DAVID M. SHRIBMAN ON THE REMAKING OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY

Donald Trump’s Republican Party is something entirely new, but we’re not sure yet what it is

Apresident campaigns with promises to achieve a specific goal. The House goes along. The Senate begins to examine the matter, accedes to various lawmakers’ demands for special favors and concessions, but the process runs into resistance. Commentators ask why a Republican president with a Republican House and a Republican Senate can’t pass a major element of the Republican platform.

That describes the legislative history of the Smoot-Hawley tariff bill of 1930, admittedly an unfortunate comparison to President Donald J. Trump and his efforts to win repeal of Obamacare. That tariff bill eventually passed into law, beginning a debate that dates to this very day about whether it caused, or deepened, the Great Depression. That debate is beside the point, at least for this column. What is relevant is the process — and the political implications.

“Hoover’s inability to manage Congress was rooted in a fundamental and amateurish misapprehension of his job,” Kenneth Whyte writes in a new (refreshingly positive) biography of the 31st president, to be published two months from now. He adds: “His ascension to the presidency without benefit of the usual Republican machinery had duped him into thinking that he had little need of his party’s congressional potentates.”

The result of the Trump experience with health care — the president has described some Republicans as “fools” and said that if the GOP doesn’t try again to repeal Obamacare they would be “total quitters” — is a fresh set of questions about what the Republican Party is all about, and who is a Republican.

These kinds of questions have been raised before. They arose, for example, during the Barry Goldwater insurgency of 1964, again during the Ronald Reagan ascendancy in 1976 and 1980, and a third time when religious conservatives became a vital element of the GOP coalition around 1988. Nor are these questions confined to the Republican Party. The Democrats asked similar searching questions about 1968 and over the next three decades, when they lost five out of six presidential elections and might have lost them all had not the Republicans been burdened by the Watergate scandal in 1976.

But this month the question is taking on new urgency, prompted by the rise of a president who once was a Democrat and who won the White House by running against the establishment of the very party that gave him its presidential nomination. Mr. Goldwater tried that more than a half-century ago and failed. By the time Mr. Reagan won his first nomination, in 1980, he had a good deal of the establishment behind him, and his running mate, George H. W. Bush, whose father was a Connecticut senator, was a gold-plated memberof that establishment.

Mr. Trump’s Republican Party is something entirely new.

The GOP is being re-formed, or reformed, at this very moment. Sober voices are asking whether some members — the names of Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska inevitably are invoked here — are really Republicans after all, and whether they ought to be allowed to remain under the party’s policy umbrella.

“The fact is that last year after Trump won everyone was on the same page: full repeal of Obamacare,” says Andrew Roth, the chief lobbyist for the Club for Growth, a conservative group that emphasizes economic issues, especially lower taxes. “When the vote came and it mattered, some Republicans betrayed their campaign promises. The truth is that they largely believe in keeping Obamacare going. They’re too liberal for the constituents they represent.”

Some establishment figures, meanwhile, are wondering whether they are welcome anymore. Like all presidents, Mr. Trump is remaking his party in his own image.

As a result, the question of who is a Republican, and what that means, remains open — and, for some lawmakers loyal to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who hasbeen pilloried by the president in recent weeks, that open question is an open wound.

Establishment Republicans grinned and bore the insults they received last year from the Trump campaign, figuring that establishment figures such as Reince Priebus, who had been the chair of the Republican National Committee, would steer the White House toward a traditional approach to Washington power centers, interest groups and what is known as the “regular order” in the capital.

But Mr. Trump’s impulses tend toward disrupting the regular order, and his supporters fully embrace those impulses, for the regular order has marginalized a substantial group of Americans who last November found a comfortable home in the new Trump coalition, composed of many voters who felt left behind economically and alienated culturally.

The question is whether that coalition is a party.

Mr. Trump is defying the physics of politics by trying as an outsider to transform dissent into a political force that lasts beyond a single election. Franklin Delano Roosevelt may have mobilized dissent in 1932, but he was a distant relative to a president, a Navy official, a vice-presidential nominee and the governor of the most important state before becoming president. FDR may have been a traitor to his class, but he was no outsider.

The lack of precedent to the Trump ascendancy — at least since Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, in a political system that bears no resemblance to ours — is one reason the president is struggling with his fellow Republicans, particularly in the Senate, where the chamber’s rules reward independence.

Then add this: The party that Mr. Trump is trying to transform has been, since 1908, the party of the establishment itself.

Establishment figures are uncomfortable in rebel roles. The leading exception (Theodore Roosevelt, beginning in 1912) was himself a state assemblyman, a governor, a vice president and a president who served nearly two full terms in the White House. And while Woodrow Wilson took over a conservative Democratic Party and transformed it into a progressive vanguard, he was no rebel personally. He had, after all, been president of Princeton, then as conservative an institution, perhaps more so, as any in the land.

“Trump is reflective of our society,” says Craig Shirley, who worked for the Reagan and for the campaigns of both George Bushes. “He’s a product of the iPhone and the iPad. Kennedy and Reagan were special because they spoke of ‘we’ and ‘ours.’ Trump isn’t thinking about building a party. He fits in with people who ran against the status quo. But the question is what the Republican Party looks like after Trump. It’s the biggest question of the day.”