But what Republicans learn from the Trump era will make all the difference.
It must pain Donald Trump, deep down in his showman’s soul, to have had his convention taken away from him. The arguable peak of his presidency, the hubristic State of the Union that preceded the coronavirus, raised the reality-television elements of the address to new heights — reuniting a military family! Bestowing a Presidential Medal of Freedom! You can only imagine what brazen gimmicks, what WWE stagecraft, Trump would have rolled out for a convention taking place in normal times. Alas he has only four days of speeches via streaming video, the absence of cheering crowds itself an exhibit of his administration’s coronavirus failure. And for members of his party privately pining for his evaporation or feeling their way back toward pre-Trump positioning, the diminished convention can’t help but feel like a hopeful thing — instead of a showcase for Trumpian power, a weeklong indicator of its ebb. That hopefulness is misplaced. Trump could still win re-election, and his convention is irrelevant to a comeback that mostly hinges on what happens with the pandemic between now and Election Day. But even if he loses, his power over the Republican Party will probably ebb only slowly, if at all. His allies and sycophants will have every reason to maintain a court in exile. His enemies and frenemies in the mainstream media will continue to elevate him for the sake of ratings and attention. And the man himself will seek the spotlight as assiduously as ever. The knowledge that Trumpism has delivered — about what is possible in American politics, what Republicans will vote for and accept, what conservatism can accommodate — will not simply disappear. It may go underground for a time, if there is a temporary restoration of Republican politics as usual under a Joe Biden presidency. But the lessons will still be there to be picked up, the truths exposed hard to suppress. Any future Republican who seeks or occupies the presidency will have learned something from the years of Donald Trump. But what they learn will make all the difference. Here are three different ways that the G. O. P. could remain the party of Trump long after he is gone. First, Trumpism could come into its own as an ideological agenda, a genuine policy alternative to both left-liberalism and the zombie Reaganism that the Republicans offered before Trump’s advent. In this scenario, Trump’s successors would learn two lessons from his rise. First, that Republican voters aren’t necessarily wedded to ideological nostrums about limited government, and so a politician can succeed in a Republican primary by running, as Trump did, against elements of movement-conservative orthodoxy. Second, that the sustained failures of the establishment center create a practical need for a policy agenda that’s populist in the best sense — it would defend and rebuild the decaying America that exists outside the coastal metropoles, tech hubs and university towns. This agenda would start with ideas that Trump campaigned on in 2016 and then abandoned or only half-pursued: not just infrastructure spending, but a self-conscious industrial policy to bring back the capacities and jobs that America has lost to Asia.
