Trump Reportedly Wants to Create a New Political Party. Should He?

President Trump wants to create a new political party after leaving office, says the Wall Street Journal. According to the report, “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.”

According to sources, President Trump says he would want to call his new political party the “Patriot Party,” but the White House refused to comment.

It is not known just how serious Trump is about starting a new political party. As the WSJ notes, to do so “would require a significant investment of time and resources,” and third parties “have typically failed to draw enough support to play a major role in national elections.” But President Trump is perhaps the most uniquely positioned person to do such a thing, as he has a huge base of supporters, many of whom were not heavily involved in the Republican Party.

Aside from the question of whether or not he can or will start a new political party, the real issue here, I think, is whether he should.

I’ve seen many Republican friends express disappointment with the GOP in recent weeks for their failure to fight for President Trump and his priorities, as well as their criticism of Trump in the wake of the Capitol riots following the false narrative that he incited an insurrection. In fact, Republican wobbliness preceded President Trump’s term in the White House. The corrupt Obama-Biden administration spent eight years violating the Constitution without significant pushback from the Republican Party. Aside from the refusal to give Merrick Garland a hearing upon his nomination to the Supreme Court, the GOP was an ineffective check on the abuses of the Obama-Biden administration, which culminated with the spying on Trump’s campaign in 2016.

As a registered Republican—the party of Lincoln and Reagan—I’d hesitate to leave the GOP, but at the same time, what good is a political party that doesn’t fight at least as hard as the Democrats do? But I’m also a realist. Should Trump do this, he risks fracturing the conservative vote in elections. This would be like ceding power to the Democrats automatically. We can’t have that. If Trump started the Patriot Party, I might actually register as a Patriot, but I would not condone the running of a Patriot Party candidate against a Republican in any race where such a thing would result in a Democrat victory. Perhaps this is an unlikely thing to wish for.

Maybe the answer is the formation of a Patriot Caucus in the Republican Party. Give Republican voters the opportunity to see who in the party is going to fight the swamp and threat of socialism, and which ones will capitulate to the left at every opportunity.

Obviously, the only reason we’re even discussing this is that the Republican Party has proven itself to be ineffective against the Democratic machine. I hope Trump’s goal here is really to send a signal to the Republican Party that they have to step up their game. We should all be on the same side. We have to take our country back before it’s too late.