Donald Trump mural. Credit: Thierry Ehrmann
In the year 2000, George W. Bush's signal political achievement was uniting an already fractious Republican Party behind him and coming within 550,000 votes of Gore-Lieberman in the general election. His father's re-election campaign in 1992 was undone by a rebellion in the party led by Newt Gingrich. In 1996 Pat Buchanan with his "pitchfork rebellion" toppled eventual nominee Robert Dole in the New Hampshire primary. Bush won election as a "wartime president" in 2004, the only year since the 1980s the Republicans have won the presidential popular vote. In 2008 John McCain was toppled in the Iowa caucuses by evangelical preacher and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. Rick Santorum reprised Huckabee's role in 2012 as the last of several right-wing challengers standing, having won in Iowa and staying in the race against eventual nominee Mitt Romney until the April primaries.
The pattern is clear: for a quarter century a disgruntled and largely populist right wing has challenged the establishment Republican party for the party's presidential nomination. And the grievances of that right wing toward the party establishment have grown deeper and more acrimonious over the years. After 2008, when the election of Barack Obama coincided with a devastating financial and housing crisis, the right, stronger and angrier than ever, formed itself into an organized force, the Tea Party. The Tea Party regularly defeated established Republicans in state and local primaries, and forced the national party toward more and more radical positions by their increased representation in Congress and their willingness to obstruct the legislative process.
