For the past two years, President Trump and his core supporters have governed by the mantra “We can just do stuff.” On Tuesday, voters replied, “So can we.” It did not go well for the Republican Party.
Voters did not ask for open borders on Tuesday, but they did ask for a deportation process that looks humane. They wanted a president focused on the economy instead of gold leaf in the Oval Office. Voters rejected a party that taxed them through tariffs, drove up gas prices through war and seemed more interested in construction projects in Washington, D.C., and social media meme wars than in middle-class struggles. They rejected a party driven by social media meme wars, subversive racism, a fondness for dictators and, at the end of the election, a weird fixation on Anakin Skywalker (whom they see as a symbol of young men’s political frustrations).
Voters want normal people in charge, and they took their wrath out on otherwise normal Republicans who refused to push back against the lunacy, corruption and incompetence within the G.O.P.
Republicans have spent years warning that a party unwilling to confront its radicals will be defined by them. They meant the Democrats, and pointed in particular at the democratic socialists working to take over the Democratic Party from the inside.
Now that warning applies to the G.O.P. The weirdo right will not stop in its attempt to take over the Republican Party, and party leadership must resist it or watch a group that openly declares its contempt for conservatism do to the G.O.P. what the democratic socialists are trying to do to the Democrats.
During the 2016 campaign, Ross Douthat warned, “If you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right.” A decade later, we have met it. It has borrowed the grievance politics, the identity obsessions and the contempt for dissent of the woke left, and it has dressed all of that in a rather Christless Christian nationalism. It intends to be the future of the Republican Party.
Consider how some of its leading lights spent the month before the election. For four consecutive Mondays, Peter Thiel, a billionaire, lectured on the Antichrist at a Masonic lodge in Nashville. The sessions drew William Wolfe, Andrew Isker and Joshua Haymes, prominent Christian nationalists. Mr. Wolfe’s Center for Baptist Leadership rallies online mobs against Southern Baptist pastors who resist his project and offer a gentle word about the culture.
Some of the funding behind this movement comes from Charles Haywood, who made his fortune selling a shampoo company. Mr. Haywood has written that his preferred government “will not be democratic,” that women “will not be permitted to choose career over family” and that men “will not be permitted to choose not to have a family” without “significant penalties.” He has written glowingly of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. His foundation has reportedly given the Claremont Institute nearly $400,000 since 2022, and it has funded American Reformer, a publication devoted to recapturing Christian institutions, and American Moment, a government staffing pipeline founded with JD Vance’s support.
Nate Fischer, who is a founder of American Reformer and runs the venture capital firm New Founding, belongs to Mr. Haywood’s men-only fraternal order and published its mission statement, which promise to curate a pool of ready-made ideologues in the case of regime change. Josh Abbotoy, who co-founded American Reformer, has written that America will need a “Protestant Franco.” In the same movement, pastors such as Joel Webbon argue for repealing the 19th Amendment.
The intellectual seriousness of this crowd was tested in 2024. James Lindsay, then an atheist provocateur, lightly rewrote “The Communist Manifesto” in the vocabulary of the New Right and submitted it to American Reformer under a pseudonym. “A rising spirit is haunting America,” it began, “the spirit of a true Christian Right.” American Reformer published it. When Mr. Lindsay revealed the hoax, the publication kept the piece online and called it a reasonable aggregation of New Right ideas.
These are not conservatives. They are progressives with a different set of enemies. My own denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America, barred American Reformer from having an exhibitor booth at its annual meeting, and it was right to do so.
This group is invested in the future of Vice President JD Vance as the agent of the change they want. At a National Conservatism conference in Jerusalem, which happened to be held on the anniversary of the Oct. 7 massacre, Mr. Wolfe said that “JD Vance is our guy.” According to Rod Dreher, he also suggested that conservative American Jews should know their place. Mr. Vance, for his part, has cultivated the weirdo right rather than confront it. He appears to be going along for the ride. Even after Tucker Carlson turned on President Trump and kept mainstreaming antisemitic conspiracy theories, Mr. Vance has not put any real distance between himself and the weirdo right.
The men who talk most about Christian nationalism have the least use for what Christ actually commanded. They have argued in print that “love your enemies” does not extend to their political opponents.
Normal Americans want none of it, and on Tuesday they said so. Despite the midterm results, the reaction on the weirdo right, led by a vocal group of Christian nationalists, grievance-mongers and others, has been to insist on doubling down on economic protectionism and a heavy-handed executive intent on governance through executive power. More of the same will lead only to further rejection.
If Republicans want those voters back, the party’s leaders, beginning with the man who wants to lead it in 2028, will have to reject the demands of the weirdo right. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida was able to govern a multiethnic and multiracial state with a winning coalition that put competence above meme wars and demands for American Caesars. So too have Gov. Brian Kemp in Georgia, Gov. Greg Abbott in Texas and other Republicans focused more on their states and less on group chats.
Until the G.O.P. rejects the weird, the fringe and the grievance hustlers, Democrats will happily remind voters whom the G.O.P. keeps around.
Erick Erickson is the host of his namesake radio show.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post I’m a Republican. We Have Let Too Many Weirdos Into Our Party. appeared first on New York Times.
