ABSTRACT
The election of Donald Trump marks the end of the Reagan era. In 1980, Ronald Reagan set the Republican Party on a conservative path that endured for more than a generation, marked by tax reductions, free trade, and an immigration policy that rejected border walls. In 2016, Trump ran a populist-inspired campaign that rejected decades of GOP thinking. Trump’s denunciations of the Republican Party were hardly new – in 1987, he took out newspaper advertisements excoriating Reagan’s trade and immigration policies. And his lack of party loyalty was unsurprising, given that he has changed party identification seven times. But Trump did more than merely use the Republican Party as a kind of Hertz-Rent-a-Car; instead, he sought to transform it into a populist-minded party characterized by nationalist appeals such as “Make America Great Again.” As López-Alves and Johnson argue in Chapter 1, the populist nationalist appeals Trump made to American voters had an especially powerful resonance. In the American context, Trump’s fusion of populism and nationalism meant rejecting free trade deals, building a border wall, and making inroads into formerly Democratic constituencies of blue-collar workers and labor unions who longed for an era already past. While Trump’s calculus paid political dividends in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, his populist appeals exposed divisions among Republicans. Once in office, Trump’s job approval quickly fell, while the Republican-controlled Congress suffered legislative setbacks and widespread public disdain. A newly energized Democratic Party has only increased the political price of the Republican Party’s Faustian bargain with Trump.
