How Trump got diversity right and built a GOP coalition for the future

It turns out that everyone underestimated how a proposal for mass deportations could bring Americans together. Donald Trump assembled the biggest, most diverse GOP coalition in decades while running further to the right on immigration, crime, and culture than perhaps any major-party presidential candidate in US history. Trump inveighed against unchecked illegal immigration in harsh and lurid terms — and picked up Hispanic voters. Trump pledged to reverse “a brutal plague of bloodshed, crime, chaos, misery and death in our land” — and won more young voters. Trump famously dethroned the Republican establishment in 2016, and now has crushed underfoot its theory of how to forge a GOP future in an increasingly diverse country. Trump may win the most electoral votes of a Republican since George H.W.Bush in 1988.

In the 1980s, America was roughly 80% white, and Hispanics and Asians were less than 7% and 2% of the population respectively.Now, Hispanics and Asians are 19.5% and 6.4%, while whites have declined to 75% of the population. We’ve long been told these changes are a herald of doom for the Republican Party, and the GOP can only survive by softening its edges. This was the admonition of the famous “autopsy” commissioned by the Republican National Committee after Mitt Romney’s loss to Barack Obama in 2012.According to that report, the divisive policies and tone of Romney’s GOP — yes, the resolutely polite, earnest and scrupulous Mitt Romney — were dooming the party to demographic extinction. To win Hispanics, the autopsy insisted, Republicans “must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform,” the establishment’s favorite euphemistic phrase for a mass amnesty.“It does not matter,” it maintained, “what we say about education, jobs or the economy; if Hispanics think we do not want them here, they will close their ears to our policies.”And the party’s tone had to change.The autopsy intoned that “we must emphas...