Why the Tea Party Is Now Trump’s Party

THE Tea Party is dead. The Covfefe Party has killed it. The Tea Party was the term given to the grassroots movement that emerged out of nowhere in spring 2009 in response to an explosion of government spending and direct federal involvement in the economy the likes of which we had never before seen in peacetime. Both those who sought to claim the Tea Party’s triumphs for their own conservative causes and those who sought to use the Tea Party as an umbrella term for every conservative policy idea they wished to discredit misunderstood it. The Tea Party wasn’t complicated. It wasn’t a conspiracy. Simplicity was the hallmark of its success.

Its message was: You’re doing too much — too much spending, too much regulation, too much interference in the private economy. Too much government. And the message resonated because it was true.

By the end of Barack Obama’s first 16 months in office, he’d overseen the partial nationalization of the auto industry, a new financialregulation regime, a stimulus package that spent more than any other piece of legislation in US history and signed into law a new healthcare system that — for the first time — actually compelled every American to buy something whether he wanted to or not.

The Tea Party sought to stand athwart Obama yelling “Stop.” Its adherents didn’t riot. They had peaceful rallies and cleaned up after themselves, and they took to carrying around pocket copies of the Constitution as a symbolic statement about the ways the overly activist executive branch was claiming powers it wasn’t authorized to use.

As it turned out, “stop” was a brilliant national message, and the “shellacking” (Obama’s term) Republicans administered to the Democrats in the 63-House-seat midterm victory of 2010 did ex- actly that. Obama did not get a single major piece of legislation through the Congress in the final six years of his presidency.

The Tea Party scored one major victory of its own in 2011, when a showdown over the debt ceiling led to the imposition of new budget restrictions in Washington — the so-called “sequester.” That translated the “stop” message of 2010 into action.

Otherwise, the Tea Party had no real definition. It came into being to prevent the ceaseless march of Big Government under Obama, and it succeeded to the extent possible. Anyone who claims the Tea Party demanded the reform of entitlements, for example, or the pursuit of any specific controversial policy from abortion to immigration, is mischaracterizing what it was and what it did.

Last week, in the passage of the two-year budget featuring several hundred billion in new spending, the Tea Party years came to an end. The unifying glue of the GOP in the early years of the second decade of the 21st century came apart.

In its place is the Covfefe Party. You remember covfefe. It was the marvelously inscrutable assemblage of letters President Trump issued forth late one night last spring in a tweet so indecipherable (“despite the negative press covfefe”) it might have come straight out of James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake.”

It is impossible to make a case that there is a Republican Party agenda now in the classic sense of the word. Instead, there is whatever works at any given point of time.

To take one interesting example: House Speaker Paul Ryan’s consuming obsession as a public servant these past decades has been the pressing need for entitlement reform — a reform it’s now unlikely we’ll ever see until we hit the moment of existential budgetary crisis in about 15 years.

I write these words as an analyst of the phenomenon, not as a mourner heartbroken by the death of the Tea Party. The new budget deal’s sharp increases in military spending, for example, are important — and necessary precisely because restrictions imposed in that 2011 sequester deal shortchanged our armed forces even as we were depleting our storehouse fighting wars in far-off lands.

Still, it’s fair to look at what has happened here and say that the Republican Party has no governing philosophy any longer and will find it difficult to run on themes like budgetary restraint and smaller government in the future.

Time to drink your covfefe and hope it’s not poison.

It is impossible to make a case that there is a Republican Party agenda now in the classic sense of the word.