In 1854, the Republican Party began as an anti-slavery party to combat the expansion of slavery into western territories after the passing of the Kansas–Nebraska Act by the Democrats under Stephan Douglas. The party was formed in the Northern and Border states, but not the South. It rapidly gained support in the North, drawing in former Whigs and Free Soil Democrats. Under the Presidency of Abraham Lincoln it led the successful war effort against the Confederacy.
By 1865 it encompassed northernProtestants, factory workers, professionals, businessmen, prosperous farmers, and also black former slaves. It also included a minority of white Southerners who had opposed the Confederacy—men ridiculed by Democrats as "Scalawags". The great majority of white southerners were Democrats, as were the great majority of Irish Catholics and German Catholics. While both parties adopted pro-business policies in the 19th century, the early GOP was distinguished by its support for the national banking system, the gold standard, railroads, and high tariffs.
After the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Southern strategy, the party's core base shifted with the Southern states becoming more reliably Republican in presidential politics and the Northeastern states becoming more reliably Democratic. White voters increasingly identified with the Republican Party after the 1960s. Following the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, the Republican Party opposed abortion in its party platform and grew its support among evangelicals. The Republican Party won five of the six presidential elections from 1968 to 1988. Two-term President Ronald Reagan, who held office from 1981 to 1989, was a transformative party leader. His conservative policies called for reduced social government spending and regulation, increased military spending, lower taxes, and a strong anti-Soviet foreign policy. Reagan's influence upon the party persisted into the early 21st century.
Donald Trump, the 45th (2017–2021) and 47th (since 2025) president
In the 2016 presidential election, Republican nominee Donald Trump defeated Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. The result was unexpected; polls leading up to the election showed Clinton leading the race. Trump's victory was fueled by narrow victories in three states—Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—that had been part of the Democratic blue wall for decades. It was attributed to strong support amongst working-class white voters, who felt dismissed and disrespected by the political establishment. Trump became popular with them by abandoning Republican establishment orthodoxy in favor of a broader nationalist message. His election accelerated the Republican Party's shift towards right-wing populism and resulted in decreasing influence among its conservative factions.
After the 2016 elections, Republicans maintained their majority in the Senate, the House, and governorships, and wielded newly acquired executive power with Trump's election. The Republican Party controlled 69 of 99 state legislative chambers in 2017, the most it had held in history. The Party also held 33 governorships, the most it had held since 1922. The party had total control of government in 25 states, the most since 1952. The opposing Democratic Party held full control of only five states in 2017. In the 2018 elections, Republicans lost control of the House, but strengthened their hold on the Senate.
Following the 2020 election, election denial became increasingly mainstream in the party, with the majority of Republican candidates in 2022 being election deniers. The party also made efforts to restrict voting based on false claims of fraud. Furthermore, the party began to systematically downplay, deny, or reinterpret controversial actions from Trump's first term, particularly the Capitol attack, regarding which the party has circulated revisionist narratives, some of which are also being presented as official accounts during Trump's second term.
As of 2026, the GOP holds the presidency, and majorities in both the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate, giving them a federal government trifecta. It also holds 26 state governorships, 28 state legislatures, and 23 state government trifectas. Six of the nine current U.S. Supreme Court justices were appointed by Republican presidents. There have been 19 Republicans who have served as president, the most from any one political party; the most recent being current president Donald Trump, who became the 47th president on January 20, 2025. Trump also served as the 45th president from 2017 to 2021.
The Republican Party's founding members chose its name as homage to the values of republicanism promoted by the Democratic-Republican Party, which its founder, Thomas Jefferson, called the "Republican Party". The idea for the name came from an editorial by the party's leading publicist, Horace Greeley, who called for "some simple name like 'Republican' [that] would more fitly designate those who had united to restore the Union to its true mission of champion and promulgator of Liberty rather than propagandist of slavery". The name was selected as it "connected voters with the original political organization of Thomas Jefferson in the 1790s, the Democratic-Republican Party". "Republican" has a variety of meanings around the world, and the Republican Party has evolved such that the meanings no longer always align.
The term "Grand Old Party" is a traditional nickname for the Republican Party, and the abbreviation "GOP" is a commonly used designation. The term originated in 1875 in the Congressional Record, referring to the party associated with the successful military defense of the Union as "this gallant old party". The following year in an article in the Cincinnati Commercial, the term was modified to "grand old party". The first use of the abbreviation is dated 1884.
The traditional mascot of the party is the elephant. A political cartoon by Thomas Nast, published in Harper's Weekly on November 7, 1874, is considered the first important use of the symbol. The cartoon was published during the debate over a possible run for a third term by President Ulysses S. Grant. It draws imagery and text from the Aesop fable "The Ass in the Lion's Skin", combined with rumors of animals escaping from the Central Park Zoo.
An alternate symbol of the Republican Party in states such as Indiana, New York, and Ohio is the bald eagle as opposed to the Democratic rooster or the Democratic five-pointed star. In Kentucky, the log cabin is a symbol of the Republican Party.
Traditionally the party had no consistent color identity. After the 2000 presidential election, the color red became politically associated with Republicans. During and after the election, the major broadcast networks used the same color scheme for the electoral map: states won by Republican nominee George W. Bush were colored red and states won by Democratic nominee Al Gore were colored blue. Due to the weeks-long dispute over the election results, these color associations became firmly ingrained, persisting in subsequent years. Although the assignment of colors to political parties is unofficial and informal, the media has come to represent the respective political parties using these colors. The party and its candidates have also come to embrace the color red.
Contrarily, the color red tends to represent left-leaning socialist, communist, and labor political movements in many nations, while blue is linked with conservatism.
An 1874 cartoon by Thomas Nast, featuring the first notable appearance of the Republican elephant
The red, white, and blue elephant as seen on the GOP website in 2011
U.S. representative Thaddeus Stevens, considered a leader of the Radical Republicans, was a fierce opponent of slavery and discrimination against African Americans.
The Radical Republicans were a major factor in the party from its inception in 1854 until the end of the Reconstruction Era in 1877. Like the moderate Republicans the radicals strongly opposed the expansion of slavery. Unlike the moderates they were hard-line abolitionists calling for the end of slavery in the South. By 1865 Both factions advocated equal rights for the freedmen. Radicals were heavily influenced by religious ideals and evangelical Christianity. Radical Republicans pressed for abolition as a major war aim and they opposed the moderate Reconstruction plans of Abraham Lincoln as both too lenient on the Confederates and not going far enough to help former slaves. After the war's end and Lincoln's assassination, the Radicals clashed with Andrew Johnson over Reconstruction policy. Radicals led efforts to establish civil rights for former slaves and fully implement emancipation, pushing the Fourteenth Amendment for statutory protections through Congress. They opposed allowing ex-Confederate officers to retake political power in the Southern U.S., and emphasized liberty, equality, and the Fifteenth Amendment which provided voting rights for the freedmen. Many later became Stalwarts, who supported machine politics.
Moderate Republicans were known for their loyal support of President Abraham Lincoln's war policies and expressed antipathy towards the more militant stances advocated by the Radical Republicans. In contrast to Radicals, Moderate Republicans were less enthusiastic on the issue of Black suffrage even while embracing civil equality and the expansive federal authority observed throughout the American Civil War. They were also skeptical of the lenient, conciliatory Reconstruction policies of President Andrew Johnson. Members of the Moderate Republicans comprised in part of the previous Radical Republicans who became disenchanted with the alleged corruption of the latter faction. They generally opposed efforts by Radical Republicans to rebuild the Southern U.S. under an economically mobile, free-market system.
The 20th century saw the Republican party split into an Old Right and a moderate-liberal faction in the Northeast that eventually became known as Rockefeller Republicans. Opposition to Roosevelt's New Deal saw the formation of the conservative coalition. The 1950s saw fusionism of traditionalist and social conservatism and right-libertarianism, along with the rise of the First New Right to be followed in 1964 with a more populist Second New Right.
Republicans began the 21st century with the election of George W. Bush in the 2000 United States presidential election and saw the peak of a neoconservative faction that held significant influence over the initial American response to the September 11 attacks through the war on terror. The election of Barack Obama saw the formation of the Tea Party movement in 2009 that coincided with a global rise in right-wing populist movements from the 2010s to 2020s. The global rise in right-wing populism has been attributed to factors including economic insecurity due to financialization, a decline in organized religion, backlash to globalization, and migrant crises.
Right-wing populism became an increasingly dominant ideological faction within the GOP throughout the 2010s and helped lead to the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Starting in the 1970s and accelerating in the 2000s, American right-wing interest groups invested heavily in external mobilization vehicles that led to the organizational weakening of the GOP establishment. The outsized role of conservative media, in particular Fox News, led to it being followed and trusted more by the Republican base over traditional party elites. The depletion of organizational capacity partly led to Trump's victory in the Republican primaries against the wishes of a very weak party establishment and traditional power brokers.:27–28 Trump's election exacerbated internal schisms within the GOP,:18 and saw the GOP move from a center coalition of moderates and conservatives to a solidly right-wing party hostile to liberal views and any deviations from the party line.
The Party has since faced intense factionalism. These factions are particularly apparent in the U.S. House of Representatives, where three Republican House leaders (Eric Cantor, John Boehner, and Kevin McCarthy) have been ousted since 2009. All three of the top Republican elected officials during Trump's first term (Vice President, Speaker of the House, and Senate Republican leader) were ousted or stepped down by Trump's second term.
The party's establishment conservative faction has lost all of its influence. Many conservatives critical of the Trumpist faction have also lost influence within the party, with no former Republican presidential or vice presidential nominees attending the 2024 Republican National Convention.
The victory of Trump in the 2024 presidential election saw the party increasingly shift towards Trumpism, and party criticism of Trump was described as being muted to non-existent. The New York Times described it as a "hostile takeover", and a victory of right-wing populism over the old conservative establishment. Polling found that 53% of Republican voters saw loyalty to Trump as central to their political identity and what it means to be a Republican. During Trump's second presidency, Republican members of Congress were described by political commentators and news media as largely submissive to Trump, letting him dictate policies without pushback.
JD Vance, Donald Trump's vice president during Trump's second term. Initially critical of Trump, he became a staunch advocate of Trumpism later in Trump's first term and has been described as a right-wing populist.
The Republican Party's right-wing populist movements emerged in concurrence with a global increase in populist movements in the 2010s and 2020s, coupled with entrenchment and increased partisanship within the party since 2010. This included the rise of the Tea Party movement, which has also been described as far-right.
In international relations, populists typically support American aid to Israel but not to Ukraine, though since 2025, a growing element is critical of aid to Israel as well. They are generally supportive of improving relations with Russia, and favor an isolationist "America First" foreign policy agenda. This faction has been described as closer to that of Vladimir Putin's Russia and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Turkey than Western Europe and the Anglosphere in terms of positions on international cooperation, support for an autocratic leadership style, and trust in institutions. This faction takes nationalist and irredentist views towards other countries in North America, advocating for American territorial expansion to include Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal, the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico, and potential military action on Mexican soil.
The party's far-right faction includes members of the Freedom Caucus. They generally reject compromise within the party and with the Democrats, and are willing to oust fellow Republican office holders they deem to be too moderate. According to sociologist Joe Feagin, political polarization by racially extremist Republicans as well as their increased attention from conservative media has perpetuated the near extinction of moderate Republicans and created legislative paralysis at numerous government levels in the last few decades. The rise of the party's populists diminished the influence of its other factions.
Ronald Reagan's presidential election in 1980 established Reagan-style American conservatism as the dominant ideological faction of the Republican Party until the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Traditional conservatives combine support for free-market economic policies with social conservatism and a hawkish approach to foreign policy. Other parts of the conservative movement are composed of fiscal conservatives and deficit hawks.
