Report could alienate voters Republicans need
RONALD BROWNSTEIN
11:55 AM ET
Beyond all the revelations about Russian entanglements and possible obstruction of justice, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report crystallizes two cardinal rules about governance in Donald Trump’s Washington. One is that Trump will shatter any boundaries of law, morality, or custom in his exercise of presidential power. The second is that Republicans—not only in Congress, but now also in the executive branch—will not restrain any of his excesses. The same holds true for both unwritten rules: They constitute a defining gamble for the GOP in future elections ...
Starting with Attorney General William Barr’s staggeringly misleading press conference Thursday about the report, and extending through the blithe dismissal from congressional Republicans of its revelations, the release was yet another demonstration that there may be literally nothing Trump can do that would cause Republicans to break from him. Mueller’s report cataloged dozens of behaviors from Trump and his advisers—from sharing internal campaign polling data and strategy with a suspected agent of a foreign power to repeatedly lying to the public to systematically seeking to thwart investigations—that would have inspired volcanic eruptions of outrage from congressional Republicans and the conservative-media infrastructure if perpetrated by a Democratic president.
Instead, the dominant impulse among leading Republicans and conservatives that it’s time to move on was interrupted only by those who say the party should now investigate the investigators who launched the Russia inquiry. Whether by conviction or convenience, the GOP has now almost completely accepted an implicit trade-off: It will tolerate and even defend all of Trump’s most malignant behavior—from his assaults on the rule of law to his open appeals to white racial resentments to his fraying of bonds with historic international allies—in return for the leverage he provides to extend core conservative goals, such as cutting taxes, spending, and regulation and appointing conservative judges.
The electoral bet embodied in this choice is to bind the party’s fate tightly to Trump’s. His tumultuous presidency has accelerated and deepened three political trends that predated him. One is to solidify the Republican hold on what I’ve called the “coalition of restoration”: older, blue-collar, and evangelical whites. The second is to alienate the most ardent elements of the Democratic coalition: young people and minorities. The third is to weaken the Republican position with college-educated, white-collar white voters, particularly in the suburbs surrounding major metropolitan areas ...
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/04/muellers-report-could-hurt-trump-and-gop-2020/587584/
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