Long GOP Civil War

‘We Are in for a Pretty Long Civil War’

In back rooms and think tanks, Republicans are already mourning their party—and plotting the fight over who’s going to be in it after Trump.

By Julia Ioffe

As the country geared up for the third and final presidential debate last week, the fellows of the storied conservative Hoover Institution gathered in Palo Alto to present their research to the think tank's wealthy patrons. Elsewhere in America, in the home stretch of perhaps the weirdest election the nation has ever experienced, things were getting tense, excited, even feverish. But the rooms at the Hoover retreat at Stanford University could have doubled as a funeral parlor, and the lectures as eulogies for a bygone era. Larry Diamond, a prominent political sociologist known to fellow scholars as “Mr. Democracy,” talked about the breakdown of the party system. Kori Schake, a National Security Council official in the George W. Bush administration and adviser to the McCain-Palin campaign, spoke about how the U.S. was endangering the international order it had itself created. Peter Berkowitz, a conservative political scientist and commentator, gave a talk about “the unraveling of civil society” in America.

“Obviously the party and the conservative movement are very troubled, and there will obviously be a crisis whether Trump wins or loses,” Berkowitz told me later. “What are the core conservative convictions going forward?”

“If he wins, he will for all intents and purposes reshape what it means to be a Republican,” said Schake when I called her. “We’re fumbling our way through, which I hope will lead us to consensus, but we’re nowhere near it now.”

This election, the conventional wisdom goes, has done tremendous damage to the American body politic, but nowhere is the damage as severe as it is inside the party that nominated the wrecking ball known as Donald Trump. Now the party of Ronald Reagan is being led by a man with no discernible ideological leanings, save for an affinity with some of history’s ugliest. In the face of mounting evidence that Hillary Clinton is set to dominate the electoral map on November 8, Republicans across the right side of the spectrum recognize there’s defeat coming. And behind the scenes, in conversations and closed-door venues—the Hoover gathering was not open to the public—the people who once considered themselves the heart, or at least the head, of the party have begun a very pessimistic reckoning.

As yet there seems to be no coherent vision for what kind of future November 9 brings for the Republican Party—or, for that matter, if there will even be a Republican Party they could support. “You’re assuming that ‘establishment Republicans’ are going to be Republicans anymore,” said Juleanna Glover, a GOP lobbyist and former staffer to then-Senator John Ashcroft.

“The likelihood of the Republican Party surviving this, of there being another Republican president in the future, is small,” said one movement conservative who served in the Bush White House. “I don’t think the Party survives.”

Far from the halls of the Hoover Institution and big Washington policy shops is a force they cannot control: the Trump campaign, a small collection of social-media gurus, Breitbart alumni, and Trump family members who have managed to capture the majority of Republican voters in the US, and who may use their new power to launch a media network, or take over as the new axis of the GOP, or both. And as the old establishment looks on in horror, the civil war in its ranks has already begun.

The chasm that opened first was intellectual: The neocon movement, which was, in essence, the brain trust of the latter Bush, “has broken off,” Berkowitz said. The next fissure appears to be generational: The so-called reformicons—a priesthood of intellectual Gen Xers who have been trying to recalibrate Reagan’s vision for the conditions of the 21st century—are at the very heart of the agonized intra-party conflict. On one hand, they’ve often been seen as the potential ideological future of the party. On the other, a resoundingly loud majority of their electorate, the very people for whom they were tending the flame, have roundly rejected their vision. Few in the Republican base in 2016 cared much for free trade and supply-side economics, preferring the isolationist, nativist, paleocon teachings of the itinerant preacher Trump.

Establishment stalwarts in their 60s, meanwhile, are rolling their eyes at the angst of these rarefied intellectual purists, saying there’s nothing wrong with tinkering with your ideology for the sake of forming a coalition to hold power, no matter how motley. To them, Trump is a black swan event, and the way forward, though significantly more difficult after the chaos he’s wrought, isn’t all that fraught: Toss some ideological dead weight overboard to bring in more voters, and run a candidate like Trump’s VP pick Mike Pence in 2020.