Conventional conservatism has been in decline across the Western world, not just the United States. In the European Union's multi-party system, right-wing populist parties and European conservative parties both received support from about a quarter of voters in the early 2020s, the highest share for right-wing populist parties since the end of World War II.
The Christian right is strongest in the Bible Belt, which covers most of the Southern United States. Mike Pence, Donald Trump's vice president from 2017 to 2021, was a member of the Christian right. In October 2023, a member of the faction, Louisiana representative Mike Johnson, was elected the 56th Speaker of the United States House of Representatives.
Former Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, who set off a libertarian revival while running for president in 2008 and 2012
The Republican Party has a libertarian faction. This faction of the party is most popular in the Midwestern and Western United States. Libertarianism emerged from fusionism in the 1950s and 60s. Barry Goldwater had a substantial impact on the conservative-libertarian movement of the 1960s.[bettersourceneeded] Libertarian Republicans support isolationism and a small government, and are the party faction with the lowest support for Trump as of 2023. Right-wing libertarians are strongly divided on the subject of abortion. Prominent libertarian conservatives within the Republican Party include Rand Paul, Thomas Massie, and Mike Lee.
Moderates in the Republican Party are an ideologically centrist and center-right group that predominantly come from the Northeastern United States, and are typically located in swing states or blue states. Moderate Republicans are typically highly educated, affluent, fiscally conservative, socially moderate or liberal and often supported the "Never Trump" movement. Moderate Republicans differ in that some are for affirmative action, LGBT rights and same-sex marriage, legal access to abortion, gun control laws, environmental regulation and action on climate change, fewer restrictions on immigration and a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. In the 21st century, a significant amount of former Republican moderates have switched to the Democratic Party, and the faction is in decline.
By the early 2020s, the Republican Party distanced itself from its traditional international conservative allies and aligned itself with the global far-right, supporting Fidesz and the National Rally.
The election of Trump in 2016 saw the Republican Party shift to embrace and bring far-right, fringe, and extreme ideas and organizations into the mainstream. His election shifted traditional Republican beliefs and ideology into a new leadership style and political agenda referred to as Trumpism. This realignment saw a reflexive opposition of liberal policies to "own the libs" become a core belief among its base.
Trump explicitly and routinely disparages racial, religious, and ethnic minorities, and scholars consistently find that racial animus regarding black people, immigrants, and Muslims are the best predictors of support for Trump. By 2025, congressional Republicans have increasingly used overtly bigoted language and offensive tropes against the racial and religious identity of their political opponents with little to no pushback from GOP leadership. In 2026, elected Republicans have increasingly used blatantly anti-Muslim rhetoric which was described by commentators as mirroring a prior increase in such rhetoric by the GOP following the 9/11 attacks in 2001.
The second presidency of Trump saw him nominate several White House officials[who?] with ties to antisemitic extremists. His administration promoted social media content promoting remigration and containing antisemitic slurs, and was criticized as promoting Nazism and white nationalism, the latter of which has become influential within the party since the 2020s. Other social media posts from multiple government agencies have variously alluded to neo-Nazi and white supremacist literature and promoted ethnic cleansing and QAnon conspiracies. The Southern Poverty Law Center found that some "images and language appear to come directly from antisemitic and neo-Nazi publications and a white Christian nationalist website".
According to The New York Times, Republican youth groups have grown increasingly divided over the acceptance and prevalence of far-right speakers and ideology. In October 2025, Politicorevealed leaked group chats among high-ranking leaders of the "Young Republicans" that included language praising Adolf Hitler and promoting Nazism, encouraging the rape and killing of political opponents, extensive use of antisemitic and racial slurs, and favorable opinions on slavery. The messages drew bipartisan condemnation, and another incident involving the display of an American flag with a swastika in Republican Congressman David Taylor's office a day later spurred significant political commentary about the future of the GOP and condemnation about the prominence of Nazi ideology within the party. The same month, Politico posted more leaked messages from Republican Office of Special Council nominee Paul Ingrassia where he stated he had "a Nazi streak", that he wanted white men in positions of leadership, used ethnic slurs for Black people and Italians, and proposed making Kwanzaa and all celebrations of Black culture illegal. In March 2026, group chats among young Republicans created by the Miami-Dade Republican Party included slurs against Black and Jewish people, killing African-Americans, and Hitler's policies. Politico reported that several more scandals in 2026 involving Republican officials making controversial remarks led to concerns over the influence of "Groypers" and far-right ideology among young Republicans, with the conservative Manhattan Institute finding 31% of Republicans under the age of 50 self-identified as having "racist" views.
Starting in October 2025, Axios, Politico, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times described the party as undergoing a "rift" among a growing cohort of anti-Jewish and antisemitic voices within the party and debate over how expansive the party's coalition should be. In January 2026, Trump publicly came out against those with antisemitic views in the party, which The New York Times and The Economist described as being contrasted with J.D. Vance's prior refusal to condemn the incidents and statement that the party did not need "purity tests".
Enacting high tariffs on foreign imports is a core component of Donald Trump's fiscal agenda. Tariffs are taxes on foreign imports, mainly paid by domestic businesses, given that consumers generally do not import foreign goods directly. By raising tariffs to their highest levels since the Gilded Age, Trump enacted one of the largest tax increases by any Republican president. The Constitution's Import-Export Clause requires that only the federal government be allowed to collect tariff revenue from imports.
Historically, Republicans advocated for free markets and individual achievement as the primary factors behind economic prosperity. Reduction in income taxes for those with higher incomes is a core component of Republicans' fiscal agenda.
In February 2026, the New York Times contrasted Trump's economic policies with those of Mitt Romney, the previous Republican presidential nominee before Trump. It described Trump's economic ideology as similar to dirigisme, used in some countries such as France.
State capitalism
The relationship between income and voting broke down in the 2010s. Instead, age and education became the best predictors of voting behavior. Writing for Time magazine in 2024, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld described Trump's moves against capitalism as sharing "more in common with far-left progressive positions than with traditional GOP views, and are often far more progressive than the Biden Administration" and wrote that he expected such attacks to continue into his second term.
By 2025, Trump and the Republican Party largely abandoned traditional Republican orthodoxy about protecting and promoting the free market, instead favoring state capitalism by taking direct government equity stakes in major US corporations, an approach that has been characterized by critics in favor of free market economics as socialist. The Trump administration has also deviated from the GOP's conventional free market approach by ordering Nvidia and AMD to pay the federal government a portion of chip sales to China.
Taxes and trade
As of 2026, the Republican Party supports near-universal tariffs, but that has not always been the case. For example, during the last half of the 20th century, Republicans were strong proponents of free trade. However 68% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents approve of the increasing tariffs while the Democrats overwhelmingly disapprove of it at 89%. The current Republican president, Donald Trump, has been a staunch proponent of enacting tariffs as a means of generating tax revenue and has been described as a mercantilist. In 2025, Trump raised American tariff rates to the highest in the world, at the highest level since the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. Donald Trump opposes globalization, and his economic policies have been described as attempting to unravel the multilateral global economic order, including the power of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Trump has expressed his admiration for Republican president William McKinley's tariff policies. McKinley was the author of the Tariff Act of 1890, and both Trump and McKinley nicknamed themselves as a "Tariff Man". According to an April 2025 Economist/YouGov poll, "Republican voters overwhelmingly support Trump's tariffs, while Democratic voters generally do not."
At its inception, the Republican Party supported protective tariffs. Abraham Lincoln enacted tariffs during the Civil War. The great battle over the high Payne–Aldrich Tariff Act in 1910 caused a split in the party. The Reciprocal Tariff Act of 1934 marked a sharp departure from the era of protectionism in the United States. American duties on foreign products declined from an average of 46% in 1934 to 12% by 1962, which included the presidency of Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower. After World War II, the U.S. promoted the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) established in 1947, to minimize tariffs and other restrictions, and to liberalize trade among all capitalist countries.
During the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations, Republicans abandoned protectionist policies and came out against quotas and in favor of the GATT and the World Trade Organization policy of minimal economic barriers to global trade. Free trade with Canada came about as a result of the Canada–United States Free Trade Agreement of 1987, which led in 1994 to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) based on Reagan's plan to enlarge the scope of the market for American firms to include Canada and Mexico. President Bill Clinton, with strong Republican support in 1993, pushed NAFTA through Congress over the vehement objection of labor unions.
The 2016 presidential election marked a return to supporting protectionism, beginning with Donald Trump's first presidency. In 2017, only 36% of Republicans agreed that free trade agreements are good for the United States, compared to 67% of Democrats. When asked if free trade has helped respondents specifically, the approval numbers for Democrats drop to 54%, however approval ratings among Republicans remain relatively unchanged at 34%.
Income tax cuts have been at the core of Republican economic policy since 1980. At the national level and state level, Republicans tend to pursue policies of tax cuts and deregulation. Modern Republicans advocate the theory of supply-side economics, which holds that lower tax rates increase economic growth. Many Republicans oppose higher tax rates for higher earners, which they believe are unfairly targeted at those who create jobs and wealth. They believe private spending is more efficient than government spending. Republican lawmakers have also sought to limit funding for tax enforcement and tax collection.
The modern Republican Party's economic policy positions tend to align with business interests and the affluent.
Republicans have traditionally advocated in favor of fiscal conservatism. By the 2020s, Republicans have largely abandoned fiscal conservatism as an ideological cornerstone.
Labor unions and the minimum wage
The Republican Party is generally opposed to labor unions. Republicans believe corporations should be able to establish their own employment practices, including benefits and wages, with the free market deciding the price of work. Since the 1920s, Republicans have generally been opposed by labor union organizations and members. At the national level, Republicans supported the Taft–Hartley Act of 1947, which gives workers the right not to participate in unions. Modern Republicans at the state level generally support various right-to-work laws. Most Republicans also oppose increases in the minimum wage.
Democrats and Republicans have diverged on the seriousness of the threat posed by climate change, with Republicans' assessment remaining essentially unchanged over the past decade.
Opinion about human causation of climate change increased substantially with education among Democrats, but not among Republicans. Conversely, opinions favoring becoming carbon neutral declined substantially with age among Republicans, but not among Democrats.
Historically, progressive leaders in the Republican Party supported environmental protection. Republican President Theodore Roosevelt was a prominent conservationist whose policies eventually led to the creation of the National Park Service. While Republican President Richard Nixon was not an environmentalist, he signed legislation to create the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970 and had a comprehensive environmental program. However, this position has changed since the 1980s and the administration of President Ronald Reagan, who labeled environmental regulations a burden on the economy. Since then, Republicans have increasingly taken positions against environmental regulation, with many Republicans rejecting the scientific consensus on climate change. Republican voters are divided over the human causes of climate change and global warming. Since 2008, many members of the Republican Party have been criticized for being anti-environmentalist and promoting climate change denial in opposition to the general scientific consensus, making them unique even among other worldwide conservative parties.
In 2006, then-California GovernorArnold Schwarzenegger broke from Republican orthodoxy to sign several bills imposing caps on carbon emissions in California. Then-President George W. Bush opposed mandatory caps at a national level. Bush's decision not to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant was challenged in the Supreme Court by 12 states, with the court ruling against the Bush administration in 2007. Bush also publicly opposed ratification of the Kyoto Protocols which sought to limit greenhouse gas emissions and thereby combat climate change; his position was heavily criticized by climate scientists.
Many Republicans during the presidency of Barack Obama opposed his administration's new environmental regulations, such as those on carbon emissions from coal. In particular, many Republicans supported building the Keystone Pipeline; this position was supported by businesses, but opposed by indigenous peoples' groups and environmental activists.
