Politicians have always taken their own parties to task to prove their independence come election time, but Donald Trump has turned it into a bloodsport with his vicious attacks on the Republican party, Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman wrote Monday.
Worse still, he notes, Trump has opened the door for his closest allies and rivals for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination to join in his ugly bashing of the party.
In his column, Waldman wrote, "As the 2024 GOP presidential primary gets going, it’s becoming clear that Trump has remade presidential politics in an under-appreciated way: He has made it practically a requirement that GOP candidates campaign on open hostility toward their own party."
Pointing to Trump's recently calling unnamed GOP lawmakers "freaks, neocons, globalists, open-borders zealots and fools,” Waldman noted that prominent Republicans seeking to raise their national profiles have joined in the attacks.
"Obviously, candidates who do this are mostly posturing. But the 2024 campaign is already testing just how far candidates, at least Republican ones, will have to go in making attacks on their own party establishment a key pillar of their campaigns," he wrote before adding that the former president has proved that bashing the party you represent can be a winning strategy.
"Trump showed that naked contempt for one’s own party wouldn’t necessarily cause a problem in the general election," he wrote before recalling, "In 2016, 89 percent of Republicans voted for him, and in 2020 the figure was 92 percent, about the same as previous GOP nominees had garnered.
"Once the general election starts, negative partisanship takes hold, with voters motivated strongly by their hatred of the other side."
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