Our view: Trump tarnishes the Republican Party brand

Both elegant and eviscerating, the anti-incumbency attack Ronald Reagan unleashed against Jimmy Carter in a 1980 debate was a simple question: Are you better off now than you were four years ago?

With the country then struggling with stagnant economic growth, high inflation and a debilitating hostage crisis in Iran, the question answered itself in the minds of most Americans.

Put aside for the moment how devastating that same question could be for Donald Trump amid more than 135,000 Americans dead in a pandemic, a related economic crisis and sweeping protests over racial injustice.

Imagine the query cast in a slightly different context: Is the president’s Republican Party better off than it was four years ago? The answer has to be a resounding no.

Start at the ballot box. Democrats captured the House of Representatives in 2018 with their largest gain (41 seats) since Watergate, captured a Senate seat in deeply red Alabama in a special election, and drastically slashed the GOP’s historic lead in governorships from 33-16 to 26-24. The Republican majority in the Senate is at serious risk in November, and Trump’s racial rhetoric hurts the party with minority groups that will become increasingly important in the years to come.

Then there’s the growing number of GOP figures publicly declaring they won’t vote for Trump (Mitt Romney, John Bolton and Carly Fiorina) or contemplating as much (Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, George W. Bush, Jeb Bush and Cindy McCain). A small but vehement group of Republican “Never Trumpers” has banded together to launch caustic anti-Trump ads.

For much of Trump’s first term his party has stood steadfastly by him — in part because of his commitment to appointing conservative judges, lowering taxes and reducing regulations, and in part because they fear the ire of the president and his base. But during this year of crises and sinking poll numbers, Trump has become consumed with deflecting blame for the coronavirus response and fueling the culture wars. The president can’t even articulate a second-term agenda when asked.

“He’s causing a brand problem for Republicans,” former Ohio Republican

Gov. John Kasich told CNN last week. “That base he has — the edges of that base are beginning to fray, (it’s) getting smaller and smaller.”

The nation has long benefited from having two vibrant competing parties, one of them a GOP that traditionally advocated for smaller government, ethical conduct, fiscal responsibility, free trade, international alliances and standing up to dictators abroad. Yet today’s GOP is more like a cult of personality. On issue after issue, Trump is out of sync with public sentiment and the Republican Party’s traditional values:

❚ COVID. GOP governors of Texas and the swing states Florida and Arizona heeded the president’s call to reopen quickly, even when none met White House coronavirus task force criteria for doing so. The states’ infections and hospitalizations have since soared, even as Trump has downplayed the outbreak, sidelined scientists, pulled the United States out of the World Health Organization and refused until this weekend to wear a mask in public.

❚ Confederates. A national reexamination of race finds Trump defending Confederate names, monuments and symbols, even as the Republican-led Senate Armed Services Committee voted to strip names of Confederate generals from military installations, an overwhelmingly Republican Mississippi government voted to erase a Confederate symbol from the state flag, and NASCAR banned Confederate symbols.

❚ Corruption. After vowing to “drain the swamp” in Washington, Trump has presided over a cesspool of cronyism and corruption. Late Friday, he commuted the prison sentence of longtime friend Roger Stone, who had been convicted of seven felonies.

The reaction to this blatant abuse of presidential clemency power? Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, called it “unprecedented, historic corruption.” Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., said it was a “mistake.” Beyond that: the usual silence from Trump’s GOP enablers.

Republican senators had the chance to rid themselves and the nation of the Trump millstone at the impeachment trial this year, but only Romney voted to convict and remove. Now their fortunes are tied to Trump’s, even as the president recklessly tacks in a direction most of the nation doesn’t want to go.