According to the Center for American Progress, a non-profit liberal advocacy group, more than 55% of congressional Republicans were climate change deniers in 2014. PolitiFact in May 2014 found "relatively few Republican members of Congress... accept the prevailing scientific conclusion that global warming is both real and man-made." The group found eight members who acknowledged it, although the group acknowledged there could be more and that not all members of Congress have taken a stance on the issue.
From 2008 to 2017, the Republican Party went from "debating how to combat human-caused climate change to arguing that it does not exist", according to The New York Times. In January 2015, the Republican-led U.S. Senate voted 98–1 to pass a resolution acknowledging that "climate change is real and is not a hoax"; however, an amendment stating that "human activity significantly contributes to climate change" was supported by only five Republican senators. By 2025, the GOP during the second Trump administration moved to abandon all efforts to regulate greenhouse gases by reversing the endangerment finding, and Trump criticized global warming as a "hoax" and a "con job". The Energy Department also released a report promoting climate change denial and refuting the scientific consensus on climate change after several climate skeptics were given government jobs.
Health care
The party opposes a single-payer health care system, describing it as socialized medicine. It also opposes the Affordable Care Act and expansions of Medicaid. Historically, there have been diverse and overlapping views within both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party on the role of government in health care, but the two parties became highly polarized on the topic during 2008–2009 and onwards.
Both Republicans and Democrats made various proposals to establish federally funded aged health insurance prior to the bipartisan effort to establish Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. No Republican member of Congress voted for the Affordable Care Act in 2009, and after it passed, the party made frequent attempts to repeal it. At the state level, the party has tended to adopt a position against Medicaid expansion.
Republicans typically believe individuals should take responsibility for their own circumstances and that the private sector is more effective in helping the poor through charity than the government is through welfare programs, and argue that social assistance programs cause government dependency. As of November 2022, all 11 states that had not expanded Medicaid had Republican-controlled state legislatures.
By the 2020s, Republican officials had increasingly adopted anti-vaccine activism and policy.
The Republican Party has a persistent history of skepticism or opposition to multilateralism in American foreign policy. Its members have frequently advocated for restricting foreign aid to assert the interests of the United States. The modern GOP opposes liberal internationalism. Trump shifted the party towards an isolationist and nationalist agenda that is skeptical of international alliances and free trade.
Israel
President Trump with the current Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu (July 2025)
During the 1940s, many Republicans, particularly Senator Robert A. Taft, advocated for recognition of Israel, leading to support for Israel being integrated into the 1948 Republican Party platform. Nevertheless, some Republicans at the time opposed the cause of an independent Jewish state due to the influence of conservatives of the Old Right. The rise of neoconservatism saw the Republican Party become further pro-Israel by the 1990s and 2000s, although notable anti-Israel sentiment persisted through paleoconservative figures such as Pat Buchanan. As president, Donald Trump generally supported Israel during most of his term, but became increasingly critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu towards the end of it. According to i24NEWS, the 2020s have seen declining support for Israel among nationalist Republicans, led by individuals such as Tucker Carlson. Nevertheless, the 2024 Republican Party platform reaffirmed the party would "stand with Israel" and called for the deportation of "pro-Hamas radicals", while expressing a desire for peace in the Middle East. Although the Republican Party has often positioned itself as an opponent of antisemitism and denounced Democrats as insufficiently supportive of Israel, many members of the Christian right support Israel primarily due to theological beliefs about the centrality of Israel to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and the conversion or damnation of Jews and other non-Christians.
Taiwan
In its 2016 platform, the Republican Party's stance on Taiwan was: "We oppose any unilateral steps by either side to alter the status quo in the Taiwan Straits on the principle that all issues regarding the island's future must be resolved peacefully, through dialogue, and be agreeable to the people of Taiwan." In addition, if "China were to violate those principles, the United States, in accord with the Taiwan Relations Act, will help Taiwan defend itself".
Mention of Taiwan was omitted from the party's 2024 platform.
The 2016 Republican platform eliminated references to giving weapons to Ukraine in its fight with Russia and rebel forces; the removal of this language reportedly resulted from intervention from staffers to presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. However, the Trump administration approved a new sale of anti-tank weapons to Ukraine in 2017. Republicans generally question European NATO members' alleged insufficient investment in defense funding, and some are dissatisfied with American aid to Ukraine. Some Republican members of the U.S. Congress support foreign aid to Israel but not to Ukraine, and have been described by U.S. media as pro-Russian.
Amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine, several prominent Republicans criticized some colleagues and conservative media outlets for echoing Russian propaganda. Liz Cheney, formerly the third-ranking House Republican, said "a Putin wing of the Republican Party" had emerged. Former vice president Mike Pence said, "There is no room in the Republican Party for apologists for Putin." House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Michael McCaul asserted that Russian propaganda had "infected a good chunk of my party's base". House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Turner confirmed McCaul's assessment, asserting that some propaganda coming directly from Russia could be heard on the House floor. Republican senator Thom Tillis characterized the influential conservative commentator Tucker Carlson, who frequently expresses pro-Russia sentiments, as Russia's "useful idiot".
In April 2024, a majority of Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives voted against a military aid package to Ukraine. Both Trump and Senator JD Vance, the 2024 Republican presidential nominee and vice presidential nominee respectively, have been vocal critics of military aid to Ukraine and advocates of a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. The 2024 Republican Party platform did not mention Russia or Ukraine, but stated the party's objectives to "prevent World War III" and "restore peace to Europe".
The Republican Party is generally associated with social conservative policies, although it does have dissenting centrist and libertarian factions. The social conservatives support laws that uphold their traditional values, such as opposition to same-sex marriage, abortion, and marijuana. The Republican Party's positions on social and cultural issues are in part a reflection of the influential role that the Christian right has had in the party since the 1970s. Most conservative Republicans also oppose gun control, affirmative action, and illegal immigration. By the 2020s, the GOP has shifted from traditional conservative support of limited government to instead support statism and increased government oversight when enforcing conservative cultural values.
Abortion and embryonic stem cell research
The Republican position on abortion has changed significantly over time. During the 1960s and early 1970s, opposition to abortion was concentrated among members of the political left and the Democratic Party; most liberal Catholics—which tended to vote for the Democratic Party—opposed expanding abortion access while most conservative evangelical Protestants supported it.
During this period, Republicans generally favored legalized abortion more than Democrats, although significant heterogeneity could be found within both parties. Leading Republican political figures, including Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush, took pro-choice positions until the early 1980s. However, starting at this point, both George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan described themselves as pro-life during their presidencies.
In the 21st century, both George W. Bush and Donald Trump described themselves as "pro-life" during their terms. However, Trump stated that he supported the legality and ethics of abortion before his candidacy in 2015.
Summarizing the rapid shift in the Republican and Democratic positions on abortion, Sue Halpern writes:
...in the late 1960s and early 1970s, many Republicans were behind efforts to liberalize and even decriminalize abortion; theirs was the party of reproductive choice, while Democrats, with their large Catholic constituency, were the opposition. Republican governor Ronald Reagan signed the California Therapeutic Abortion Act, one of the most liberal abortion laws in the country, in 1967, legalizing abortion for women whose mental or physical health would be impaired by pregnancy, or whose pregnancies were the result of rape or incest. The same year, the Republican strongholds of North Carolina and Colorado made it easier for women to obtain abortions. New York, under Governor Nelson Rockefeller, a Republican, eliminated all restrictions on women seeking to terminate pregnancies up to twenty-four weeks gestation.... Richard Nixon, Barry Goldwater, Gerald Ford, and George H.W. Bush were all pro-choice, and they were not party outliers. In 1972, a Gallup poll found that 68 percent of Republicans believed abortion to be a private matter between a woman and her doctor. The government, they said, should not be involved...
Since the 1980s, opposition to abortion has become strongest in the party among traditionalist Catholics and conservative Protestant evangelicals. Initially, evangelicals were relatively indifferent to the cause of abortion and overwhelmingly viewed it as a concern that was sectarian and Catholic. Historian Randall Balmer notes that Billy Graham's Christianity Today published in 1968 a statement by theologian Bruce Waltke that: "God does not regard the fetus as a soul, no matter how far gestation has progressed." Typical of the time, Christianity Today "refused to characterize abortion as sinful" and cited "individual health, family welfare, and social responsibility" as "justifications for ending a pregnancy." Similar beliefs were held among conservative figures in the Southern Baptist Convention, including W. A. Criswell, who is partially credited with starting the "conservative resurgence" within the organization, who stated: "I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed." Balmer argues that evangelical American Christianity being inherently tied to opposition to abortion is a relatively new occurrence. After the late 1970s, he writes, opinion against abortion among evangelicals rapidly shifted in favor of its prohibition.
Today, opinion polls show that Republican voters are heavily divided on the legality of abortion, although the vast majority of the party's national and state candidates are anti-abortion and oppose elective abortion on religious or moral grounds. While many advocate exceptions in the case of incest, rape, or the mother's life being at risk, in 2012 the party approved a platform advocating banning abortions without exception. There were not highly polarized differences between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party before the Roe v. Wade 1973 Supreme Court ruling (which made prohibitions on abortion rights unconstitutional), but after the Supreme Court ruling, opposition to abortion became an increasingly key national platform for the Republican Party. As a result, Evangelicals gravitated towards the Republican Party. Most Republicans oppose government funding for abortion providers, notably Planned Parenthood. This includes support for the Hyde Amendment.
Until its dissolution in 2018, Republican Majority for Choice, an abortion rights PAC, advocated for amending the GOP platform to include pro-abortion rights members.
The Republican Party has pursued policies at the national and state levels to restrict embryonic stem cell research beyond the original lines because it involves the destruction of human embryos.
After the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, a majority of Republican-controlled states passed near-total bans on abortion, rendering it largely illegal throughout much of the United States.
Republicans generally oppose affirmative action, often describing it as a "quota system" and believing that it is not meritocratic and is counter-productive socially, with critics arguing that it promotes reverse discrimination. According to a 2023 ABC poll, a majority of Americans (52%) and 75% of Republicans supported the Supreme Court's decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard prohibiting race as a factor in college admissions, compared to only 26% of Democrats.
The 2012 Republican national platform stated, "We support efforts to help low-income individuals get a fair chance based on their potential and individual merit; but we reject preferences, quotas, and set-asides, as the best or sole methods through which fairness can be achieved, whether in government, education, or corporate boardrooms...Merit, ability, aptitude, and results should be the factors that determine advancement in our society."
Scholars note that Republicans and conservatives have historically supported forms of gun control when leftist groups, including Black Power and feminist movements, embrace "guns as tools for resistance and self‐defense against systemic oppression".
The Republican Party has generally promoted strict anti-crime policies, such as mandatory minimum sentences and the death penalty. In the 2010s, however, prominent Republicans demonstrated some interest in criminal justice reform designed to combat mass incarceration, with President Trump signing the First Step Act, which expanded good behavior credits for perpetrators of most nonviolent crimes and required the U.S. Attorney General to develop a system to assess the recidivism risk of all federal prisoners. By 2024, however, the Republican Party and its leaders had largely left behind its prior support for reform of the justice system.
Republican elected officials have historically supported the war on drugs. They generally oppose legalization or decriminalization of drugs such as marijuana.
Opposition to the legalization of marijuana has softened significantly over time among Republican voters and politicians. A 2021 Quinnipiac poll found that 62% of Republicans supported the legalization of recreational marijuana use and that net support for the position was +30 points. Some Republican-controlled states have legalized medical and recreational marijuana in recent years. In September 2024, then-candidate Donald Trump endorsed the legalization of recreational marijuana.