That is an appalling prospect to the younger conservatives, some of whom have begun to use the word “collaborator” to describe the Republicans who publicly signed on with Trump as he steamrolled toward the nomination. “I know lots of high-value donors who have no desire to have any collaborators at the top of the ticket in 2020,” Glover said of Pence. “That’s a commonly held opinion.” “Pence has disgraced himself in this election,” says reformicon archpriest Pete Wehner, a senior fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center and a former senior adviser to the younger Bush. “He has been making arguments that he can’t possibly believe, on behalf of the man he can’t possibly believe in.” To them, Pence made a pact with the devil, and says Wehner, “There should be consequences for that.”

With less than two weeks until election day, this is what Republican agony sounds like. “I’ve never seen so many really smart people at a loss for what to do,” says the head of one prominent conservative think tank. “They’re pulling their hair out, to the extent they have any hair left.” Douglas Heye, a former RNC official and Eric Cantor staffer, rejects the word “collaborator.” “I don’t like that language. I don’t think it helps,” he told me. “I’ve been watching a French TV series about World War Two, and now I’m watching the part about the aftermath of the war where they’re trying to figure out who’s a collaborator, shaving women’s heads, etc.” The echo scares him. “I would like to see us sort out our difference in non-punitive ways,” he says.

Maybe that’s possible. But today, it sounds like wishful thinking. “There’s going to be an extremely tense and divisive and probably angry fight within the Republican Party to determine the future of the Party,” says Wehner. “These wounds won’t heal quickly, or at all.”

This isn’t the first time the Republican Party has looked death square in the face. “I remember the Wednesday, Thursday, Friday after the 2012 election, I was in Richmond with Eric Cantor, calling people, asking, ‘What did you see? What did you hear?’” Heye told me. “Overwhelmingly, it was, ‘We have a real problem with immigration and Hispanics, and we need to fix it.’”

These were among the conversations that led to the famous 2012 autopsy report, in which the GOP examined the reason for its loss in that year’s presidential race, and outlined suggested fixes, most of them having to do with outreach to women and minorities. The document’s fame, however, lay more in its breach than its content. “Every day we moved past the election, it became less a problem for individual congresspeople and more a national problem for the RNC,” Heye explained. “There’s nothing I disagree with in the autopsy, but it was unenforceable. The Majority Leader’s secretary couldn’t make a particular congressional office reach out to the Hispanic or black or Jewish community in their district. It was all, ‘Mind your own business, you don’t understand our congressional district.’ ”

Four years later, “breach” would be a kind word to describe what Donald Trump did to that optimistic autopsy report: His campaign ran precisely against it, and swept the ground clear of its shreds. This time, the party doesn’t really need an autopsy, said Russell Moore, evangelical theologian and president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. “We’ve known the cause of death while the patient was still alive on the table.”

There is pretty universal agreement in conservative circles that the immediate cause of death was blunt force trauma with a loud, orange object. “You cannot overlook the temperament of a candidate,” says Moore. “You cannot win a general election by antagonizing minorities.” But there is wide disagreement as to whether this was a sudden, unpredictable trauma—a piano falling on you as you walk down the street—or the result of deep-seated, sclerotic disease. And the answer depends on a Republican’s faction, age, and view of where the Party goes from here.

Take, for instance, Republican pollster and commentator Kristen Soltis Anderson. She is in her early 30s and a self-proclaimed fan of the reformicons like Wehner, Yuval Levin, and Ramesh Ponnuru. She feels that, with Trump, the Republican Party has shifted out from under her. “When he said he was a gentleman, that it’s not really sexual assault, that’s been driving me crazy, because people have said that about Republicans for a while,” she said of Trump’s response in the third debate to the dozen sexual assault allegations against him. “Great, you are everything that the left said you were!” It’s not a Republican Party she recognizes, she says; she sees it as an entity that has been perhaps permanently changed. “If Trump wins the White House, then he has redefined the Republican Party, and to the victor go the spoils,” she says. “It’s his party now.”

