What to do after Trump? Next-gen Republicans have no clue

Let’s say Donald Trump drops out of the 2024 presidential race. What happens then? 

First there is the political fight for the GOP presidential nomination. According to polls, Ron DeSantis would jump into the lead in Trump’s absence. 

Time will tell whether DeSantis can win. But win or lose, he is already the de facto leader of next-generation Republicans as they try to define the party’s future in the post-Trump era. 

The biggest current problem for this next generation is the failure to get beyond Trump’s populist success in selling anger and grievance to excite online donations and right-wing talk shows. 

Last week, next-generation Republicans put on a Trump-like show in Congress by approving a censure resolution against a Democrat, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), for leading impeachment hearings against Trump.

Also last week,  the younger generation of Republicans in Congress put on a clownish competition to get credit for a resolution to impeach President Biden.

The resolution lacked winning support even among Republicans. 

But as it was being voted on, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) confronted Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) on the House floor and charged her with trying to undermine her use of the resolution to appeal for online donations from far-right, Trump-backing Republicans. 

The Daily Beast reported that Greene got personal by calling Boebert a “little bitch,” after accusing her of copying her own effort to impeach Biden.

What is becoming clear is that even if Trump drops out of the race the future of the party is still being shaped by the enduring power of his appeals to racial division, fear, and grievances. 

GOP primary voters told a CBS poll last month that their top priority in a presidential candidate is someone to “challenge woke ideas,” among Democrats. An unnamed candidate who makes “liberals angry,” was not far behind with 57 percent support. 

This is a political party still avoiding the conversation about its future. 

“Is there a market for a Republican who will focus on the future…a positive agenda?” asked Frank Donatelli, former director of political affairs for the Reagan White House. “Maybe when Republicans finally get tired of losing, they’ll return to the party’s historic traditions that worked well for a long time,” 

But what is that ‘positive agenda,’ in the minds of the party’s next generation? What is that winning agenda? 

As the current leading challenger to Trump in the primaries, DeSantis is campaigning by being a stealthily Trump-like candidate. He presents himself as Trump, pursuing the same culture wars but without all the legal problems. 

He is campaigning as the governor who signed an abortion ban that takes effect only six weeks after a woman becomes pregnant. 

He backed laws designed to intimidate gay and transgender people. He put into law a ban on teaching diversity, equity, and inclusion in Florida universities. 

He has shown exceptional hostility to the First Amendment, even supporting a measure to make it easier for high-profile people to win defamation suits against people who write critically about them.

DeSantis created a state election police force that disproportionately targeted people with criminal records in black neighborhoods after Florida voters restored voter rights to felons in 2018.  

David Jolly, a former Republican congressman from Florida, recently said: “DeSantis is a cultural warrior who wants to take us back 100 years and believes he can use the Constitution to that end and ultimately has a very dark vision of what America will be.”

In fact, DeSantis seems to have no argument with Trump’s authoritarian instincts. 

Falling in line with most of his fellow next-generation Republicans, DeSantis says he is open to pardoning Trump and the rioters convicted of a violent riot at the Capitol designed to stop Congress from certifying the election of President Joe Biden. 

In other words, he is open to excusing an attempt to overthrow American democracy. 

DeSantis is a Harvard- and Yale-educated Republican with the ability to be even more disciplined than Trump in pursuing Trump-like culture wars and authoritarianism.

The main problem with the current state of the party, according to DeSantis and other next-generation Republicans, is that Trump keeps losing elections.  

“We’ve developed a culture of losing in this party,” DeSantis told conservatives meeting in Nevada a few weeks ago. He pointed to the party’s poor showing in the 2018 midterms, the 2020 presidential race and the 2022 midterms. 

Other Republicans point to the party’s losses without connecting them to pointless, endless culture wars promoted by Trump. 

“[Republicans] have lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections…,” former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley told the Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this year as she launched her own bid for the nomination. “If you are tired of losing, then put your trust in a new generation.” 

And Mike Pompeo, Trump’s former Secretary of State, is in the ‘Amen’ chorus about Trump leading the party to defeat. “We were told we’d get tired of winning, but I’m tired of losing,” Pompeo said when he was still considering a run for the 2024 nomination. “And so are most Republicans.” 

But most of Trump’s opponents want to win with more culture wars and remain blind to evidence that it is a losing ticket. They might be worse than Trump. 

Juan Williams is an author and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.