Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.
Donald Trump’s domination of the primaries made it official: He has successfully routed the GOP establishment.
Some would argue, with ample evidence, that this happened a long time ago. Particularly in Congress, the party is divided into three sometimes overlapping factions: Reaganites, pragmatists and populists, the last being Trump’s “MAGA” faction. Politicians from the non-MAGA factions have been retreating, retiring or reinventing themselves in Trump’s image for years now.
If Republican Sens. Mike Lee of Utah, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Tim Scott of South Carolina and Marco Rubio of Florida aren’t fully MAGA in their hearts, you wouldn’t know it from their current public personas. Other Republicans, including former Sens. Rob Portman of Ohio, Jeff Flake of Arizona, and Bob Corker of Tennessee, along with former Reps. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, Eric Cantor of Virginia, and Liz Cheney of Wyoming, were either shown the door or fled for it themselves. And outside institutions such as the Conservative Political Action Committee, or CPAC, and the Heritage Foundation have repositioned themselves as MAGA organs.
That process has accelerated since Trump effectively locked up the Republican nomination for president for the third time. Over the past few months, non-MAGA Republicans such as Reps. Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, Patrick McHenry of North Carolina and Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington have announced that they will be leaving Congress. And Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, the last actual avatar of “the GOP establishment,” declared that he would not run to lead the Republican caucus again and went on to endorse Trump.
The takeover is culminating with the Trumpian captivity of the Republican National Committee. There’s virtually no Republican establishment left that isn’t synonymous with the Trump establishment.
Michael Whatley, the former head of the North Carolina GOP, is the new national chairman, having earned Trump’s favor as an unrestrained booster of his claim that the 2020 election was stolen. Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law, is serving alongside Whatley as co-chair. And Chris LaCivita, a top Trump campaign adviser, will run day-to-day operations. On Monday, they began a wholesale purge of staffers deemed insufficiently loyal.
Trump’s son Donald Jr. agrees that it’s official. In an interview with Newsmax Sunday, he said the old GOP establishment “no longer exists. … People have to understand that America first, the MAGA movement, is the new Republican Party. That is conservatism today.”
Now, one can quibble over whether a political philosophy that traces itself back to Edmund Burke and the American founding can be transformed by the installment of Trump apparatchiks at the RNC. Trump himself might even agree with those quibbles.
Trump has previously described himself as a “ nationalist,” and he at least partly rejected the conservative label in an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Monday. “People say, ‘You’re conservative,’ ” Trump said. “I’m not conservative. You know what I am? I’m a man of common sense, and a lot of conservative policies are common sense.”
Whatever we call him, what’s clear is that Trump thinks his team can go it alone. At a recent Virginia rally, he declared that MAGA “represents 96%, and maybe 100%” of the GOP. “We’re getting rid of the Romneys of the world. We want to get Romneys and those (like him) out.”
Normally, general election candidates try to expand their coalitions. Primary election exit polls — and the actual results — belie Trump’s claim that the party is now almost pure MAGA.
“In each of the six states with entrance and exit polls,” a CNN analysis found, “a sizable minority of the GOP electorate identified directly as a part of the MAGA, or ‘Make America Great Again,’ movement, ranging from about one-third in California, Virginia and New Hampshire to nearly half in Iowa.” Put another way, between half and two-thirds of those primary-voting Republicans don’t identify as MAGA. Most will still likely hold their nose and vote for Trump in November, but that’s not proof that the GOP is totally Trumpian.
The national GOP leadership, however, is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Trumpism. That behooves a movement that has often been as concerned with taking over the party as taking over the government. In Republican primaries, Trump has tended to back loyalists with dim general election prospects over more traditional Republicans with a better chance of actually winning House and Senate seats. The MAGA movement seems convinced that a purer party dedicated to Trump is for some reason better than one saddled with the remnants of the old GOP coalition.
For all practical purposes, their wish has been granted. That’s good for the movement if Trump wins in November. But if he loses, they’ll have no one to blame but themselves. After all, they’re the establishment now.
First posted March 12, 2024. (C)2024 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Americans across the political spectrum have continued to ask about the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s connections among the political elite. (Angela Weiss/AFP)
A view of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on June 25, 2026. President Donald Trump jolted Republicans during a fiery appearance at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, scrapping a housing bill signing ceremony and clashing behind closed doors with a party rebel who challenged him over the Iran war. Trump had been expected to sign the bipartisan housing.
Only Trump doesn’t care about housing
It was August 15, 2024. Then candidate Donald Trump stepped out of his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club’s columned clubhouse to a gaggle of reporters. He was flanked by tables of groceries and signs showing the rising cost of food. Also on one of the tables was a dollhouse, meant to represent the equally alarming rise in housing prices.
It was a speech about the economy, the single most important issue of the 2024 election cycle, full of promises that went right to the heart of Americans’ anxieties. While former President Joe Biden and then Vice President Kamala Harris were contorting themselves to posture a good economy that just needed more time to recover from the pandemic, Trump was preying on voters’ very real fears of unaffordable gas, groceries, and homes. It was obviously a winning message.
In that speech, Trump promised, “We’re going to open up tracts of federal land for housing construction. We desperately need housing for people who can’t afford what’s going on now.”
As of mid-2023, there had been a housing shortage of nearly four million homes, according to the National Association of Realtors. Americans all over the country were either priced out of buying new homes due to low inventory, trapped in their existing homes by sky-high mortgage rates, or facing exorbitant rent hikes thanks to corporate investors buying up rental properties. Americans needed help, and Trump promised it.
Cut to March of 2026, when Trump reportedly told House Speaker Mike Johnson, “No one gives a sh*t about housing.”
That kind of thinking may explain why Trump this week suddenly announced he was canceling a signing ceremony for the bipartisan “21st Century ROAD to Housing Act,” a housing bill co-sponsored by Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Tim Scott that passed the House 358-32 and was approved in the Senate on Monday.
Trump instead demanded Congress pass the SAVE America Act, his controversial election grievance bill that doesn’t have enough Republican support to get passed in the Senate.
It’s just the latest in a line of policy self-owns where Trump has seemingly intentionally made life more difficult for Republicans hoping to keep their majority. Despite midterm elections occurring in the midst of a blistering economy and an unpopular war, they were surely hoping the housing bill would give them something — anything — to brag about when they returned home to their districts.
And very much to the contrary, Americans do give a sh*t about housing. According to a recent survey by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a whopping 79% say the cost of housing is extremely or very important to them. Eighty-three percent say Congress should take action on the issue — like it just did. Eighty-nine percent say the House and Senate need to work together to pass affordable housing legislation — like they just did. And 63% say they would be more likely to vote for a lawmaker if they helped pass legislation to build more affordable homes and lower housing costs — like they just did.
There aren’t many issues that unite Americans like housing does, and very few bipartisan policy wins Congress can point to, and yet, Trump is holding that bill hostage in order to get his pet project — which doesn’t even have the support of his own party — pushed through.
If you’re trying to make sense of something so nonsensical, as I’m sure many Republican lawmakers are, it’s certainly sad but not actually all that complicated. Trump said what he needed to get reelected and then promptly abandoned his promises in order to pursue his own self-interests, even if those interests are bad for Republicans and bad for voters.
That’s just the kind of guy he is.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.