Steve Bannon’s arrest on charges that he defrauded donors to a right-wing immigration group for $1 million marks the end of a political era—the era when a Trumpian admixture of economic populism and nativist immigration policy looked as if it could, as Bannon once put it to me, deliver the Republican Party “a hammerlock on the Electoral College.”
At the time he made this assessment, in the days after Trump’s 2016 victory, it seemed entirely plausible that Bannon, Donald Trump’s campaign chairman and future chief strategist, was right. Before Trump, the GOP had imagined its future lay in purging its racist fringe and soft-pedaling its brand of laissez-faire economics to a diversifying nation that had spurned the 2012 Republican ticket of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. The Republican Party “autopsy” conducted in 2013 after their loss warned that the GOP risked falling into oblivion if it didn’t present a more welcoming face to immigrants, minorities, and young people.
