THIS IS HOW THE REPUBLICAN PARTY WILL SURVIVE WHEN TRUMP IS GONE

A month ago, I wrote a post titled "The Next Trump Might Just Be a Collection of Grievances." I was making a point that I've made here several times: that the Republican Party will no longer have a charismatic leader when Donald Trump is gone, but it might not need one -- it will probably just reorganize itself around grievances, the way it did during the Barack Obama/Tea Party era, when Republicans made big gains in congressional and state elections, even though the party (and the Tea Party movement) had no charismatic figurehead. Anger was the organizing principle, not personality.

I think we're beginning to see a post-Trump Republican Party take shape, even though Trump is still in office. In the midterm elections, Republicans know they can't run on their record, and they certainly know they can't run on Donald Trump's record. So they're running on hate, particularly hatred for Muslims. This has been happening in the battleground state of Texas for months -- last September, Governor Greg Abbott

signed into law House Bill 4211, which took aim at sharia compounds—fantastical concoctions. This was in response to a ferocious conservative campaign against EPIC City, [a] proposed master-planned community near Dallas.... Created by the East Plano Islamic Center, a prominent Collin County mosque, and rebranded late last year as the Meadow, the residential development would reportedly include more than a thousand homes, a faith-based K–12 school, a community college, and a place of worship. The issue exploded in early 2025, after [online right-wing commentator Amy] Mek labeled the development a “402-acre sharia city.”

All this year, Texas GOP candidates have denounced any manifestation of Islam in Texas as part of a scheme to impose sharia law on the rest of us. Now this Islamophobia is going national, largely in response to Abdul El-Sayed's victory in Michigan's Democratic Senate primary. Below, I've cued up some of the responses to El-Sayed's win from prominent figures in the national GOP. Please note that Trump is among them, but it's other Republicans -- the likes of J.D. Vance, Ted Cruz, and Tommy Tuberville -- who are leading the charge.

TRUMP: Abdul El-Sayed, can you believe this? He doesn't love Israel. He doesn't love Jewish people. He hates 'em.

TUBERVILLE: Hey, we might build a 30-foot wall around our state, because I know what's coming. I can see it coming, I can hear it coming, I can -- you know, you can just smell it.

CRUZ: They want to cancel Thanksgiving. They want to cancel Christmas. El-Sayed is also an Islamist, as is Mandami [sic]. And look, you see the green-red convergence where the communists and the Islamists, they want sharia law.

VANCE: The modern Democratic coalition, which is self-hating white liberals united to people who just came to the country for the first time and don't actually have the sense of appreciation for it that they should.

Cruz and Vance wrap a couple of grievances up in a neat package: the fear of communism and Islamicism, allegedly embodied in El-Sayed, who's neither a communist nor an Islamist. (At this moment, every Republican rank-and-file voter appears to believe that all Muslims are Islamists and all Islamists are communists.) And, of course, it's Francesca Hong, the DSA-affiliated candidate for governor of Wisconsin who's likely to win the Democratic primary on Tuesday, who formerly expressed skepticism about Thanksgiving, not El-Sayed. But Republicans want to keep those distinctions muddy.

Maybe this is just a stopgap plan for motivating base voters this year, when many of them have soured on Trump. Maybe it won't be the party's message after November. But Trump will still be a terrible president for two years after the midterms. I think the party will be running against Muslims and commies (and Anthony Fauci and trans people and a long list of others) two years from now.

This might fail. El-Sayed might win comfortably. And in all likelihood, only a tiny audience will pay attention to the Daily Wire's latest foray into moviemaking, which is tapping into the same bigotry and rage:

When radical Islamic terrorists hijack a liberal college's pro-Palestine encampment to enforce barbaric Sharia law on students and execute infidels in a makeshift caliphate, a ragtag band of red-blooded students, a security guard tired of 'Uncle Tom' smears, and a Delta Force vet must arm up to save their clueless peers and keep America from surrendering to the enemy on its own soil. Coming exclusively to The Daily Wire, September 16.

But all this will keep the base loyal as Trump declines. In some surveys, Trump's approval is in the low 30s, but I fear that anti-Muslim bigotry might poll higher -- as might anti-trans bigotry. The GOP knows how many voters live in small towns and rural communities, monocultures where difference is always perceived as dangerous. If Trump's numbers sink into the 20s, Republicans will just define Republicanism as a collection of bigotries and never look back.