Southern and Sun Belt states
— Arizona, Georgia and Nevada
— that could help him find an alternative path to 270 electoral votes.

In just a few months, Trump may join the exclusive club of🔸 two-time presidential losers.🔸

Of course, it is still too early to make any real prediction about November.
But the sharp reversal in Trump’s electoral fortunes raises an obvious question worth thinking about now:

❓If Trump loses, and perhaps especially if he loses badly,
what comes next for the Republican Party?❓

As striking as the relative electoral weakness of the Trump-era Republican Party
is its ♦️total inability to either govern or police the boundaries of its coalition. ♦️

Trump himself has no program beyond his own prejudices and impulses.

🔹“Build the wall” and “mass deportation now”
reflect a deep-seated hostility to nonwhite immigrants that has no basis other than #rank #bigotry.

🔹“Stop the steal” and Trump’s broader obsession with so-called election integrity
is nothing more than an attempt to operationalize his core belief that he #cannot actually #lose an election, or anything for that matter.

🔹Fittingly, the Trump-led Republican Party declined to devise a platform for the 2020 presidential election
and produced a set of Trump-esque #slogans for its 2024 one.

To the extent that there is a Republican agenda, it is a product of the hard-right #ideologues and conservative #organizations that
💥 see Trump as a willing vessel and vehicle for their own interests.💥

Trump’s leadership has also occasioned the 🔸total collapse of the boundaries 🔸(such as they were)
separating the far-right #fringe of American politics from its #mainstream.

The former president provides license for
— and inspiration to
— a large crop of right-wing extremists
who 🔥disdain democracy and openly fantasize about the use of violence 🔥
to eliminate their political opponents.

♦️“Some folks need killing,” Mark Robinson, the Republican Party’s nominee for governor in North Carolina, declared at a church event in June.

Trump’s Republican Party is a paradigmatically “#hollow” party,
according to the argument laid out by the political scientists Daniel #Schlozman and Sam #Rosenfeld
in 👉“The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics.” 👈

For all its activity, a hollow party “demonstrates fundamental #incapacities in organizing democracy.”

Its zombielike commitment to tax cuts and deregulation notwithstanding,
the Republican Party from this vantage point is little more than
💥“a personal vehicle for Trump’s vendettas and fantasies.” 💥

It offers nothing to the public, they observe, “besides praise for its leader.”

❓So what happens if and when that leader loses yet another national election for his party? ❓

What happens when,
❗️in the face of conditions that seem as favorable as they could be, ❗️
the Republican coalition led by Trump 🌟still falls short?🌟
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/13/opinion/trump-republican-party-loss.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare