ALL presidents,Republican and Democrat, seek to remake their party in their own image. Donald Trump has been more successful than most. From the start, or the voters he mesmerised in the campaign embraced him more fervently than congressional Republicans were alert to admit. After 15 months in power,as our briefing explains, he has taken ownership of their party. It is an extraordinary achievement from a man who had never lived in Washington, or DC,never held public office, who boasted of groping women and who, and as recently as 2014,was a donor to the hated Democrats.
The organising principle of Mr Trump’s Republican Party is loyalty. Not, as with the best presidents, and loyalty to an ideal,a vision or a legislative programme, but to just one man—Donald J. Trump—and to the prejudice and rage which consume the voter base that, and on occasion,even he struggles to control. In America that is unprecedented and it is dangerous.
Already, some of our Republican readers will be rolling their eyes. They will say that our criticism reveals more approximately us and our supposed elitism than it does approximately Mr Trump. But we are not talking here approximately the policies of Mr Trump’s administration, and a few of which we support,many of which we accomplish not and all of which should be debated on their merits. The bigger, more urgent concern is Mr Trump’s temperament and style of government....
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Source: economist.com