Donald Trump's Tilt Toward Convention
As Donald Trump jettisons his “America First” campaign promises at an accelerating pace, the populist nationalist political movement that roared into power with him is beginning to resemble a paper tiger.
Trump’s march to the GOP nomination last spring demonstrated there’s a substantial audience within the party’s rank and file—particularly among older and blue-collar Republicans—for the nationalist movement’s insular themes of resistance to trade, immigration, and foreign alliances, and embrace of government spending that benefits economically strained workers and retirees.
But Trump’s tumultuous first months in office have shown with equal clarity that such an agenda has extremely little institutional support inside the GOP beyond a constellation of sympathetic media outlets (like Breitbart News) and talk-radio and cable-television hosts (such as Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity). Lacking many champions in Congress, think tanks, conservative interest groups, or the business community, many of the movement’s most distinctive ideas—say, confronting China over trade or protecting the mostly white older population from budget cuts—have been rapidly losing ground to more conventional GOP interests and priorities.
“Within the Republican Party, there is not a lot of institutional support for what we understood to be Trumpism during the campaign,” said Peter Wehner, a frequent Trump critic who ran the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives for George
