Letter to the Editor

Letter to the Editor: After “E Pluribus, None? A Recent History of the Republican Party”

It seems that former President Barack Obama’s terms in the Oval Office caused a radical shift within the Republican Party from general conservatism to right wing populism. Ellen Jordan ’26 argued in E Pluribus, None? that this radical shift was a response to the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), more commonly known as Obamacare. According to Jordan, Republicans viewed Obamacare as a sign that the Democratic Party was more willing than ever to increase government spending. She also claimed that this belief caused fiscally-conservative Republicans, who believed that government spending and intervention is harmful, to double down on their fiscal-conservatism. The modern Republican Party, however, follows a cult-of-personality more than any concrete principles; Jordan noted this “new identity” in her article, but it’s important to acknowledge that the political analysis she used in her article is no longer applicable to a transformed Party.

The Republican Party of today is Donald Trump; Trump is the Republican Party.

It doesn’t matter how absurd Trump is, his followers will forever follow him, something that has been demonstrated not a few times. Trump can make the most absurd conspiracy theories and the most blatantly obvious lies become the truth to some.

To understand this shift, it’s important to recognize the Republican Party’s push away from fiscal-conservatism and towards right-wing populism: Trump has morphed the Republican Party into a cult-of-personality. 

Sure, certain Republicans still declare their commitment to a smaller government by decreasing social securities and lowering taxes, two ways to facilitate trickle-down economics. However, trickle-down economics simply doesn't work. Trump’s tax cuts saw the bulk of the benefits going to the wealthy; as the NYT Editorial Board put it, “the idea that the tax cuts were going to line workers’ pockets was always a mirage.” 

There are certainly Republicans who swore against Obamacare because of their resolute belief in fiscal-conservatism (for example, then-Speaker of the House Paul Ryan in 2016), but Trump and the ensuing tsunami of Trump-like politicians are not part of this bloc; the most influential donors to the Republican Party espouse entirely different cultural values than a belief in limited government.

Trump’s platform was never tax cuts; it was just limiting immigration and “draining the swamp” by ridding Washington of corrupt politicians. Right-wing populists brand themselves as not-your-typical-politician. Trump’s own campaign website introduces him as someone who “could not sit by and watch career politicians continue bleeding this country dry.” He professed to voters that, in contrast to politicians who listen only to the elites, he would value the average American’s opinion.

Thus, Trump and his followers rallied against Obamacare because it was “Obama”-care, because Obama represented the establishment and Trump’s political rivals. “Obamacare” is itself a Republican-coined term; only a third of Americans understand that Obamacare is the ACA. In fact, a columnist argued in an article for The Miami Herald that this partisan labeling is “a trap set by…conservatives and the healthcare industry,” and not a mere semantic difference. Perhaps Republican voters oppose not the ACA but only “Obamacare” and what it represents.

Obamacare certainly is a policy that many Trump supporters rely on. According to the Pew Research Center, more than 60 percent of voters support some form of nationalized healthcare, including over a third of Republican voters. Some polls, like one conducted by Reuters, report higher numbers, predicting that over 50 percent of Republican voters support Medicare for All (a program that, if legislated, is even more “radical” than Obamacare).

All this is to say the hatred for Obamacare, as American economist Paul Krugman pointed out in an article for the NYT, is “deep” and “unreasoning”—a product of today’s Trumpian politics. Since Trump exerts near-complete control over his party, the Republican Party has indeed become very different from its fiscal-oriented past.

And so it is impossible to use the political analysis of yesteryear, which Jordan may have assumed applicable to today, when discussing the motivations of the modern Republican Party.