Donald Trump is behind.

He trails in the pivotal postindustrial swing states
and is treading water in the Southern and Sun Belt states
— Arizona, Georgia and Nevada
— that could help him find an alternative path to 270 electoral votes.

In just a few months, Trump may join the exclusive club of two-time presidential losers.

Of course, it is still too early to make any real prediction about November.
But the sharp reversal in Trump’s electoral fortunes raises an obvious question worth thinking about now:

If Trump loses, and perhaps especially if he loses badly,
what comes next for the Republican Party?

As striking as the relative electoral weakness of the Trump-era Republican Party
is its total inability to either govern or police the boundaries of its coalition.

Trump himself has no program beyond his own prejudices and impulses.

“Build the wall” and “mass deportation now”
reflect a deep-seated hostility to nonwhite immigrants that has no basis other than #rank #bigotry.

“Stop the steal” and Trump’s broader obsession with so-called election integrity
is nothing more than an attempt to operationalize his core belief that he #cannot actually #lose an election, or anything for that matter.

Fittingly, the Trump-led Republican Party declined to devise a platform for the 2020 presidential election
and produced a set of Trump-esque #slogans for its 2024 one.

To the extent that there is a Republican agenda, it is a product of the hard-right #ideologues and conservative #organizations that
see Trump as a willing vessel and vehicle for their own interests.

Trump’s leadership has also occasioned the total collapse of the boundaries (such as they were)
separating the far-right #fringe of American politics from its #mainstream.

The former president provides license for
— and inspiration to
— a large crop of right-wing extremists
who disdain democracy and openly fantasize about the use of violence
to eliminate their political opponents.

“Some folks need killing,” Mark Robinson, the Republican Party’s nominee for governor in North Carolina, declared at a church event in June.

Trump’s Republican Party is a paradigmatically “#hollow” party,
according to the argument laid out by the political scientists Daniel #Schlozman and Sam #Rosenfeld
in “The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics.”

For all its activity, a hollow party “demonstrates fundamental #incapacities in organizing democracy.”

Its zombielike commitment to tax cuts and deregulation notwithstanding,
the Republican Party from this vantage point is little more than
“a personal vehicle for Trump’s vendettas and fantasies.”

It offers nothing to the public, they observe, “besides praise for its leader.”

So what happens if and when that leader loses yet another national election for his party?

What happens when,
️in the face of conditions that seem as favorable as they could be, ️
the Republican coalition led by Trump still falls short?
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/13/opinion/trump-republican-party-loss.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare