Ignoring Donald Trump Is the Least-Bad Republican Approach

The Republican Party has — this is not news — a Donald Trump problem. What it does not have is a consistent Donald Trump strategy. There really is no good answer, but the least-bad one is to give Trump as little attention as possible.

The problem is straightforward. As I wrote immediately after the 2020 election, there are two Republican Party voter bases: the Donald Trump party and what you might call the Paul Ryan party. There is more overlap among the two than you might think from listening to media and political arguments, but there are clearly voters that each party has been able to reach that the other repels. Taken together, the GOP is, or at any rate was at the time, agonizingly close to assembling a coalition that could win the House, the Senate, and the White House — yet, since 2018, it has narrowly lost all three.

About the Author

Dan McLaughlin

Dan McLaughlin is a senior writer at National Review Online and a fellow at National Review Institute.

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The Republican Party has — this is not news — a Donald Trump problem. What it does not have is a consistent Donald Trump strategy. There really is no good answer, but the least-bad one is to give Trump as little attention as possible.

The problem is straightforward. As I wrote immediately after the 2020 election, there are two Republican Party voter bases: the Donald Trump party and what you might call the Paul Ryan party. There is more overlap among the two than you might think from listening to media and political arguments, but there are clearly voters that each party has been able to reach that the other repels. Taken together, the GOP is, or at any rate was at the time, agonizingly close to assembling a coalition that could win the House, the Senate, and the White House — yet, since 2018, it has narrowly lost all three.