Wehner, considered a leading light among reformicons, said this has brought him to a certain realization about his own party, and that the forces that Trump represents are “forces that predated Trump forces and will outlive him,” he told me last week. “The ugliness of those forces is real. The number of people who supported Trump is alarming. It turned out that those forces within the Republican Party were larger than what I had imagined.” He sees “a moral necessity” to hand Trump a humiliating defeat and to scrub out the uglier things he brought to the surface of American politics. But, like Soltis Anderson, he recognizes that splitting the two may prove a Solomonic task. “Is there a way to repudiate the worst of Trump—the nativistic, racist, misogynistic elements—and appeal to people whom he brought because of economic anxiety?” he asked. “It won’t be easy because he has loyal following. If you morally repudiate him—which has to happen—those people may decide they don’t want to be part of that.”

Like other young conservatives, Wehner and Soltis Anderson are facing the possibility that, instead of being the Party’s intellectual vanguard and future leadership, they may no longer even qualify as Republicans. “I think the party will be too far gone from the party I joined,” Soltis Anderson says. “My Democrat friends are telling me I’m free to join them whenever, but I told them not to hold my space and I won’t be joining them any time soon.” Instead, she says, “I’d be an independent, and I’d be perfectly comfortable with that.”

She, like several other young Republicans I spoke to, cited Avik Roy, a Republican health care wonk who advised the campaigns of Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, and Marco Rubio, and who is now increasingly distancing himself from the Party. “These are people who are much more interested in ideas and policies than the jerseys they’re wearing, and, until now, the Republican Party has been best vehicle for their ideas,” Soltis Anderson said. “I think Avik Roy is the kind of model of where you’ll see people go if they feel the Party is not the right vehicle anymore. It has liberated folks who care more about the policy than about just getting Republicans elected.”

Eric Teetsel, a prominent young evangelical and the executive director of the 2009 Manhattan Declaration that trumpeted the sanctity of life and heterosexual marriage, expressed similar views to me in an email. “Not so long ago I stood in the back of an event in South Carolina watching Marco Rubio, Tim Scott and Nikki Haley together and thought, ‘This is my Republican Party,’” Teetsel, Rubio’s former director of faith outreach, said. “With Paul Ryan as Speaker, rising stars in the Senate like Ben Sasse, and the influence of Arthur Brooks and Yuval Levin, the future of the conservative movement is bright. Whether the Republican Party is the vehicle for that movement is to be determined.”

Rather than kicking Trumpers out of the GOP, in other words, these young conservatives may instead find themselves without a party. Some among them just think it’s time to start over. “If you can’t resurrect the Republican brand with less than half a billion dollars and spending four to eight years to get it done,” Glover, who is on the board of Roy’s new think tank, said, it might be time to think about starting something new. “The question is where do the brains and the billions go after this?” The party she envisions is one with “a Jeb Bush platform but with a 21st-century bolt-on acknowledging climate change, gay marriage, and campaign finance reform that’s First Amendment-compliant.” She believes that such a party “is a majority party and has vast support to get to the White House,” even if the dynamics of the 2016 GOP primary seem to indicate it would be the party of the one percent—at most.

Other, older Republicans, don’t see a need to panic—in part because they have a less idealized view of the party as an ideological bulwark. Given their long experience doing battle for the GOP, they actually think some optimism might be in order. “Back up and look at the map of 50 states,” says Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform, the activist who has badgered hundreds of Republican politicians into signing a pledge never to vote for tax increases. “There are 31 states with Republican governors. Thirty-one where we have both houses of legislature; twenty-three where we have both houses of the legislature and the governorship. The Democrats have all of seven states where they have all three. That is a depth of Republican strength that is enduring. We really ought to have 60 senators on a bad day. The focus on the Presidential race alone give people a strange view of the miracle strength modern Republican Party.”

Norquist argues that reports of the Republican Party’s death are greatly exaggerated—as they were after, say, Watergate—and that the GOP has actually done a great job of governing in the age of Obama, mainly by not allowing him to govern. During the Cold War, Norquist says, there needed to be a Republican in the White House “to keep the Soviet Union from finishing us off, to have a veto on socialism.” These days, the Presidency is not that important. “One can govern very well against a sitting president,” he goes on. The days of Congress deferring to the White House are over. Today, “Congress intends to be the governing body,” Norquist says. “This is not a reflection on Trump. Romney would have discovered this, and Hillary will discover this. And that is a very healthy thing to learn.” All this funereal talk, he groans, “is an exercise to depress conservatives into not voting. We’ve seen it before, and there’s less justification for it today than in the past.”

There are other older establishment Republicans who agree with him, taking a longer view that it is not the house that’s on fire, but just the kitchen. “There are times in this history where a fault line develops where the status quo isn’t sustainable anymore. Is it that bad now?” says the (decidedly gray) head of a prominent conservative think tank. “People are saying that the party is on the verge of extinction even though, in certain respects, we’re at a hundred-year high.”

And, like Norquist, these other older Republicans, see Trump as “sui generis,” a freak storm after which things return to normal. “Every one of Trump’s problems is self-inflicted,” Norquist says. “There isn’t a single issue on which he agrees with Reagan, McConnell, or Ryan that’s been a problem for him in the race.” Whit Ayres, a veteran Republican strategist, says Trump won more on celebrity than politics. Elsewhere, his politics, stripped of his star power, have proven a loser against traditional conservatism. “If you look at candidates who tried—the guy who ran against Paul Ryan got 16 percent,” says Ayres. “The guy who ran against Rubio got 18 percent. These guys aren’t even scratching, even though they ran explicitly as clones of Donald Trump. The idea that Trump has started a movement or is in some way representative of a lot of other politicians is absurd.”

In these stalwarts’ view, reformicons and other conservative idealists should just get real. “Do they want someone who is 60 percent of what they want or do they want to run a noble campaign and lose?” says the head of the conservative think tank. “Are you a conservative of a certain style or are you a Republican?” He went on. “There are people”—i.e., the reformicons, now mostly in their 40s—“who came of age during Reagan, who saw an increasingly ideologically coherent party, and have never seen anything else.” In the age of Trump, “the Republican Party is being asked right now to transition from what’s been an ideologically coherent coalition for 35 years to a pragmatic coalition where you sacrifice the ideology for a majority … and go back to the era of what the Democrats had, some kind of weird coalitional dynamic.” The people who grew up on Reagan orthodoxies are now facing a reality of sharing a party with people who dismiss their orthodoxies, like free trade and an activist foreign policy. “From demographic perspective, declining stock,” says the think tank head. “The sweet spot may not be people who live and breathe the Austrian school of economics.”

To these conservatives, the real way forward is to somehow bridge the gap between a disgruntled white America energized by Trump, and the growing population of minorities. Ayres, for instance, says the GOP must “adapt to the new reality and adapt the conservative principles to the new America. You don’t have to change your values, but you have to adapt them to a country that looks very, very different. A few changes on the margins aren’t going to cut it.” That is, take the party orthodoxy that the reformicons so cherish, and use it as a roof to house both angry whites and, say, pro-life Hispanic Catholics.

Needless to say, this is anathema to the younger set of conservatives. “You can see in the choices of some in the Republican leadership what they would like, which is for all of this craziness to sink down under the water and to revive the Paul Ryan way forward, the policy-oriented approach,” says Schake. “The Republican establishment wants to get back to those Elysian days of thinking about expanding our base. That’s the biggest danger, that we’ll ignore people’s exasperations and reinforce the message that Washington is ignoring.” Says Wehner, “You can’t pretend that Trump didn’t happen. And you can’t pretend that there aren’t real issues and concerns that he spoke to.”

