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.
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a“ Steel Across America” event ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11th attacks on the Ellipse near the White House on Sept. 8, 2026 in Washington, D.C. President Trump welcomed 9/ 11 first responders to the Tunnel to Towers Foundation’ s“ Steel Across America” event featuring a 16,900- pound, 21- foot steel beam recovered.
For Trump, even 9/11 is an opportunity
There was a reason organizers of the 9/11 ceremony in Manhattan told President Trump he could not speak at this year’s memorial service.
A good one, it turns out.
Because in a speech he gave on Tuesday in Washington, he did exactly what they were presumably worried about — he made it about himself.
According to The New York Times, Trump had wanted a speaking role at the service, but the National Sept. 11 Memorial and Museum, which oversees the site, said no, as they’ve maintained for the past decade-plus that the venue and event should be nonpartisan.
Trump has long used awful tragedies to either puff himself up, trash political opponents, or sell lies to the American people.
He blamed a deadly plane crash at Washington National Airport last year on diversity, equity and inclusion policies. He blamed Puerto Ricans for the devastation they endured after Hurricane Maria in 2017. He reportedly considered withholding disaster relief after the California wildfires based on the way affected regions voted. In an interview on Fox News meant to commemorate the 75th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy, he used the occasion to slam former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi…with graves of the dead behind him.
And now, as we approach the 25th anniversary of what many New Yorkers consider the darkest day in modern history, Trump has done it again.
He told a rambling, nonsensical story — one he’s told before — about going to Ground Zero just after terrorists flew two commercial jets into the twin towers. In the story, which no one has been able to verify, despite multiple attempts, he says firefighters had to carry him out of One Liberty Plaza, also known as the U.S. Steel Building, because they thought it was about to collapse.
As CNN fact checker Daniel Dale notes, there’s no evidence Trump went into this building, especially at a time when NYPD and NYFD had locked down the area. There’s no evidence that building was collapsing — in fact, it was deemed structurally sound and reopened within two months of the attacks. There’s no evidence he was carried out of it by firefighters.
But the lie isn’t even the worst part. Pretend it was all true — why would the leader of our country, and a New Yorker, decide to make that tragic day about himself?
Because that’s who Donald Trump is. He’s a malignant narcissist.
He’s also, incidentally, a terrible and ineffectual president, who’s made ill-fated decisions that he has to keep defending, and there’s nothing he won’t do to make himself look and feel better.
Within the first two minutes of his speech, he was cravenly using 9/11 to justify and promote his dumb war in Iran — two events separated by 25 years and 6,000 miles.
“And I will tell you, we’re right now fighting because we have a certain nation that wanted a nuclear weapon, they were very close to getting it, and now they have no chance at getting it. They will never have a nuclear weapon. Iran will not have a nuclear weapon. And they’ve been punished greatly. As you know, we’ve really taken it to them.”
As a New Yorker who lived through 9/11, still one of the worst days of my life, I’m utterly sickened by Trump’s crass, political, and self-promotional framing of that awful day.
And I’m relieved he won’t be given a platform to do it again on Friday’s anniversary in lower Manhattan.
Because for Trump, everything is his for the taking, and absolutely nothing is sacred.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.