What happens to an entrenched two-party system when one party undermines the system?

This is why political parties exist. They are institutions built to hold and maintain power for a political group. They have locked down pathways to that power to limit the likelihood that it will move out of their grasp. The value to voters is in spotting a D or an R next to a name in a race they haven’t paid attention to and getting a sense of what that candidate is likely to advocate. It’s a well-oiled system that rewards involvement.

There have been rumblings about the formation of a third political party by Republicans left in the political wilderness by the party’s shift during the Trump era. But that we call this a potential “third party” makes clear the challenge in doing so. There are, of course, scores of other political parties that already exist; saying you’re going to form a third party is like saying you’re going to create a second dating app. All those other parties are small and mostly impotent because the two major parties have been successful at constraining upstarts.

It’s not a free market. It’s a duopoly.

As it turns out, this is also the problem. During the Trump era, those non-Trump Republicans had an alliance of convenience with Democrats. The political agenda was shared: Oust Trump and redirect the country. But that couldn’t last once Democrats were in power simply because the left’s agenda pointed in a different direction than the ones the former Republicans supported. They were left homeless, watching their party move right as they were standing still.

Much has been made of the way in which the Trump era left some Republicans in the cold. There’s been a lot of attention paid to party registrations following the violence of Jan. 6, for example, changes that make up only a very small part of the party’s base. More significant is the way in which the party’s former leaders have been pushed away, from Arizona Republicans censuring the wife of the party’s 2008 presidential nominee for opposing Trump last year to its 2012 nominee literally running for safety from a Trump crowd at the Capitol last month.

People forget that Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) was an explicit target of Trump’s mockery on that day. During his speech outside the White House that morning, Trump referred to an incident in which Romney was harassed by Trump supporters on a flight into Washington the previous day.

“I wonder if he enjoyed his flight in last night,” Trump said to laughter from the crowd. He taunted Romney for getting “slaughtered” in the 2012 election precisely two hours before the senator was hurriedly redirected away from an angry mob of Trump supporters inside the Capitol.

In a way, that encapsulated the shift in the party that left a number of Republicans behind. Trump’s rise was a function of his being a nontraditional Republican, one who was willing to amplify false claims and virulent rhetoric from the conservative media universe, which gave him a veneer of authenticity with that universe’s audience. Trump exploited a loophole in the system: Fox News spends a lot more time talking to Republican voters than does the Republican National Committee, giving a big advantage to people willing to fold into the Fox rhetorical ecosystem over those adhering to the GOP one. The party was built to institutionalize power but it wasn’t well built to protect that power. So once he seized the 2016 nomination, Trump spent the next few years wringing as much of the power from the GOP for his personal benefit as he could.

At the same time, he blended the party into the same media universe from which he emerged. As I’ve written before, this is the tension that the party is currently working out, whether it is primarily a vehicle for legislation it uses to win over voters or a vehicle for engaging in cultural fights that let it win elections that it can use to pass legislation. In fairness, the question has already been resolved toward the latter; the tension that remains is mostly the party leadership fully coming to terms with the new path.

This isn’t simply an academic review of the changes underway on the United States’ political right, though. The shift toward culture fights driven by conservative media has real implications for the evolution and expectations of that group of Americans, including an erosion in the democratic system the GOP was built to leverage.

There’s no real debate that a primary motivating factor for Trump’s rise was not only his embrace of cultural fights but an embrace of those that focused on a sense of White disempowerment. That his 2015 campaign announcement focused on the purported threat of criminal immigrants was not a coincidence; that his campaign benefited once the blowback over his comments garnered national media attention wasn’t either. There is a lot of data showing that Trump voters were disproportionately motivated by a sense that White Americans were being disadvantaged by changes in culture. Trump’s proposal to “make America great again” was understood to be a commitment to unwind those changes.

Trump used that resentment as a weapon against the GOP quite effectively. But he also used it more broadly as a weapon against all American institutional power, including the democratic process itself. Before the 2016 election and, from a bigger platform, before the 2020 election, he amplified unfounded claims about the flaws in the electoral system to try to backstop his potential electoral loss. When he did lose the popular vote in 2016 and the presidency in 2020, he claimed that those losses were unfair or the result of cheating. He successfully leveraged skepticism about the system to aid his own ambitions to retain power.

Under Trump, the Republican Party moved dramatically away from the precepts that power in the United States should be shared and determined through elections. The Washington Post’s Christopher Ingraham documented research showing how Republicans were far more likely than Democrats to embrace “democratic backsliding” — a “retreat from upholding democratic norms,” as one expert put it. The party’s rhetoric “is closer to authoritarian parties, such as AKP in Turkey and Fidesz in Hungary,” political scientist Anna Lührmann told Ingraham.

A poll released on Thursday from the American Enterprise Institute measures the difference between the parties on the question of how well the system works.

“There is a great deal of skepticism among the public about how well democracy reflects the interests of everyday Americans as opposed to the wealthy and well-connected,” the poll’s authors write. “The view that the political system is rigged against conservatives and people who hold traditional values is also widespread, particularly on the political right.”

Especially worrisome: One-third of Americans agreed with the statement that “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” That includes more than half of Republicans.

Evan McMullin, a former government official who ran an outside bid against Trump in 2016, addressed this sentiment in a tweet on Thursday.

“Hearing lots of comments lately about how Congressional Republicans fear Trump and his base,” he wrote. “That’s just part of it. Many of them also share his view that America isn’t intended to be pluralistic and sacrificing democracy to ensure that is necessary.”

This is anecdotal, but it comports with what the research has found.

The toxicity of all of this is obvious. We have an impermeable two-party system in which one party is sliding away from democratic elections, the core value proposition of the American system. Republicans who object are left without a political home. Republicans who still hope to wield power through the system but disagree with its direction are left trying to figure out how to appeal to voters who want something they won’t provide.

In an interview with Politico’s Tim Alberta, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley criticized her former boss’s politics.

“We need to acknowledge [Trump] let us down,” she told Alberta. “He went down a path he shouldn’t have, and we shouldn’t have followed him, and we shouldn’t have listened to him. And we can’t let that ever happen again.”

That conversation happened on Jan. 12, six days after the violence at the Capitol. Thirteen days after that, she offered a slightly different assessment of Trump in a Fox News interview. Trump’s actions after the election were “not great,” she said, as she did to Alberta. But impeaching him was a “political game.”

“They beat him up before he got into office. They’re beating him up after he leaves office,” she said in that interview. “I mean, at some point — I mean, give the man a break. I mean, move on.”

Trump accelerated a shift in the Republican Party that Haley pinned on Trump when speaking off-camera. On Fox News, talking to the Republican base, she blamed the Democrats for similarly trying to hold Trump to account.

That distinction is as pat a summary of the moment as you’ll find.