Veteran newsman Dan Rather believes President Donald Trump has blown up something Republicans spent generations building, and the bill is coming due right before the midterms.
In a Thursday post on his Substack newsletter, Steady, Rather wrote with his team that Trump has wasted the extraordinary advantages his party held when he returned to power and is now driving off the very voters Republicans have leaned on for decades.
Rather pointed out that the GOP entered 2025 controlling the White House and both chambers of Congress, with a Supreme Court majority Trump helped stack and an economy he argued President Joe Biden had steered out of the pandemic in strong shape.
“Trump has not only squandered this political bounty, but he has severely damaged much of American democracy and the Republican Party in the process,” Rather wrote.
The longtime anchor traced the party’s long game to Barry Goldwater’s lopsided 1964 loss, which he said pushed Republicans toward the “Southern Strategy” and its appeals to white voters angry over civil rights legislation. Over the following decades, he wrote, the party built out think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, conservative talk radio and Fox News, a deep bench of state and local candidates and a pipeline of conservative judges.
Rather argued Trump dropped the subtlety his predecessors relied on, writing that “his racist and divisive rants, sprinkled with lie after lie, replaced the more subtle style used by his predecessors.” In Trump’s second term, he added, the guardrails from Trump’s first go-around vanished.
“Any independence the party might have had during Trump 1.0 was gone, replaced by loyalty tests and presidential retribution,” Rather wrote.
Now, he argued, the plan is backfiring. Citing reporting from The New York Times, Rather pointed to a dramatic swing of white working-class voters away from Trump, driven largely by the economy and the war with Iran.
“The great irony of this midterm election is the disaffected white voters, whom Republicans have so long relied on, and who guaranteed Trump’s wins, are suddenly heading for the exits,” he wrote.
Rather laid the blame squarely on GOP leaders who stuck with Trump.
“Because the Republican Party chose to back rather than repudiate Trump, not once but twice, it badly damaged 60 years of meticulous planning and the possibility of political domination for years to come,” he wrote.
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