You probably don't remember any particular person being a leader of the movement that effectively took over and rebranded the Republican Party in the years after George W. Bush left office. Maybe you remember Jenny Beth Martin, the co-founder and president of the Tea Party Patriots, but she never became a household name, and the group she led was just one of many Tea Party organizations.
In fact, there was no well-known, charismatic leader of the Tea Party. There was no single Republican in Congress who was regarded as the movement's leader, the way Newt Gingrich was clearly the leader of the Republicans who seized Congress in the 1994 midterms.
The Tea Party -- and the Republican Party -- didn't have an obvious leader in the Obama years. Yet that didn't prevent Republicans from having a fairly successful eight years. Sure, Barack Obama won two presidential elections. But Republicans did just fine downballot, as this report noted during Obama's last few weeks in office:
... the Democratic Party has lost a net total of 13 Governorships and 816 state legislative seats since President Obama entered office, the most of any president since Dwight Eisenhower....We're told that Republicans will be adrift once Donald Trump leaves office or dies, because the GOP is nothing more than a personality cult focused on a charismatic leader. The Obama years tell me that Republicans don't necessarily need a charismatic leader. Without such a leader, they can reorganize themselves around a collection of grievances.
President Obama entered the White House with his party touting a 60 seat majority in the Senate and 257 seat majority in the House. Democrats now hold a 48 seat minority in the Senate and 194 seat minority in the House — a net loss of 12 and 64 seats respectively....
The midterm elections delivered significant blows to Congressional Democrats. In 2010, Democrats lost 6 seats in the Senate and 63 seats in the House, costing them the chamber. In 2014, Democrats lost another 13 seats in the House and a staggering 9 seats in the Senate; this time losing them the Senate and completing a Republican takeover of Congress.
(What were their grievances in the Obama years? Um ... they didn't like Obamacare? And ... um ... the president was Black? Also ... oh, yeah! Benghazi! ACORN! The Ground Zero mosque!)
As Donald Trump's first term was ending, you could see the GOP attempting to reorganize around a collection of grievances. Notice when Chris Rufo first appeared on Tucker Carlson's Fox News show to talk about DEI: September 2, 2020. At that time, Joe Biden had been leading Trump in the polls all year, and led by 7.2 points in the Real Clear Politics average. The election looked like a blowout -- time to get the Fox audience worked up about something other than the issues being discussed on the camapign trail!
The Fox war on Drag Queen Story Hours started in 2019; over the next few years, this evolved into a war on trans youth that, along with the war on DEI, helped elect a Republican governor in seemingly blue Virginia a year after Biden defeated Trump.
At a time when it appeared that Trump was a spent force in American politics, GOP propagandists made sure that the party (and the conservative movement) still seemed to be on offense. That's what they'll do when Trump is gone.
They're already hard at work ginning up anger. I told you yesterday about the campaign to make the continued existence of birthright citizenship into a major right-wing grievance. Right-wing cartoonists and memers are really working this angle:
And, of course, it's all part of the Elon Musk-driven global campaign to purge America and Europe of non-white people:
Pretty much. It’s not promoted in any other countries …
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 28, 2026
The right is working all kinds of angles these days. The New York Times has recently reported on campaigns to make same-sex marriage illegal again and prosecute women who have abortions. Those will probably alienate swing voters, but Republicans might get a more positive response to their renewed Muslim-bashing -- Texas Republicans in particular seem to believe that the most important issue in their state is a nonexistent push for "sharia law" -- and to denunciations of "communism" in the Democratic Party, which will probably resonate with some of the Hispanic voters Trump has alienated with his anti-immigrant extremism. And there's always sexism, which I suspect wins over more swing voters than you'd think:
The worst Supreme Court Justices of all time have all been women. That’s just a fact. Republican presidents should take the hint. https://t.co/hMHwMBVx5J
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) June 30, 2026
None of this is a substitute for a real party leader, but it will all sustain GOP solidarity in the post-Trump era until that leader comes along.
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