Trump remade the GOP in his own image — to reject Obama’s overhauled Democrats

Donald Trump has made history: Not only by returning to the White House four years after his expulsion from it, but also by founding a new American political party in his own image. 

He’s consolidated a new coalition under an old name, a rare feat we’ve seen before in America’s past, most recently achieved by Trump’s former predecessor.

Today and perhaps for decades to come, the Republican Party is the Trump Party while the Democratic Party is the Barack Obama Party.

President-elect Trump on stage at his campaign watch party in West Palm Beach on Nov. 6, 2024. AP Photo/Evan Vucci

Following two transitional presidents, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, Obama presided over the assembly of what was in reality a new party under the Democratic Party’s banner. 

To the older Democratic constituencies of organized labor and African Americans, Obama and his allies welded former moderate Republicans whose great causes were Planned Parenthood and environmentalism. 

Financial backing came from Hollywood, long affiliated with Democrats, and from Silicon Valley and Wall Street libertarians who combined liberalism on social issues with free-market conservative economics. 

In the new Obama party, the hierarchical organizations of the past, with their bosses and patronage employees, were eclipsed by new urban machines based on nonprofits, many funded by city, state or federal funds. 

Those ideologues — including environmentalists and race- and gender-studies departments on university campuses — devised the party line, expecting voters to support the Democrats on the basis of their race and gender.

In return, members of these abstract categories were promised targeted and different benefits. 

The Obama Party that took shape in the 2010s has achieved a near-monopoly of political power in its homelands — big cities and college towns. In 2024, nine of the 10 most populous American cities had Democratic mayors; in 2000, four of those same had Republican mayors.

Even in red states like Texas, big cities and university towns today are usually blue.

But this new Democratic coalition has struggled to extend its control to national politics, as well as to governors’ mansions and state legislatures in states like Florida and Texas. 

During Obama’s first term, the Republicans regained control of the House, which they had lost in 2006. Obama’s Democrats suffered the highest losses in a midterm election since 1938. A “red wave” election inflicted further damage on them in 2014.

But worse was to come. In 2011, at the annual White House correspondents’ dinner, Obama mocked Donald Trump, who was sitting in the audience.

Trump had his revenge in 2016, when he shocked Democrats, and many Republicans, by winning first the GOP presidential nomination and then the presidency. 

Defeated in 2020 after serving one term, Trump was disgraced in the eyes of many by discredited claims about electoral cheating and subjected to “lawfare.” Yet he survived and won the presidency a second time in 2024 — this time as the undisputed leader of a new Republican Party.

The Reagan Republican coalition devoted to free trade, mass legal immigration, “wars of choice” and entitlement cuts and hostile to organized labor, is no more. 

In its place, Trump and his allies have formed a new coalition based on strategic trade, limited immigration, skepticism about foreign military quagmires, defense of entitlements and outreach to labor union members. 

To the old GOP constituencies of small-business owners and evangelicals, the Trump movement has added former Democrats — working-class whites and a growing number of black and Latino voters — while losing most college-educated Americans to the rival Obama party.  

The public personas of their leaders reflect the parties’ constituencies. Obama, leading a party of college-credentialed professionals and technocratic experts, exudes the kind of soft-spoken rationality favored in academic seminars and corporate suites. 

Trump, a veteran of reality television, a serial brander of commercial products and a fan of TV wrestling, is as raucous and hyperbolic as Obama is cool and deliberate. 

An Obama speech is an NPR-approved author’s talk at a metropolitan bookstore. A Trump speech is half-time entertainment at a demolition derby.

The victory of the Trump party at the federal level does not mean the disappearance of the Obama party. 

Obama’s new Democratic coalition will continue to control its big-city and college-town strongholds, biding its time until it can regain power in Washington. 

For its part, the new Trump coalition may squabble: Its diverse constituents, from Bitcoin-bedazzled libertarians to anti-woke trade unionists, may share little other than their rejection of Obama’s Democrats. 

One thing seems certain: The grudge match between Obama and Trump that flared at that 2011 dinner, and has been institutionalized in the national parties they remade, will likely continue for years to come.

Michael Lind is the author of “Hell to Pay:  How the Suppression of Wages is Destroying America.”