The stakes have never been higher, and the goal has never been more clear:
Remigration now.
November 28, 2025
The Republican Party has taken widely varying views on immigration throughout its history, but has generally and traditionally taken an anti-immigration and nativist stance compared to the opposition. In the period between 1850 and 1870, the Republican Party was more opposed to immigration than the Democrats. The GOP's opposition was, in part, caused by its reliance on the support of anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant parties such as the Know-Nothings. In the decades following the Civil War, especially in the 1880s, the Republican Party lessened its stance on immigration, as it represented the manufacturers in the northeast (who wanted additional labor); although during this period, the Democratic Party still came to be seen as the party of both American and foreign labor, and many religious Republicans used anti-Irish and pro-Christian sentiments. Starting in the early 1930s, the parties focused on Mexican emigration, as the Democrats proposed a softer stance on Mexican immigration during the Great Depression and New Deal, rather than Republicans under Herbert Hoover.
Since the 2024 presidential election, the party's leading figures have shifted towards supporting remigration. In September, Donald Trump called for "remigration" of illegal immigrants to their home countries and suspending refugee resettlement, also pledging to "do large deportations in Springfield, Ohio", referring to the town's community of legal Haitian immigrants. The usage mainstreamed the term in the country. In May 2025 the Department of State released a "reorganisation chart" that included the creation of an "Office of Remigration". As President, Trump once again endorsed "remigration" in June 2025 as "reversing the invasion" of illegal immigrants into the United States. In July 2025 Trump claimed that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act would allow for remigration to be implemented. White House Deputy Chief of StaffStephen Miller has been described as an advocate for remigration within the Trump administration. In October 2025, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security gained attention after tweeting "remigrate" from its official X account.
From the early 2000s to the mid-2010s, Republicans opposed same-sex marriage, while being divided on the issue of civil unions and domestic partnerships for same-sex couples. During the 2004 election, George W. Bush campaigned prominently on a constitutional amendment to prohibit same-sex marriage; many believe it helped Bush win re-election. In both 2004 and 2006, President Bush, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, and House Majority Leader John Boehner promoted the Federal Marriage Amendment, a proposed failed constitutional amendment which would legally restrict the definition of marriage to heterosexual couples.
As more states legalized same-sex marriage in the 2010s, Republicans increasingly supported allowing each state to decide its own marriage policy. As of 2014, most state GOP platforms expressed opposition to same-sex marriage. The 2016 GOP platform defined marriage as "natural marriage, the union of one man and one woman," and condemned the Supreme Court's ruling legalizing same-sex marriages. The 2020 platform, which reused the 2016 platform, retained the statements against same-sex marriage. Following his election as president in 2016, Donald Trump stated that he had no objection to same-sex marriage or to the Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, but had previously promised to consider appointing a Supreme Court justice to roll back the constitutional right. The Trump administration banned transgender individuals from service in the United States military and rolled back other protections for transgender people which had been enacted during the previous Democratic presidency.
The Republican Party platform previously opposed the inclusion of gay people in the military and opposed adding sexual orientation to the list of protected classes since 1992. The Republican Party opposed the inclusion of sexual preference in anti-discrimination statutes from 1992 to 2004. The 2008 and 2012 Republican Party platform supported anti-discrimination statutes based on sex, race, age, religion, creed, disability, or national origin, but both platforms were silent on sexual orientation and gender identity. The 2016 platform was opposed to sex discrimination statutes that included the phrase "sexual orientation". In the early 2020s, numerous Republican-led states proposed or passed laws that have been described as anti-trans by critics, as well as laws limiting or banning public performances of drag shows, and teaching schoolchildren about LGBT topics. The 2024 party platform removes all mention of same-sex marriage saying instead "Republicans will promote a Culture that values the Sanctity of Marriage." However, the platform does explicitly declare opposition to topics relating to gender identity being taught in public schools, opposition to transgender women participating in women's sports, and opposition to federal funding for gender-affirming surgery.
Virtually all restrictions on voting have in recent years been implemented by Republicans. Republicans, mainly at the state level, argue that the restrictions (such as the purging of voter rolls, limiting voting locations, and limiting early and mail-in voting) are vital to prevent voter fraud, saying that voter fraud is an underestimated issue in elections. Polling has found majority support for early voting, automatic voter registration, and voter ID laws among the general population.
In defending their restrictions to voting rights, Republicans have made false and exaggerated claims about the extent of voter fraud in the United States; all existing research indicates that it is extremely rare, and civil and voting rights organizations often accuse Republicans of enacting restrictions to influence elections in the party's favor. Many laws or regulations restricting voting enacted by Republicans have been successfully challenged in court, with court rulings striking down such regulations and accusing Republicans of establishing them with a partisan purpose.
After the Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder rolled back aspects of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Republicans introduced cuts to early voting, purges of voter rolls, and imposition of strict voter ID laws. The 2016 Republican platform advocated proof of citizenship as a prerequisite for registering to vote and photo ID as a prerequisite when voting.
After Donald Trump and his Republican allies made false claims of fraud during the 2020 presidential election, Republicans launched a nationwide effort to impose tighter election laws at the state level. Such bills are centered around limiting mail-in voting, strengthening voter ID laws, shortening early voting, eliminating automatic and same-day voter registration, curbing the use of ballot drop boxes, and allowing for increased purging of voter rolls. Republicans in at least eight states have also introduced bills that would give lawmakers greater power over election administration, after they were unsuccessful in their attempts to overturn election results in swing states won by Biden.
Supporters of the bills argue they would improve election security and reverse temporary changes enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic; they point to false claims of significant election fraud, as well as the substantial public distrust of the integrity of the 2020 election those claims have fostered, as justification. Political analysts say that the efforts amount to voter suppression, are intended to advantage Republicans by reducing the number of people who vote, and would disproportionately affect minority voters.
12The GOP is classified as populist-nationalist, more specificly neo-nationalist.
12Political scientists had generally seen the party as upholding American conservatism before 2017; it is now considered a minority view in the party.[excessive citations]
↑Reagan-era conservatism, generally considered to be a leading faction of the party that is distinct from national-populism, is now a minority. Due to the hegemonic historical influence of classical liberalism on American conservatism, scholars disagree on whether Trumpism is a form of, outgrowth, or deviation away from the ideology, a subject discussed in Max Boot's Reagan: His Life and Legend. The GOP continues to generally adhere to socially conservative positions, and scholars have noted analogies between Trumpism and national conservative parties.
↑Political scientist Cas Mudde discusses this debate in his 2019 book The Far-Right Today.
↑Scholars broadly agree that the modern GOP is a neo-nationalist party. There is an ongoing academic debate on type, and they have variously described the party as civic, cultural, or ethnic nationalist, or taking aspects from them. In 2026, the V-Dem Institute reported a consensus in political science that the party is "far-right" and its nationalism is "anti-pluralist".
↑Right-to-work laws ban union security agreements, which require all workers in a unionized workplace to pay dues or a fair-share fee regardless of whether they are members of the union or not.
↑According to an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll, while more than 60% of Americans believe the 2020 election was secure, a large majority of Republican voters say they do not trust the results of the 2020 election. According to a poll by Quinnipiac, 77% of Republicans believe there was widespread voter fraud.
↑Incumbent vice-president James S. Sherman was re-nominated as Taft's running-mate, but died six days before the election. Butler was chosen to receive the Republican vice-presidential votes after the election.
1234Boot, Max (September 8, 2024). "How the GOP Went From Reagan to Trump". The Atlantic. Retrieved May 4, 2026. The Trump-dominated, populist-nationalist GOP is certainly very different from the conservative party that Reagan led in the 1980s [...]
Brug, Wouter van der; Hobolt, Sara B.; Popa, Sebastian Adrian (April 18, 2025). "The Kids Are Alt Right? Age, Authoritarian Attitudes and Far-Right Support in Europe". Journal of European Public Policy. 32 (1). Taylor & Francis: 469–494. doi:10.1080/13501763.2025.2488358. p.20: The Republican Party of the US is not a far-right party, but since the rise of the Tea Party movement and especially under the presidency of Donald Trump, the party has embraced the main characteristics of a populist right party (such as authoritarianism, nativism, populism, conspiracy theories involving ethnic minorities, etc.)
McKay, David (2020). "Facilitating Donald Trump: Populism, the Republican Party and Media Manipulation". In Crewe, Ivor; Sanders, David (eds.). Authoritarian Populism and Liberal Democracy. Cham: Springer International Publishing. pp.107–121. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-17997-7_7. ISBN978-3-030-17997-7. Retrieved June 13, 2024. the Republicans changed from being a right of centre coalition of moderates and conservatives to an unambiguously right-wing party that was hostile not only to liberal views but also to any perspective that clashed with the core views of an ideologically cohesive conservative cadre of party faithfuls
Greenberg, David (January 27, 2021). "An Intellectual History of Trumpism". Politico Magazine. Archived from the original on April 11, 2024. Retrieved June 13, 2024. The larger ideology that the president-elect represents is a post-Iraq War, post-crash, post-Barack Obama update of what used to be called paleoconservatism: On race and immigration, where the alt-right affinities are most pronounced, its populist ideas are carrying an already right-wing party even further right.
Wineinger, Catherine; Nugent, Mary K. (January 2, 2020). "Framing Identity Politics: Right-Wing Women as Strategic Party Actors in the UK and US". Journal of Women, Politics & Policy. 41 (1): 5. doi:10.1080/1554477X.2020.1698214. ISSN1554-477X.
Jessosula, Matteo; Natili, Marcello; Pavolini, Emmanuele (August 8, 2022). "'Exclusionary welfarism': a new programmatic agenda for populist right-wing parties?". Contemporary Politics. 28 (4): 447–449. doi:10.1080/13569775.2021.2011644. ISSN1356-9775.
"DEMOCRACY REPORT 2026: Unraveling The Democratic Era?"(PDF). V-Dem Institute. March 17, 2026. Retrieved March 22, 2026. One notable shift is the transformation of the Republican Party to endorsing a far-right, nationalist, and anti-pluralist agenda. Nationalist, anti-liberal, far-right parties and leaders have largely driven the "third wave of autocratization." Yet the USA stands out as the only case where such movement seized control over one party in a rigid two-party system.
Greenberg, David (January 27, 2021). "An Intellectual History of Trumpism". Politico Magazine. Archived from the original on April 11, 2024. Retrieved June 13, 2024. The larger ideology that the president-elect represents is a post-Iraq War, post-crash, post-Barack Obama update of what used to be called paleoconservatism: On race and immigration, where the alt-right affinities are most pronounced, its populist ideas are carrying an already right-wing party even further right.
123Lührmann, Anna; Medzihorsky, Juraj; Hindle, Garry; Lindberg, Staffan I. (October 2020). "New Global Data on Political Parties: V-Party"(PDF). Briefing Paper No. 9. V-Dem Institute. Archived(PDF) from the original on November 14, 2024. Retrieved November 13, 2024.
↑"How President Trump has challenged a constitutional foundation". NPR. January 23, 2026. Retrieved May 9, 2026. In his first year back in the White House, President Trump has presided over a sweeping expansion of executive power while eroding democratic norms. Many scholars of democracy say that these moves are unprecedented in U.S. history and that Trump has pushed the United States toward authoritarianism.
12Tyler Godines Camarillo, C.; Clark Wilson, Walter; Perroud, Jace; VanGoethem, Margaret (January 3, 2026). "The New Republican Revolution: The Implications of Illiberalism and Populism for GOP Politics and Policy". The Roads to Congress 2024: Navigating Elections in an Era of Upheaval. Palgrave Macmillan Cham. pp.127–151. ISBN978-3-032-07119-4.
