President Trump’s farewell speeches contained promises of “the best is yet to come” and “we will be back in some form,” and it appears one such way he may continue to play a prominent role in the political arena is through the formation of a third party, potentially called the “Patriot Party.”
The Wall Street Journal reported this week, “President Trump has talked in recent days with associates about forming a new political party, according to people familiar with the matter, an effort to exert continued influence after he leaves the White House.”
The Journal added that Trump “discussed the matter with several aides and other people close to him last week.”
Predictably, establishment Republicans were quick to scoff at the idea, claiming a third party led by President Trump would only serve to help Democrats.
National Review writer Dan McLaughlin took to Twitter to voice his opposition: “If he does this, he may as well just call it the ‘give power to Democrats party.’”
Of course, the GOP’s devolution into RINO-dom by neocons such as those at the National Review has long been criticized by constitutional conservatives. President Trump, as imperfect as he is, arguably is the most constitutional conservative Republican the GOP has placed in the White House in decades, which explains the rise of the Never-Trump Republicans.
And McCloughlin’s criticism ignores the fact that the deteriorating Republican Party has already become the “give power to Democrats party.” Vice President Mike Pence’s refusal to use his constitutional authority to pause the certification of the contested Electoral College votes to ensure election integrity is proof of that.
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Trump and his supporters have been critical of weakness in the ranks of the Republican Party and the failure of many elected Republicans to stand behind President Trump in his efforts to prove the election was full of enough fraud to change the outcome.
And the Republican response to the Capitol building breach has underscored just how fractured the GOP has become. In a speech on the Senate floor on Tuesday morning, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell placed the blame for the “riot” on President Trump, despite Trump’s repeated assertions for peace.
“The mob was fed lies,” McConnell said. “They were provoked by the president and other powerful people.”
This is a marked difference from the Democrats, who never turned on one another during the violent Antifa- and BLM-led protests that plagued 2020 or placed blame on Democratic leaders, many of whom outright encouraged the violence.
Likewise, as noted by Fox News’ political pundit Tucker Carlson, the Democrats continue to treat Trump supporters like domestic terrorists.
“The leaders of the Democratic Party have now decided that 74 million Trump voters … are in fact, terrorists, and must be dealt with in the way that you deal with threats like that,” Carlson observed.
President Trump’s supporters looking to the Republican Party for “protection” of sorts will find that the choices are few and far between, particularly as the Left is using the Capitol building protests as an excuse to censor conservatives while Republicans remain largely impotent.
If the GOP continues to treat Donald Trump like a pariah, it may ensure its own destruction. Despite the best efforts by the mainstream media and Big Tech to portray Trump as a scandalized figure who will soon be forgotten, he ended his presidency with a 51-percent job approval rating, according to Rasmussen Reports, which is generally accepted as one of the most reliable and accurate polling firms. The Pew Research Center poll also found that 57 percent of Republicans want Trump to remain a major political figure after he leaves the White House.
And if day one of Biden’s administration is any indication of what the next four years will look like, it is likely the American resolve for another strong, patriotic leader such as Donald Trump will only increase ahead of the 2024 election, assuming, of course, there is any hope the election will be legal and fair.
But whether a third party would be the solution to these problems is highly disputed. As The New American has pointed out, the emergence of a third party is tempting, but ultimately misguided, as “no party is incorruptible.”
“There are certainly worthy arguments for and against the usefulness of multiple parties in a republic, but the notion that we’re just one party away from taking our country back is naïve,” we noted.
The danger of forming a party around President Trump is that Trump himself cannot run for every office at the local, state, and national levels. Therefore, the same struggle for “ideological purity” will ultimately pervade the new party as it does the Republican Party.
The better solution is to force the Republican Party to return to its platform of constitutional conservativism by voting out the RINOs.
But perhaps there is no harm in talking about the creation of a third party, if, for no other reason, to remind establishment Republicans that they are not indispensable.
