Trump remade the GOP in his own image to reject Obamas overhauled Democrats

Donald Trump has made history: Not only by returning to the White House four years after his expulsion from it, but also by founding a new American political party in his own image. He’s consolidated a new coalition under an old name, a rare feat we’ve seen before in America’s past, most recently achieved by Trump’s former predecessor.Today and perhaps for decades to come, the Republican Party is the Trump Party while the Democratic Party is the Barack Obama Party.Following two transitional presidents, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, Obama presided over the assembly of what was in reality a new party under the Democratic Party’s banner. To the older Democratic constituencies of organized labor and African Americans, Obama and his allies welded former moderate Republicans whose great causes were Planned Parenthood and environmentalism. Financial backing came from Hollywood, long affiliated with Democrats, and from Silicon Valley and Wall Street libertarians who combined liberalism on social issues with free-market conservative economics. In the new Obama party, the hierarchical organizations of the past, with their bosses and patronage employees, were eclipsed by new urban machines based on nonprofits, many funded by city, state or federal funds.  Those ideologues — including environmentalists and race- and gender-studies departments on university campuses — devised the party line, expecting voters to support the Democrats on the basis of their race and gender.In return, members of these abstract categories were promised targeted and different benefits. The Obama Party that took shape in the 2010s has achieved a near-monopoly of political power in its homelands — big cities and college towns.

In 2024, nine of the 10 most populous American cities had Democratic mayors; in 2000, four of those same had Republican mayors.Even in red states like Texas, big cities and university towns today are usually blue.But this new Democratic coalition has strugg...