12Sunshine, Spencer (January 6, 2026). "The Far Right Is Quietly Building Power Under Trump". The New Republic. ISSN0028-6583. Retrieved May 9, 2026. The administration has also made efforts to help the European far right, which it is increasingly allied with. Trump is close to Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Britain's head of the nativist Reform Party, Nigel Farage, while JD Vance met with the leader of the extremist Alternative for Germany party and called on European parties to remove their "firewalls" against cooperating with the far right.
Massey, Douglas S. (2021). "The Bipartisan Origins of White Nationalism". Daedalus. 150 (2): Abstract. doi:10.1162/daed_a_01843. ISSN0011-5266. Archived from the original on January 29, 2026. Until 2016, this cultivation relied on a dog whistle politics of racially coded symbolic language, but with the election of Donald Trump as president, White nationalist sentiments became explicit and White nationalism emerged as an ideological pillar of the Republican Party.
McClellan, Fletcher; Le, Loan (January 22, 2025), Democratic Theory and the New Undergraduate Political Science Major, doi:10.33774/apsa-2025-1blzz, retrieved July 19, 2026, Lieberman and Schlozman (2024) categorized the Republican Party as a majority ethnic party, based on white group identity, which executed backsliding behaviors such as vote manipulation and voter suppression.
Velshi, Ali; Ahmed, Amel; Detzel, Allison (November 11, 2025). "As Democrats expand their coalition, Republicans are embracing extremism". MS NOW. Retrieved August 15, 2026. Republicans have become increasingly defined by white Christian nationalism, exclusion and resentment of the nation's pluralism — and they're no longer feeling the need to disguise any of it.
12Shamim, Sarah. "What is remigration, the far-right fringe idea going mainstream?". Al Jazeera. Retrieved May 6, 2026. Remigration — once a fringe far-right notion advocating the deportation of ethnic minorities — is now gaining traction in United States Republican circles as President Donald Trump's second term enters the final weeks of its first year.
123Yousef, Odette (December 9, 2025). "'Remigration,' once a fringe idea, becomes a mantra for the Trump administration". NPR. Retrieved May 9, 2026. So President Trump on Thanksgiving Day posted to social media about how immigration policies have hurt, quote, "gains and living conditions for many." And he said only reverse migration can fully cure this situation. But also, the State Department's proposed reorganization plan included a new office of remigration, and the Department of Homeland Security has called for remigration on social media posts. One of them, for example, Ailsa, with simply the word remigrate.
↑Zingher, Joshua N. (2018). "Polarization, Demographic Change, and White Flight from the Democratic Party". The Journal of Politics. 80 (3): 860–872. doi:10.1086/696994. ISSN0022-3816. S2CID158351108.
Cliffe, Jeremy (February 15, 2023). "The strange death of the centre right". The New Statesman. Archived from the original on February 11, 2025. Retrieved February 5, 2025. In Western democracies conventional conservatism is foundering. How did this once-dominant political force become so diminished?
↑Starr, Paul (March 27, 2026). "How the Republican Party Forgot It Was Conservative". The American Prospect. Retrieved May 4, 2026. But the truly consequential change is that Republicans have broken with their own past. Under Donald Trump, the party hasn't just reversed its positions on specific policies. It has routinely betrayed basic tenets of the conservative philosophy that Republicans have long claimed was the bedrock of their party.
↑Graham, David A. (July 8, 2023). "The Democrats Are Now America's Conservative Party". The Atlantic. Retrieved May 4, 2026. Third, and relatedly, the Trump-era Republican Party has abandoned much of the party's old orthodoxy in favor of radicalism on domestic and foreign affairs.
"The Republican Party has lurched towards populism and illiberalism". The Economist. October 31, 2020. ISSN0013-0613. Archived from the original on June 2, 2024. Retrieved November 9, 2024. In the late 20th century the Republican Party already looked a bit less liberal and more populist than most mainstream European parties. But according to the V-Dem Institute's analysis, it only really started to deviate to "illiberalism" when it embraced religious values under Mr Bush after his election in 2000. The party then veered into populism in 2010 with the rise of the Tea Party movement, which vowed to curb what it saw as the unjustifiable expansion of the federal government under Barack Obama. However, the greatest shift, especially towards illiberalism, came with the election of Mr Trump.
Encarnación, Omar G. (June 12, 2023). "Democratic Backsliding: Comparative Reflections on the American Experience". Political Science Quarterly. 138 (3): 407–424. doi:10.1093/psquar/qqad036. pp.410–423: Despite the appearance of being consolidated, the American political system is institutionally vulnerable to backsliding—from an electoral system fraught with so many deficiencies that election experts deem it archaic and undemocratic; to an imperial presidency that sits at the center of federal power and towers over the legislature and the judiciary; to the recent transformation of the Republican Party into an illiberal force more interested in acquiring power than in governing. ... The Republican Party's pivotal role in enabling backsliding in the Trump era mirrors the post-Communist experience. In recent years, the Republican party has fashioned itself after the Fidesz Party in Hungary (Europe's most sobering example of backsliding), from embracing the ideology of Christian Nationalism to using the state to fight culture wars to cynically rejecting the idea of democracy. In connection to the last point, a popular argument among Republican election deniers is that the United States is not a democracy but a republic. As noted by the New York Times, "There is more at stake than the health of the Republican Party when its core activists, as well as a growing number of officials and those campaigning for governmental positions, openly espouse hostility not just to democratic principles, but, increasingly, to the word 'democracy' itself." Indeed, this illiberal behavior puts American democracy in peril.
Main, Thomas J. (January 4, 2022). The Rise of Illiberalism. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press. p.188. ISBN9780815738503. Archived from the original on January 28, 2025. Retrieved November 12, 2024. A sharp repudiation at the polls would have checked the vogue for illiberal and identitarian ideologies and driven the Republican party back within the bounds of the liberal democratic political spectrum.
Laruelle, Marlene (March 1, 2022). "Illiberalism: a conceptual introduction". East European Politics. 38 (2): 303–327. doi:10.1080/21599165.2022.2037079. hdl:11385/259401. ISSN2159-9165. pp.315–316: Classical conservatives—such as the Christian Democrats in Europe or the Republican Party in the US before Donald Trump—are/were fervent supporters of political rights and constitutionalism, while illiberalism challenges them ... The struggle of the European People's Party to win concessions from Orbán's Fidesz or the Polish PiS, as well as the subjugation of the Republican Party by Donald Trump, have revealed how attractive illiberal leaders may be to the more mainstream right. As Marc Plattner has stated, the future of liberal democracy will largely depend on how successful or unsuccessful the classical conservative right is at resisting illiberalism.
Cooley, Alexander; Nexon, Daniel H. (January–February 2022). "The Real Crisis of Global Order: Illiberalism on the Rise". Foreign Affairs. Vol.101, no.1. New York City: Council on Foreign Relations. ISSN0015-7120. Retrieved November 12, 2024. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 sparked a major debate over the nature and fate of the liberal international order, suddenly caught, it seemed, between the Charybdis of illiberal great-power challengers and the Scylla of a hostile U.S. president. Trump may have lost the presidency in 2020, but the liberal order remains under threat. ... In the United States, one of the two major political parties remains beholden to an authoritarian demagogue. Motivated by the "Big Lie" (the objectively false claim that Democrats stole the election from Trump through systematic voter fraud), the Republican Party is purging officials who stood in the way of efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Republican voter-suppression efforts are accelerating.
Dunwoody, Phillip T.; Gershtenson, Joseph; Plane, Dennis L.; Upchurch-Poole, Territa (August 9, 2022). "The fascist authoritarian model of illiberal democracy". Frontiers in Political Science. 4 907681. doi:10.3389/fpos.2022.907681. ISSN2673-3145. p.12: All the components of the fascist authoritarian model of illiberal democracy were evidenced in the recent 2020 U.S. presidential election. ... In classic authoritarian fashion, Trump sought to remain in power by asserting his preferred fiction over more objective realities promoted by those in traditional, truth-based professions. Trump engaged in threat othering to work up his base so that they would support the use of force to "save" their country. The result of these combined mechanisms was the support of blatantly illiberal antidemocratic behavior at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Norris, Pippa (2017). "Online Exchange on "Democratic Deconsolidation"(PDF). Journal of Democracy. 12. Retrieved November 9, 2024. pp.14–15–18: The rise of populist authoritarianism in the United States, especially by the risks that President Trump poses to core democratic values, practices and institutions, pose major threats to liberal democracy. ... When the populist style of governance is coupled with authoritarian values, however, this potent combination presents most dangerous risk to the principles and practices at the heart of liberal democracy. Trump falls into this category. ... populist-authoritarian forces threatening to dismantle core values in liberal democracy pose the gravest risk, especially in America, given the vast powers of the U.S. presidency and its hegemonic role in the world. The mainstream news media, the courts, and a reenergized civil society are actively pushing back to resist the threats to democracy arising from the Trump administration. In Congress and State Houses, however, the Democrats are decimated, and the Republican party and conservative activists seem willing to be seduced by dreams of power.
Drutman, Lee (June 8, 2021). "The Republican party is now an explicitly illiberal party". The Guardian. ISSN0261-3077. Retrieved May 4, 2026. Though these anti-democratic sentiments have been building within the ranks of the party for years, the events of 2021 mark the transformation of the Republican party into a genuinely illiberal party, and a grave threat to the continuation of American democracy as we've known it.
"The Republican Party has lurched towards populism and illiberalism". The Economist. October 31, 2020. ISSN0013-0613. Archived from the original on June 2, 2024. Retrieved November 9, 2024. In the late 20th century the Republican Party already looked a bit less liberal and more populist than most mainstream European parties. But according to the V-Dem Institute's analysis, it only really started to deviate to "illiberalism" when it embraced religious values under Mr Bush after his election in 2000. The party then veered into populism in 2010 with the rise of the Tea Party movement, which vowed to curb what it saw as the unjustifiable expansion of the federal government under Barack Obama. However, the greatest shift, especially towards illiberalism, came with the election of Mr Trump.
Lührmann, Anna; Medzihorsky, Juraj; Hindle, Garry; Lindberg, Staffan I. (October 2020). "New Global Data on Political Parties: V-Party"(PDF). Briefing Paper No. 9. V-Dem Institute. Archived(PDF) from the original on November 14, 2024. Retrieved November 13, 2024.
Drutman, Lee (March 18, 2021). "American Democracy Can't Survive Unless the Far Right Is Marginalized. Here's How to Do It". Time. Retrieved May 9, 2026. By international standards, the current Republican Party is an illiberal anti-democratic nativist global outlier, with positions more extreme than France's National Rally, and in line with the Germany's AfD, Hungary's Fidesz, Turkey's AKP and Poland's PiS, according to the widely respected V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy) Institute.
Kottasová, Ivana (October 26, 2020). "Republicans are starting to look like authoritarian parties in Hungary and Turkey, study finds". CNN. Retrieved May 9, 2026. Experts from the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden said the US Republican Party had become more illiberal and populist in recent decades and that its recent retreat from democratic norms has left it resembling authoritarian ruling parties like Hungary's Fidesz and Turkey's AKP.
"Trump's GOP resembles authoritarian parties in India and Turkey, and Poland, study stays". The Independent. October 26, 2020. Retrieved May 9, 2026. Donald Trump's Republican party has become more illiberal and retreated from upholding democratic norms in recent years, a study has found, with its rhetoric shifting closer that of authoritarian parties ruling in Turkey, Hungary, Poland and India.
Borger, Julian (October 26, 2020). "Republicans closely resemble autocratic parties in Hungary and Turkey – study". The Guardian. ISSN0261-3077. Retrieved May 9, 2026. In a significant shift since 2000, the GOP has taken to demonising and encouraging violence against its opponents, adopting attitudes and tactics comparable to ruling nationalist parties in Hungary, India, Poland and Turkey.
