Trump didn’t remake the Republican Party — he recognized what it had already become. For decades, the GOP marketed itself as a principled crusade for small government, morality, and fiscal restraint. In reality, it was a franchise built on grievance, a loyalty network for people convinced history had cheated them. Trump’s innovation was not ideological but psychological: he replaced policy with personality, turning resentment into identity.
He saw that Republican politics had evolved into a culture industry — one where outrage is the product, loyalty is the subscription, and the campaign never ends. Every indictment became proof of persecution; every scandal became marketing. Trump isn’t the author of the decay, just its genius editor. He industrialized the long con the party had been running on itself: a theology of losing that made victimhood a virtue.
What Trump understood — and critics still miss — is that the modern GOP doesn’t produce policy. It produces a feeling: belonging through resentment.
~ Dunneagin
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