Then there are people like Heye, who argues that Trump isn’t even the problem. The real problem was the split in the Republican Party that existed before him, and in fact allowed him to seize control. “I believed that the 2016 Republican primary was going to be a variation of Mom and Dad having the fight in front of the kids. Instead, the crazy uncle showed up and started a 17-person food fight,” Heye says. “People are talking about having a reckoning, a great purge, whatever, and there’s some truth to that, but we still haven’t resolved these differences even with Trump removed from the equation.”

These are the differences between the Jeb Bush/Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz/Rand Paul wings of the GOP, and they were raging years before Trump came down his gilded escalator. “There’s still that, and then there’s Trump,” Heye explains. “They’re not the same train track. You can recognize the danger of Trump and what he has wrought on the Party and the country, you can still think that’s terrible, and still disagree with your conservative brethren.” To some extent, Heye says, it can be boiled down to the following question: “You’re either one of the people that pushed for the shutdown or you didn’t.”

In essence, there’s a post-Trump reckoning that needs to happen, but there’s already a pre-Trump reckoning idling on the docket. “The fight hasn’t happened,” Heye says. “When the crazy uncle leaves Thanksgiving, and there’s food all over the living room, and Mom and Dad still haven’t resolved their differences, that’s a problem.” In other words, Trump could only have happened to a party that was already paralyzed by an identity crisis—one that still has to be dealt with in addition to the secondary identity crisis wrought by Trump.

People like Soltis Anderson and Heye recognize that there now three disparate factions that find themselves squabbling under the Republican tent—the Trump fans, the stand-pat establishment, and the conservative Jesuits—and, in order to form the coalition the think tank head described, they need a strong leader, a savior of sorts. “With a good leader, we can incorporate all three of those,” says Soltis Anderson. “At some point, parties tire of losing,” says Wehner. “It happened to Democrats in the ’80s. What happens? Along came Bill Clinton and the New Dems. Same thing with Tony Blair and the Labour Party in England.” These leaders reversed their parties’ losing streaks, Wehner argues, with “policy changes, stylistic changes, and key moments that signaled to the country that they were a different kind of party and different kind of candidate.” Trump is not that leader; he is a false Messiah. A better leader, hope Wehner and Soltis Anderson, will come along. “The hope is that they can merge and not become an incredibly fractious fight,” Wehner says.

But the outlook is bleak. The very fact that these debates are happening before Trump has even properly lost the election is itself deeply telling. To these Republicans, the only question is how badly he’ll lose, and what he’ll do after the election. Does he retire to his gilded den and lick his wounds? Does he continue playing politics, as he has already intimated he might, throwing shade at potential 2020 primary rivals? Does he start a Trump media company with Roger Ailes? What the orange dragon chooses to do after the drubbing Republicans are sure he’s going to get might be the difference between the final nail in the GOP coffin, and a revival. And again, few really believe in the latter, not even the stalwarts. “I have a feeling no one’s going to learn a lot from this campaign because of the unique nature of Trump,” says the think tank head. “I’m one of the people who is feeling a lot of angst.” If he starts a media company, says Ayres, “It will be far harder to heal the wounds that he opened up, and far harder to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.”

Despite conservatives’ propensity to speak in the past tense about 2016, preparing glumly for a Clinton administration and doling out the blame, one uncomfortable fact remains: the crazy uncle is still in the room, and he may control the proceedings for quite a while longer. “It’s in Trump’s nature to continue to want to be relevant, to have people come to Trump Tower to lick his boots for years to come,” says the conservative who served in the latter Bush’s administration. “He’ll remain a force, unless someone takes him out.”

As for the people who hope Trump will simply melt away on November 9 and remove the threat of collapse from the Republican Party? “I appreciate but do not share their optimism,” says Soltis Anderson. “I feel like we are in for a pretty long civil war.”