Donald Trump Will Discredit the Republican Party for a Generation

It doesn’t happen often, but I’ve got to say: The Washington Post‘s Michael Gerson is actually right for once.

Now jump forward to a recent USA Today/Rock the Vote poll that shows Hillary Clinton beating Donald Trump by 56 percent to 20 percent among voters under 35. Let that sink in. Trump is supported by 1 in 5 younger voters — an astonishing and consequential collapse for the GOP. Though the young don’t turn out at election time with the same frequency as older voters, they always get (and deserve) particular attention from the parties. In the long run, younger voters are older voters. In the long run, older voters are . . . companions to John Maynard Keynes.

Gerson’s conclusion: Trump will discredit the Republican Party for an entire generation. This was always one of the risks of nominating Trump, but especially so when the party’s establishment decided to publicly back him over Ted Cruz. Trump is now considered to be the face of the Republican Party, and rightly so.

Today’s young won’t vote in November, but they will vote in four, eight, twelve and sixteen years. Every time they vote in the future, they’ll remember that the GOP was the party of Trump; a narcissistic megalomaniac they don’t want to have anything to do with. And that will be reason enough for them to not vote for the GOP for decades, just like African Americans refuse to support the GOP because they (in this case wrongly) believe the Republican Party opposed civil rights while the Democratic Party supported it.

Yes, the GOP can still count on the support of older white people, but these older white people will eventually die. When they do, the Republican Party has no one to replace them with, all because of Trump.

So let me just add to Erick Erickson’s latest piece for The Resurgent in which he claims that a vote for Trump is a vote for Hillary Clinton: and for every other Democratic presidential candidate in the next twenty years.