1234Rovira Kaltwasser, Cristóbal; Roberts, Kenneth. "Is the United States Still a Democracy?". European Consortium for Political Research. Retrieved April 27, 2026. A key argument developed in this contribution is that the central problem lies less with the figure of Trump himself than with the broader transformation from a mainstream conservative party into a far-right one.
"DEMOCRACY REPORT 2026: Unraveling The Democratic Era?"(PDF). V-Dem Institute. March 17, 2026. Retrieved March 22, 2026. One notable shift is the transformation of the Republican Party to endorsing a far-right, nationalist, and anti-pluralist agenda. Nationalist, anti-liberal, far-right parties and leaders have largely driven the "third wave of autocratization." Yet the USA stands out as the only case where such movement seized control over one party in a rigid two-party system.
Klaas, Brian (September 9, 2025). "Is The United States Still A Democracy?". The London School of Economics and Political Science. Retrieved April 9, 2026. Political scientists continue to debate this topic, but few would classify the United States as a robust democracy. It is either a democracy in crisis that is barely clinging onto the label, or one that has tipped over the edge into competitive authoritarianism - and I believe it's the latter.
Langfitt, Frank (April 22, 2025). "Hundreds of scholars say U.S. is swiftly heading toward authoritarianism". NPR. Retrieved May 9, 2026. A survey of more than 500 political scientists finds that the vast majority think the United States is moving swiftly from liberal democracy toward some form of authoritarianism.
Schenkkan, Nate (January 15, 2026). "Century's New Democracy Meter Shows America Took an Authoritarian Turn in 2025". The Century Foundation. Retrieved May 9, 2026. The Century Foundation's 2025 evaluation finds that American democracy is already collapsing—the Democracy Meter rates the United States at 57/100, a 28 percent drop in just one year. In the first year of Trump 2.0, the United States went from being a passing if imperfect democracy to behaving like an authoritarian state: breaking the law, ignoring court rulings, engaging in grand corruption, targeting critics for persecution, and conducting a campaign against immigrants, in particular, that flagrantly violates civil rights.
"index". Polity data series. Retrieved May 9, 2026. The USA is no longer considered a democracy and lies at the cusp of autocracy; it has experienced a Presidential Coup and an Adverse Regime Change event (8-point drop in its POLITY score).
↑Drum, Kevin (November 13, 2004). "Red State, Blue State". Washington Monthly. Archived from the original on November 7, 2017. Retrieved October 30, 2017.
123Smith, Robert C. (2021). "Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump, and the Future of the Republican Party and Conservatism in America". American Political Thought. 10 (2): 283–289. doi:10.1086/713662.
↑Adams, Ian (2001). Political Ideology Today (reprinted, reviseded.). Manchester: Manchester University Press. pp.32–33. ISBN978-0719060205. Archived from the original on January 20, 2023. Retrieved February 2, 2023. Ideologically, all US parties are liberal and always have been. Essentially they espouse classical liberalism, that is a form of democratised Whig constitutionalism plus the free market. The point of difference comes with the influence of social liberalism" and the proper role of government... ...the American right has nothing to do with maintaining the traditional social order, as in Europe. What it believes in is... individualism... The American right has tended towards... classical liberalism...
12Maxwell, Rahsaan (March 5, 2019). "Analysis | Why are urban and rural areas so politically divided?". The Washington Post. ISSN0190-8286. Archived from the original on October 30, 2020. Retrieved May 6, 2024. In general, the core supporters of right-wing populist political parties across Europe are in more rural areas, where they feel left behind by the globalized economy and alienated from the multiculturalism of European capitals.
↑McKay, David (2020). "Facilitating Donald Trump: Populism, the Republican Party and Media Manipulation". In Crewe, Ivor; Sanders, David (eds.). Authoritarian Populism and Liberal Democracy. Cham: Springer International Publishing. pp.107–121. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-17997-7_7. ISBN978-3-030-17997-7. Retrieved June 13, 2024. the Republicans changed from being a right of centre coalition of moderates and conservatives to an unambiguously right-wing party that was hostile not only to liberal views but also to any perspective that clashed with the core views of an ideologically cohesive conservative cadre of party faithfuls
Kane, Paul (October 5, 2023). "McCarthy thought he could harness forces of disruption. Instead they devoured him". The Washington Post. Archived from the original on August 11, 2024. Retrieved August 4, 2024. As far back as 2009, the future House speaker tried to channel the anti-politician, tea party wave building into a political force, but the movement crushed him.
12Desiderio, Andrew; Sherman, Jake; Bresnahan, John (February 7, 2024). "The end of the Old GOP". Punchbowl News. Archived from the original on February 7, 2024. Retrieved February 8, 2024. The structures and standards that have come to define the GOP have been breaking down since the Tea Party movement began in 2009. They were further eroded when Trump won the White House in 2016. But in recent months, the last holdout of the old Republican Party — the Senate GOP Conference — has all but abandoned many of its generational positions on foreign policy and governance. ... McConnell, perhaps the embodiment of the Republican Party for the last 40 years, is increasingly looking like an anachronism — and not just on policy.
12Cohn, Nate (December 25, 2024). "Trump's Re-election Defines a New Era of American Politics". The New York Times. Archived from the original on December 25, 2024. Retrieved December 25, 2024. Instead, it's the three Trump elections — in 2016, 2020 and 2024 — that look as if they have the makings of a new era of politics, one defined by Donald J. Trump's brand of conservative populism. ... Much of the Republican Party's old establishment — like the Cheneys, the Romneys, Paul Ryan — is now without a home.
↑Swan, Jonathan; Haberman, Maggie (December 12, 2024). "The Stock Market and TV: Trump's Most Durable Guardrails". The New York Times. ISSN0362-4331. Archived from the original on January 28, 2025. Retrieved January 20, 2025. Mr. Trump is likely to receive only the meekest resistance from his own party, which will control both the House and Senate and whose members fear Trump-backed primary challengers. He has completed his hostile takeover of the Republican Party and the dissenters have been driven into retirement, defeated in primaries or cowed into silence.
12Cliffe, Jeremy (February 15, 2023). "The strange death of the centre right". The New Statesman. Archived from the original on February 11, 2025. Retrieved February 5, 2025. In Western democracies conventional conservatism is foundering. How did this once-dominant political force become so diminished? ... The picture today is drastically different. In every one of those countries the moderate conservative tendency represented by those leaders has been sidelined in one way or another. It has either been displaced by more hard-line elements within the same party, or by another party farther to the right; or it has started cooperating with the hard-line right; or has been partly or wholly marginalised within the political system. In one notable case (Orbán) it has self-radicalised. In several countries more than one of these things has occurred. ... The traditional centre right of the postwar decades could do so by "bundling" moderate social conservatism (moderate by the standards of its day, at least) with the pro-business economic conservatism favoured by higher earners. But today those two elements are coming apart: richer folk are more likely to have gone to university and be socially liberal, while social conservatism is more associated with poorer groups. That puts centre-right politics in zugzwang: forced to move, but with no good options. It can emphasize its social conservatism and lose pro-business graduates to the centre, or play it down, shore up its support among those voters and lose social conservatives to the radical right.
↑Linkins, Jason (February 23, 2025). "The Incredible Disappearing Republican Lawmaker". The New Republic. Retrieved February 23, 2025. The GOP's total withdrawal from governing is nearly complete, and they're increasingly determined to push the entire legislative branch into functional irrelevance.
↑Green, Erica L.; Kanno-Youngs, Zolan; Haberman, Maggie (March 20, 2025). "How Trump Is Trying to Consolidate Power Over Courts, Congress and More". The New York Times. Retrieved March 20, 2025. President Trump's expansive interpretation of presidential power has become the defining characteristic of his second term.
12Winberg, Oscar (2017). "Insult Politics: Donald Trump, Right-Wing Populism, and Incendiary Language". European Journal of American Studies. 12 (2): 1–16. doi:10.4000/ejas.12132. ISSN1991-9336. Archived from the original on December 31, 2024. Retrieved February 2, 2025. pp.5–6: With the presidency of George W. Bush, coinciding with the ascendance of the conservative media establishment and ending with the mass protests of the Tea Party, the long tradition of right-wing populism was a firmly institutionalized part of the conservative movement and, by extension, the Republican Party. Trump's rise should be understood as part of the long tradition of right-wing populism and the ultimate triumph of the Tea Party movement; a right-wing populist eruption within the Republican Party fueled by both a conservative media establishment and anti-intellectual and, at times, overtly racial appeals.
↑Fiorino, Daniel J. (2022). "Climate change and right-wing populism in the United States". Environmental Politics. 31 (5): 801–819. Bibcode:2022EnvPo..31..801F. doi:10.1080/09644016.2021.2018854. ISSN0964-4016. In recent years, the Republican Party in the United States has taken on the characteristics of right-wing populism, especially under President Donald Trump. Like most right-wing populist parties, the party under Trump is hostile to climate mitigation. This is reflected in skepticism or rejection of climate science, opposition to multilateral institutions and agreements, aggressive domestic exploitation of fossil fuels, and depiction of climate advocates and experts as 'elites' set on undermining the will of 'the people'.
↑Cohn, Nate (November 25, 2024). "How Democrats Lost Their Base and their Message". The New York Times. Archived from the original on November 25, 2024. Retrieved November 25, 2024. Donald Trump's populist pitch bumped Democrats off their traditional place in American politics.
↑Burn-Murdoch, John (March 6, 2025). "Why the Maga mindset is different". Financial Times. Retrieved March 18, 2025. US decisions can no longer be analyzed using assumptions shared across the democratic west
↑Aratani, Lauren (February 26, 2021). "Republicans unveil two minimum wage bills in response to Democrats' push". The Guardian. Archived from the original on August 14, 2021. Retrieved September 7, 2021. In keeping with the party's deep division between its dominant Trumpist faction and its more traditionalist party elites, the twin responses seem aimed at appealing on one hand to its corporate-friendly allies and on the other hand to its populist rightwing base. Both have an anti-immigrant element.
↑Zhou, Shaoqing (December 8, 2022). "The origins, characteristics and trends of neo-nationalism in the 21st century". International Journal of Anthropology and Ethnology. 6 (1) 18. doi:10.1186/s41257-022-00079-4. PMC9735003. PMID36532330. In order to distinguish it from classical nationalism, Western academia and media collectively referred to far-right nationalism and evangelical nationalism as neo-nationalism, that is, new phenomena appearing in Western countries since the early 21st century. On a practical level, the United Kingdom's withdrawal from the European Union and Trump's election as the United States president are regarded as typical events of neo-nationalism.
12Burn-Murdoch, John (March 6, 2025). "Why the Maga mindset is different". Financial Times. Retrieved March 18, 2025. US decisions can no longer be analyzed using assumptions shared across the democratic west ... But the series of shock decisions ... are less brain-bendingly inexplicable once you realise this: their version of America is operating on an entirely different set of values from the rest of the western world. ... A government seemingly driven by zero-sum ideology and a commitment to reducing international co-operation is one whose threats of a trade war you should probably take seriously despite possible economic self-harm. Likewise, a leadership team that believes geopolitics is a game of cards played by strong men and great powers is one whose support and cooperation other countries should quickly build independence from.
↑Huntington, John S. (2021). Far-right Vanguard: The Radical Roots of Modern Conservatism. Politics and culture in modern America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN978-0-8122-5347-4. Donald Trump shocked the nation in 2016 by winning the presidency through an ultraconservative, anti-immigrant platform, but, despite the electoral surprise, Trump's far-right views were not an aberration, nor even a recent phenomenon ... Ultraconservatives of the twentieth century were the vanguard of modern conservatism as it exists in the Republican Party of today.
