Trump Completed His Takeover Of The GOP In 2019
Donald Trump won the GOP nomination and then the presidency even as many prominent officials within the party opposed him. He spent much of his first two years in office struggling to get his policies enacted, with top advisers such as then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis essentially ignoring his demands. Early in his tenure, the GOP-controlled House and Senate adopted several measures, such as new sanctions on Russia, that it was clear Trump did not truly support, leaving the president looking irrelevant. At the same time, Trump was being investigated by the executive branch that he was running, in special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe.
Even as he was losing some fights in 2017 and 2018, though, Trump was also steadily beating back Republican resistance to his leadership. In many ways, 2019 was the culmination of that work. As we approach the end of the year, Trump is truly in charge of the party now — a fact that was powerfully illustrated last week when every Republican member of the House opposed impeachment despite ample evidence that the president and his team tried to force the Ukrainian government to investigate the former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Let me unpack that idea by looking at power centers within the government and the broader Republican Party.
The executive branch
Trump spent the latter half of 2017 and all of 2018 gradually forcing out the more establishment Republicans who he had initially put into top jobs in his administration. That process was all but completed in 2019. He replaced Mattis, national security adviser John Bolton and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats — all of whom allowed their disagreements with Trump to become public — with people who were more likely to align his vision. One of the first moves of Robert O’Brien, the new national security adviser, was to reduce the number of non-political staffers working at the National Security Council, essentially an effort to prevent future anti-Trump whistleblowers. New Defense Secretary Mark Esper forced out Navy Secretary Richard Spicer amid tensions over Trump softening the punishments for a Navy Seal accused of war crimes in Iraq.
By far the most important personnel change was the confirmation of William Barr in February to run the Department of Justice. From downplaying Mueller’s findings before the special counsel’s report was publicly released to aggressively investigating the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation, Barr is executing Trump’s agenda at DOJ in a way that Jeff Sessions never did.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-completed-his-takeover-of-the-gop-in-2019/
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