Trump made cruelty the GOP's defining principle -- and his would-be successors are rushing to outdo him: columnist

Donald Trump recruited voters who take pleasure in their opponents' pain, and his would-be successors are trying to keep that spiteful coalition together.

The former president assembled a coalition of alienated and distrustful voters who were willing to sacrifice American democracy to preserve white supremacy, according to New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall, and now imitators like Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz and Ron DeSantis are hoping to ride that same path to the White House in 2024.

"Trump's success in transforming the party has radically changed the path to the Republican presidential nomination," Edsall writes. "The traditional elitist route through state and national party leaders, the Washington lobbying and interest group community and top fund-raisers across the country no longer assures success, and may, instead, prove a liability."

Racist voters have always been around, and have historically moved back and forth between the two major parties, but Trump successfully attracted that electorate by cruelly taunting his Democratic opponents -- and now they expect other Republican candidates to do the same.

"The kind of pain voters would like to see inflicted on their adversaries varies by ideology, partisanship and issue," Edsall writes.

There's plenty of polling to suggest Trump didn't change the Republican Party all that much, Edsall wrote, but he did make cruelty its defining feature.

"Trump has mobilized and consolidated a cohort that now exercises control over the Republican Party, a renegade segment of the electorate, perhaps as large as one third of all voters, who disdain democratic principles, welcome authoritarian techniques to crush racial and cultural liberalism, seek to wrest away the election machinery and suffer the mass delusion that Trump won last November," Edsall writes.

"Regardless of whether Trump runs again, he has left an enormous footprint — a black mark — on American politics, which will stain elections for years to come," he adds.