The GOP Is About to Become the Party of Trump

When Donald Trump takes center stage at Thursday’s Fox News debate in Cleveland, it will be a critical moment for the Republican Party. Until recently, Americans mentally categorized Trump as a celebrity entertainer and interpreted his madcap antics and controversial pronouncements accordingly. But on Thursday, voters will experience Trump in a much different context: as the standard-bearer of the Republican Party, who not only leads the presidential field by a wide margin but, as a new Bloomberg Politics poll shows, has a powerful appeal to every segment of the Republican electorate.

That’s great news for Trump. But if voters start associating his demagogic rantings about Mexican “rapists” not with Trump alone but with the broader Republican Party, his presence in the field could doom the GOP’s efforts to extend its appeal to new voters. “If he got the nomination talking like that, it would be a big problem,” says Grover Norquist, the conservative anti-tax stalwart. Even Trump’s current standing could tarnish the Republican brand, says Michael Steele, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee: “It’s something very scary for the party establishment.”