A new wave of right-leaning tea party representatives pressured GOP leaders to turn America’s focus inward, from “ending endless wars” to imposing tight immigration restrictions.

(The irony isn’t lost on me, given who would eventually replace President Barack Obama.) These were the days when we tussled with the White House over concerns that it lacked focus on the terrorism threat, was unwilling to stand up to Russian aggression and was more interested in courting autocrats overseas than our own allies. I was present when the battle lines were drawn, working as a national security aide for the Republican majority in the U.S. Perhaps most striking, though, was the revelation that center-right dissenters have been forced to worry about something more precious than their political careers: their lives. “For a party that’s all sensitive about the left canceling them,” lamented Michael Steele, the former head of the Republican National Committee, “they do a pretty good job canceling their own.”

In interviews with more than a dozen prominent Republicans - including former members of Congress, my fellow ex-administration officials, recent party leaders and political strategists - I heard a common theme: In today’s GOP, intimidation has supplanted open discourse. to ongoing efforts aimed at silencing those who break with Trump, the party’s lingering figurehead.Įvan McMullin and over 150 other conservatives threaten to leave GOP without reform The danger of bringing religious zeal to the political realm What began as a philosophical cleavage has now turned into a militant fight over personalities, from a barrage of violent threats against establishment Republicans who brought down their own president. In the past year the GOP civil war has gone from figurative to physical.

But these were mostly ideological spats - disputes over policy within a political party struggling to evolve - and seem quaint when compared to the current state of affairs.Īs the former Trump administration official known as “Anonymous,” thanks to the op-ed I wrote for The New York Times announcing a resistance within Trump’s own administration, I can tell you things have gotten worse.

Fights between so-called “rational” and “radical” Republicans broke out with the rise of the tea party movement in 2009 and continued throughout the Obama presidency, as establishment GOP elites were pitted against a raucous right wing. The seeds of today’s split in the Republican Party were sown before Donald Trump declared his lofty and once-laughed-at ambition to become president.

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