↑Wahl, Klaus (2020). "Making America Great Again? The Radical Right in the United States". The Radical Right. Biopsychosocial Roots and International Variations. London: Palgrave Macmillan. pp.285–317. ISBN978-3-030-25130-7. OCLC1126278982.
12Helleiner, Eric (January 5, 2021). "The Return of National Self-Sufficiency.Excavating Autarkic Thought in a De-Globalizing Era". International Studies Review. 23 (3): 933–957. doi:10.1093/isr/viaa092. ISSN1521-9488. PMC7928914. The election of Donald Trump as American president in 2016 encouraged further interest in ideas of national self-sufficiency. ... Trump's worldview was much closer to a neomercantilist one than an autarkist one, but some of his supporters on the far right are more clearly in the latter camp.14 For example, in a 2020 publication from the Claremont Institute, Curtis Yarvin called for the promotion of an "isolationist" policy of "neo-Sakoku". Like some other past autarkists, he argued that a world of autarkic states would be more peaceful because the reasons for conflict would diminish (Yarvin 2020). The Trump administration also indirectly encouraged new interest in greater national self-sufficiency in other countries because of its protectionism and its broader "weaponization" of America's international economic relations (Farrell and Newman 2019).
12Fleming, Sam; Strauss, Delphine (April 4, 2025). "Trump's aggressive push to roll back globalisation". Financial Times. Retrieved April 4, 2025. The US president wants to unwind decades of economic integration. The risk of a 1930s-style global trade war is causing markets to panic.
The Christian Science Monitor (November 5, 2020). "Why Trumpism is here to stay". The Christian Science Monitor. Archived from the original on June 12, 2024. Retrieved February 3, 2025.
↑Kimmage, Michael (February 25, 2025). "The World Trump Wants: American Power in the New Age of Nationalism". Foreign Affairs. Vol.104, no.2. Retrieved March 18, 2025. In the two decades that followed the Cold War's end, globalism gained ground over nationalism. Simultaneously, the rise of increasingly complex systems and networks—institutional, financial, and technological—overshadowed the role of the individual in politics. But in the early 2010s, a profound shift began. By learning to harness the tools of this century, a cadre of charismatic figures revived the archetypes of the previous one: the strong leader, the great nation, the proud civilization. ... They are self-styled strongmen who place little stock in rules-based systems, alliances, or multinational forums. They embrace the once and future glory of the countries they govern, asserting an almost mystical mandate for their rule. Although their programs can involve radical change, their political strategies rely on strains of conservatism, appealing over the heads of liberal, urban, cosmopolitan elites to constituencies animated by a hunger for tradition and a desire for belonging.
Mazzetti, Mark; Kingsley, Patrick (March 21, 2025). "For Trump and Netanyahu, Similar Strategies With Similar Goals". The New York Times. Retrieved March 22, 2025. The American and Israeli leaders have been mirroring each other as they go to war with their own governments
"Saudi Arabia Has Its Own 'Deal of the Century' for Trump". Newsweek. November 24, 2024. The president-elect's "America First" platform resounds heavily with the transformative, increasingly nationalist path on which Riyadh's monarch-in-waiting has embarked.
12Baker, Paula; Critchlow, Donald T. (2020). The Oxford Handbook of American Political History. Oxford University Press. p.387. ISBN978-0190628697. Archived from the original on December 15, 2023. Retrieved April 23, 2021– via Google Books. Contemporary debate is fueled on one side by immigration restrictionists, led by President Donald Trump and other elected republicans, whose rhetorical and policy assaults on undocumented Latin American immigrants, Muslim refugees, and family-based immigration energized their conservative base.
↑Jones, Kent (2021). "Populism, Trade, and Trump's Path to Victory". Populism and Trade: The Challenge to the Global Trading System. Oxford University Press. ISBN978-0190086350.
↑Smith, Jordan Michael; Logis, Rich; Logis, Rich; Shephard, Alex; Shephard, Alex; Kipnis, Laura; Kipnis, Laura; Haas, Lidija; Haas, Lidija (October 17, 2022). "The Neocons Are Losing. Why Aren't We Happy?". The New Republic. ISSN0028-6583. Archived from the original on May 5, 2023. Retrieved May 5, 2023.
Lillis, Mike (February 28, 2024). "GOP strained by Trump-influenced shift from Reagan on Russia". The Hill. Archived from the original on February 28, 2024. Retrieved February 28, 2024. Experts say a variety of factors have led to the GOP's more lenient approach to Moscow, some of which preceded Trump's arrival on the political scene ... Trump's popularity has only encouraged other Republicans to adopt a soft-gloves approach to Russia.
Chait, Jonathan (February 23, 2024). "Russian Dolls Trump has finally remade Republicans into Putin's playthings". Intelligencer. Archived from the original on February 29, 2024. Retrieved February 28, 2024. But during his time in office and after, Trump managed to create, from the grassroots up, a Republican constituency for Russia-friendly policy ... Conservatives vying to be the Trumpiest of them all have realized that supporting Russia translates in the Republican mind as a proxy for supporting Trump. Hence the politicians most willing to defend his offenses against democratic norms — Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan, Tommy Tuberville, Mike Lee, J. D. Vance — hold the most anti-Ukraine or pro-Russia views. Conversely, the least-Trumpy Republicans, such as Mitch McConnell and Mitt Romney, have the most hawkish views on Russia. The rapid growth of Trump's once-unique pro-Russia stance is a gravitational function of his personality cult.
↑Jimison, Robert (February 19, 2025). "As Trump Turns Toward Russia and Against Ukraine, Republicans Are Mum". The New York Times. Congressional Republicans have mostly tempered their criticism or deferred to the president as he topples what were once their party's core foreign policy principles.
"Trump is teasing US expansion into Panama, Greenland and Canada". CNN. December 23, 2024. His pitch to seize the Panama Canal – which he described as a "vital national asset" though it's been decades since America controlled it – reflected a similarly nationalist agenda that Trump often describes as "America First."
"AS REPUBLICANS THIRST FOR WAR WITH MEXICO, DEMOCRATS PUSH TO MAKE THEM VOTE ON IT". The Intercept. August 31, 2023. The response to the war powers resolution from the office of Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla. — who has led recent efforts to reduce the U.S. military's foreign entanglements — highlights populist Republicans' growing pains in their emerging anti-war coalition with progressive Democrats.
12345"DEMOCRACY REPORT 2026: Unraveling The Democratic Era?"(PDF). V-Dem Institute. March 17, 2026. Retrieved March 22, 2026. One notable shift is the transformation of the Republican Party to endorsing a far-right, nationalist, and anti-pluralist agenda. Nationalist, anti-liberal, far-right parties and leaders have largely driven the "third wave of autocratization." Yet the USA stands out as the only case where such movement seized control over one party in a rigid two-party system.
↑Coates, David (2012). The Oxford Companion to American Politics. Vol.2. Oxford University Press. p.393. ISBN978-0-19-976431-0.
↑"Hard-right parties are now Europe's most popular". The Economist. February 28, 2025. Retrieved March 21, 2025. But over the past 15 years hard-right parties have made substantial gains across the region. Drawing on the work of political scientists, our analysis shows that they now make up Europe's most popular family of political parties by vote share, beating out the conservative and social-democratic blocs for the first time in modern European history.
1234Williams, Daniel K. (May 9, 2022). "This Really Is a Different Pro-Life Movement". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on May 10, 2022. Retrieved February 2, 2023. This was not merely a geographic shift, trading one region for another, but a more fundamental transformation of the anti-abortion movement's political ideology. In 1973 many of the most vocal opponents of abortion were northern Democrats who believed in an expanded social-welfare state and who wanted to reduce abortion rates through prenatal insurance and federally funded day care. In 2022, most anti-abortion politicians are conservative Republicans who are skeptical of such measures. What happened was a seismic religious and political shift in opposition to abortion that has not occurred in any other Western country.
McDaniel, Eric L.; Nooruddin, Irfan; Shortle, Allyson F. (2022). "Preface". The Everyday Crusade. pp.xiii–xvi. doi:10.1017/9781009029445.001. ISBN978-1-009-02944-5. p.xiii: White Christian Nationalists are today the base of the Republican Party and those who attacked the U.S. Capitol are drawn from their ranks.
"A Christian Nation? Understanding the Threat of Christian Nationalism to American Democracy and Culture". Public Religion Research Institute. February 8, 2023. Archived from the original on June 15, 2024. Retrieved June 16, 2024. Partisanship is closely linked to Christian nationalist views. Most Republicans qualify as either Christian nationalism sympathizers (33%) or adherents (21%), while at least three-quarters of both independents (46% skeptics and 29% rejecters) and Democrats (36% skeptics and 47% rejecters) lean toward rejecting Christian nationalism. Republicans (21%) are about four times as likely as Democrats (5%) or independents (6%) to be adherents of Christian nationalism.
Baker, Joseph O.; Perry, Samuel L.; Whitehead, Andrew L. (August 6, 2020). "Crusading for Moral Authority: Christian Nationalism and Opposition to Science". Sociological Forum. 35 (3): 587–607. doi:10.1111/socf.12619. hdl:1805/26816. Christian nationalism has become a powerful predictor of supporting conservative policies and political candidates. This is in large part due to the Republican Party platform becoming synonymous with "restoring" the sacred values, moral superiority, unity, pride, and prosperity of America's mythic past.
Whitehead, Andrew L.; Perry, Samuel L.; Baker, Joseph O. (January 25, 2018). "Make America Christian Again: Christian Nationalism and Voting for Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential Election". Sociology of Religion. 79 (2): 147–171. doi:10.1093/socrel/srx070. JSTOR48556986. The current study establishes that, independent of these influences, voting for Trump was, at least for many Americans, a symbolic defense of the United States' perceived Christian heritage. Data from a national probability sample of Americans surveyed soon after the 2016 election shows that greater adherence to Christian nationalist ideology was a robust predictor of voting for Trump...
Lauter, David (February 17, 2024). "Will Republicans become a Christian nationalist party? Can they win if they do?". Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles, California. Archived from the original on April 5, 2024. Retrieved June 16, 2024. The strength of Christian nationalist sentiment can be clearly seen in a wide range of issues that Republican elected officials have stressed, including efforts to curtail the rights and visibility of transgender people, but also some less obvious topics, such as immigration.
Whitehead, Andrew L.; Perry, Samuel L. (February 17, 2024). "Is Christian nationalism growing or declining? Both". The Washington Post. ProQuest2728318819. Archived from the original on June 16, 2024. Retrieved June 16, 2024. According to political scientists Stella Rouse and Shibley Telhami, most Republicans support declaring the United States a Christian nation. And Christian nationalists are running for office at all levels of government, from local school boards to presumptive presidential candidates. Though the numbers of those who claim Christian nationalist beliefs may decline, Christian nationalism's influence in public life only continues to grow.
Perry, Samuel (August 5, 2022). "After Trump, Christian nationalist ideas are going mainstream – despite a history of violence". The Conversation. Archived from the original on June 1, 2024. Retrieved June 16, 2024. The presence of Christian nationalist ideas in recent political campaigns is concerning, given its ties to violence and white supremacy. Trump and his advisers helped to mainstream such rhetoric with events like his photo op with a Bible in Lafayette Square in Washington following the violent dispersal of protesters, and making a show of pastors laying hands on him. But that legacy continues beyond his administration.
