Can the GOP find another conduit for its base’s anti-establishment anger?

There were a few ways in which he did this. He was defiantly and unavoidably nonpresidential, rejecting the norms (and mores) expected of the position. He directly insisted he wasn’t part of the establishment, pledging to “drain the swamp” even as he rolled around in it happily. And he explicitly told his supporters at rallies and in interviews that he and they were the real elites — simultaneously grouping together Americans powerful in culture and politics and rejecting that power.

With Trump now on the sidelines — in the unsubtle manner of Spike Lee at a Knicks game, anyway — the Republican Party is trying to figure out what its next phase looks like. The tension at the heart of that effort, though, is that Trump coalesced a powerful anti-elite strain of political thought within the base that first gained significant traction with Sarah Palin’s ascendancy in the 2008 presidential campaign and blossomed in the tea party era. How does the party establishment keep that energy engaged in Republican politics without also being centered around Trump?

At the outset, we’ll note that the idea the party won’t be centered around Trump is not necessarily the default assumption at the moment. Polling has shown that Trump’s support is not as fervent throughout the Republican electorate as it used to be, but there’s not much of an indication from higher-quality polls that his support in presidential primary polling is waning. Such polls include different wording and candidates — and are, of course, very, very, very, very early — but there’s not much difference in where Trump is now than where he was a year ago or even a few months ago. If the election were held today, it seems safe to assume that Trump would be the nominee.

As The Washington Post’s Michael Scherer and Josh Dawsey reported on Sunday, the midterms will be a significant test of how the party moves forward. Many in the party, particularly those who were muted or drowned out in the Trump era, are looking to re-exert influence. Meanwhile, the angry, anti-establishment arm of the right has splintered. That’s in part because Trump has been pushed closer to the margin and in part because of the ways in which being anti-establishment can manifest have metastasized.

Consider the coronavirus vaccine. Trump would love to be the face of the vaccination effort, the world’s salvation for speeding the availability of vaccines. He overstates the credit he is due, as is his way, but by elevating the subject, he has also made himself vulnerable to the way in which the vaccines have become a focus of anti-establishment anger.

While much of the rhetoric about vaccines is ostensibly about mandates (as with the protests in Canada), opposition to the vaccines is often instead simply opposition to something that “they” — scientists, liberals, the government — want you to do. When Fox News hosts elevate skepticism about the vaccines’ efficacy, that’s not about mandates. It’s about running a contrarian narrative. So when Trump tries to walk the line between mandates (he opposes them) and vaccination (he’s for it), he runs into anger from his natural base. He is siding with the elites who want fewer people to die of covid-19! What a sellout!

This actually predates the election and the pandemic to some extent. The rise of QAnon was a Trump-adjacent consolidation of an explicit anti-elite sentiment. Trump worked, apparently successfully, to keep the Q folks in the fold. After the election, though, the conspiracy theories went in a thousand directions. Trump has tried to corral the sentiment, to keep his hold over that segment of the right, but it’s impossible since it’s often contradictory. Even within his team of attorneys, the idea that the election was stolen by voting machines didn’t sit happily alongside the idea that it was stolen with rampant illegal voting (neither of which is true, of course). Millions of Americans have been primed to accept wild conspiracy theories as accurate, and so various hucksters are selling a vast smorgasbord of options.

That’s the opportunity for the GOP establishment: If the substantial fringe is torn between various false beliefs, there may be space to consolidate around reality. But that works better in state and local races where the GOP has an advantage. It is useful in winning primaries in red districts.

The question is 2024. In a hard-fought national election, is there a Republican who can both soothe the nerves of less-extreme donors as well as spur the conspiracy theorists to come out and vote? I mean, Trump can; his whole thing was keeping the loudest voices yelling the same thing while the donors and the establishment passed the policies and approved the judges they wanted.

Some seem to think that the strategy used by Glenn Youngkin (R) to win election as Virginia’s governor might be the path, centering on opposition to President Biden and on culture-war fights while paying quiet lip service to Trump. Perhaps it will be — in part because being anti-Biden seems like it might be enough for pretty much any Republican at this point. But that also depends on the absence of a primary candidate who can effectively organize the fringe, and the Virginia GOP, which held a convention to pick Youngkin, did not allow such a candidate to emerge.

One thing that seems clear is that the view espoused by Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) on CNN’s “State of the Nation” on Sunday is not realistic.

“The battle for the soul of the Republican Party,” host Jake Tapper asked — “are you losing it?”

“Like I said, we have until 2024,” Hogan replied. “Right now, I think we have made tremendous progress, because we went from about 80-some percent that wanted to reelect Donald Trump to 50. That’s a huge drop.”

To the extent that this actually captures reality, which isn’t much, this isn’t an indication that moderate Republicans like Hogan are winning the battle for the soul of the party. It’s a measure of the fact that the establishment is advantaged by a splintering of the anti-establishment arm of the party. That was enough for the GOP leadership to hold power from 2010 to 2016, but it was not enough to win the presidency in 2012.