Cummings, Mike (March 15, 2022). "Yale sociologist Phil Gorski on the threat of white Christian nationalism". Yale News. Archived from the original on June 12, 2024. Retrieved June 16, 2024. White Christian nationalism is a dangerous threat because it's incredibly well-organized and powerful. There's absolutely nothing like it on the left.
Rouse, Stella; Telhami, Shibley (September 21, 2022). "Most Republicans Support Declaring the United States a Christian Nation". Politico. Archived from the original on September 27, 2022. Retrieved February 22, 2024. Christian nationalism, a belief that the United States was founded as a white, Christian nation and that there is no separation between church and state, is gaining steam on the right. Prominent Republican politicians have made the themes critical to their message to voters in the run up to the 2022 midterm elections.
Contreras, Russell (February 18, 2026). "Where Christian nationalism is most dominant in the U.S."Axios. Retrieved February 18, 2026. 56% of all Republicans are Christian nationalism "adherents" or "sympathizers," the survey said. ... The report found that many of those who support Christian nationalism also support far-right conservative views around immigration, pluralism, and gender roles
↑Andersen, Margaret L.; Taylor, Howard Francis (2006). Sociology: Understanding a Diverse Society. Thomson/Wadsworth. ISBN978-0-534-61716-5.[pageneeded]
↑Smith, Robert B. (2014). "Social Conservatism, Distractors, and Authoritarianism: Axiological Versus Instrumental Rationality". Mediations of Social Life in the 21st Century. pp.95–133. doi:10.1108/S0278-120420140000032005. ISBN978-1-78441-223-4.
↑Wilbur, Miller (2012). "Libertarianism". The Social History of Crime and Punishment in America. Vol.3. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications. pp.1006–1007. ISBN978-1-4129-8876-6. While right-libertarianism has been equated with libertarianism in general in the United States, left-libertarianism has become a more predominant aspect of politics in western European democracies over the past three decades. ... Since the 1950s, libertarianism in the United States has been associated almost exclusively with right-libertarianism ... As such, right-libertarianism in the United States remains a fruitful discourse with which to articulate conservative claims, even as it lacks political efficacy as a separate ideology. However, even without its own movement, libertarian sensibility informs numerous social movements in the United States, including the U.S. patriot movement, the gun-rights movement, and the incipient Tea Party movement.
↑Dionne Jr., E.J. (1991). Why Americans Hate Politics. New York: Simon & Schuster. p.161.
↑Poole, Robert (August–September 1998), "In memoriam: Barry Goldwater", Reason (Obituary), vol.30, no.4, archived from the original on June 28, 2009
↑"index". Polity data series. October 2025. Retrieved November 7, 2025. NOTE: The USA dropped below the "democracy threshold" (+6) on the POLITY scale in 2020 and was considered an anocracy (+5) at the end of the year 2020; the USA score for 2021 returned to democracy (+8). Beginning on 1 July 2024, due to the US Supreme Court ruling granting the US Presidency broad, legal immunity, the USA is noted by the Polity Project as experiencing a regime transition through, at least, 20 January 2025. As of the latter date, the USA is coded EXREC=8, "Competitive Elections"; EXCONST=1 "Unlimited Executive Authority"; and POLCOMP=6 "Factional/Restricted Competition." Polity scores: DEMOC=4; AUTOC=4; POLITY=0. The USA is no longer considered a democracy and lies at the cusp of autocracy; it has experienced a Presidential Coup and an Adverse Regime Change event (8-point drop in its POLITY score).
↑Guillem, Colom (February 26, 2024). "An International Far-Right Alliance? A Comparative Analysis of the Linkages Between the Republican Party and European Far-Right Parties". SSRN4739346. Norris's findings conveyed that the Republican Party is as far-right ideologically as many prominent European far-right parties. The Republican Party was measured to be more conservative in comparison to various mainstream European parties. More specifically, the Republican Party was valued to be as economically conservative as the Swiss People's Party and as socially conservative as the German Alternative for Germany (AfD).
↑"The Authoritarian Playbook"(PDF). Protect Democracy. 2024. Retrieved April 26, 2026. As globalization and looser borders force many nations to grapple with questions about national identity; immigrants and refugees have been the targets of far-right populist parties across many backsliding democracy - including the United States
↑Chinoy, Sahil (June 26, 2019). "What Happened to America's Political Center of Gravity?". The New York Times. ISSN0362-4331. Retrieved April 26, 2026. The Republican Party leans much further right than most traditional conservative parties in Western Europe and Canada, according to an analysis of their election manifestos. It is more extreme than Britain's Independence Party and France's National Rally (formerly the National Front), which some consider far-right populist parties. The Democratic Party, in contrast, is positioned closer to mainstream liberal parties.
12Klaas, Brian (September 9, 2025). "Is The United States Still A Democracy?". The London School of Economics and Political Science. Retrieved April 9, 2026. Political scientists continue to debate this topic, but few would classify the United States as a robust democracy. It is either a democracy in crisis that is barely clinging onto the label, or one that has tipped over the edge into competitive authoritarianism - and I believe it's the latter.
12Fücks, Ralf; Kuisz, Jarosław; Wigura, Karolina (2026). "Wehrlose Demokratie? Lektionen aus den USA". Ende des liberalen Zeitalters? Krise und Erneuerung der freiheitlichen Demokratie(PDF) (in German). Bielefeld: Zentrums Liberale Moderne. p.124. doi:10.14361/9783839452448. ISBN978-3-8376-8012-6. Es sind die Republikaner, die sich in den vergangenen Jahrzehnten erschreckend radikalisiert haben – und doch, aufgrund des fest gefügten Zwei-Parteien-Systems, immer noch bei vielen den Eindruck von »Mainstream« erwecken. Inhaltlich bewegen sie sich inzwischen rechts von der AfD; und in ihren Verlautbarungen sprechen viele Republikaner – wie alle Rechtspopulisten – ihren Gegnern grundsätzlich die Legitimität ab (man kennt die Rhetorik allenthalben: »Volksverräter« etc.).[It is the Republicans who have undergone a frightening radicalization over the past few decades—and yet, owing to the entrenched two-party system, they still manage to convey an impression of being "mainstream" to many. In terms of policy, they have now moved to the right of the AfD; and in their statements, many Republicans—like all right-wing populists—fundamentally deny the legitimacy of their opponents (the rhetoric is familiar everywhere: "traitors to the people," etc.).]
↑"United States: Freedom in the World 2026 Country Report". Freedom House. Retrieved April 26, 2026. The intensely competitive US political environment is dominated by two major parties: the Republicans on the right and the Democrats on the left.
Baker, Peter (December 1, 2022). "Trump Embraces Extremism as He Seeks to Reclaim Office". The New York Times. Retrieved January 20, 2025. Analysts and strategists see Mr. Trump's pivot toward the far right as a tactic to re-create political momentum [...] Mr. Trump has long flirted with the fringes of American society as no other modern president has, openly appealing to prejudice based on race, religion, national origin and sexual orientation, among others [...] Mr. Trump's expanding embrace of extremism has left Republicans once again struggling to figure out how to distance themselves from him.
Swenson, Ali; Kunzelman, Michael (November 18, 2023). "Fears of political violence are growing as the 2024 campaign heats up and conspiracy theories evolve". AP News. Retrieved January 20, 2025. Trump has amplified social media accounts that promote QAnon, which grew from the far-right fringes of the internet to become a fixture of mainstream Republican politics [...] In his 2024 campaign, Trump has ramped up his combative rhetoric with talk of retribution against his enemies. He recently joked about the hammer attack on Paul Pelosi and suggested that retired Gen. Mark Milley, a former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, should be executed for treason.
Heer, Jeet (July 31, 2023). "The GOP's Nazi Problem Has Deep Roots". The Nation. ISSN0027-8378. Retrieved May 9, 2026. His [Trump's] extensive record [...] includes his numerous sly uses of alt-right memes, his promotion of extremists like Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka, and his infamous "very fine people" response to the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va.
Lowndes, Joseph (November 8, 2021). "Far-right extremism dominates the GOP. It didn't start — and won't end — with Trump". The Washington Post. ISSN0190-8286. Retrieved May 9, 2026. But far-right extremism did not work its way to the heart of the Republican Party until the nomination and 2016 election of Trump. Neither single election cycles nor individual presidencies determine the trajectories of political parties. But through racial demonization, the treatment of political opponents as enemies and an embrace of executive authoritarianism, Trump achieved two critical things at once: He moved far-right radicals toward the Republican Party and the Republican voter base toward greater radicalization.
↑Robertson, Derek (March 21, 2021). "How 'Owning the Libs' Became the GOP's Core Belief". POLITICO. Retrieved October 4, 2026. But in a post-Trump America, to "own the libs" is less an identifiable act or set of policy goals than an ethos, a way of life, even a civic religion ... Owning the libs offers bread and circuses for the pro-Trump right while Republicans quietly pursue a traditional program of deregulation and tax cuts at the policy level.
↑Coppins, McKay (May 28, 2018). "Trump's Right-Hand Troll". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on November 9, 2020. Retrieved October 4, 2026. Miller represents a rising generation of conservatives for whom "melting the snowflakes" and "triggering the libs" are first principles. You can find them on college campuses, holding "affirmative action bake sales" or hosting rallies for alt-right figures in the name of free speech. You can see them in the new conservative media, churning out incendiary headlines for Breitbart News or picking bad-faith fights on Twitter. Raised on talk radio, radicalized on the web, they are a movement in open revolt against the dogmas of "political correctness"—and their tactics could shape the culture wars for years to come.
↑Karni, Annie (June 26, 2025). "Right-Wing Republicans in Congress Attack Mamdani With Islamophobic Comments". The New York Times. Retrieved September 7, 2025. The responses to Mr. Mamdani's electoral triumph were the latest examples of how far-right Republicans in Congress have become overt in their use of bigoted language and ethnically offensive tropes, in both casual comments and official statements. (..) But the kind of language that Mr. Ogles used on social media and the questions he raised in his letter these days have become commonplace among some Republicans. And they almost always go without any real condemnation from G.O.P. leaders.
↑Saul, Stephanie (June 26, 2026). "The Far Right Is Dividing College Republicans". The New York Times. Retrieved June 26, 2026. The conflict in Maryland is the latest in a debate that has been dividing college Republicans everywhere: whether to avoid or embrace the far right.
↑Mazzie, Patricia (March 5, 2026). "Slurs Filled a Chat Created by a Republican Party Official in Florida". The New York Times. Retrieved June 26, 2026. The scandal is the latest example of extremism rankling establishment Republicans in Florida as the party has consolidated power in a state that was once a political battleground. ... The Miami-Dade County Republican Party has had extremists in its ranks before. Four years ago, several members of the Proud Boys secured seats on its executive committee with the apparent goal of radicalizing and influencing local politics.
↑Gilsinan, Kathy (August 1, 2026). "GOP Staffers Say the Party Has a Groyper Problem". Politico. Retrieved August 4, 2026. The anxiety over groyperism in the GOP talent pool corresponds to a rise in antisemitism across the political spectrum, including among young conservatives. A Yale Youth survey found "extremely conservative" young people the most likely to agree with antisemitic sentiments such as "Jews in the United States have too much power." A Manhattan Institute poll found that a full 25 percent of Republicans under 50 self-identified as having antisemitic views, and 31 percent as holding racist ones.
12"MAGA is eating itself". The Economist. December 23, 2025. Retrieved January 26, 2026. But they also reveal a broader fight within the Republican Party. As the right begins to look past Mr Trump and debate the party's future, they are brawling over how big the conservative movement's tent should be. ... The vice-president seemed to suggest that the conservative movement could include the likes of Ms Owens and Mr Fuentes. He declined to criticise racism and antisemitism among the movement's rising stars.
Zitner, Aaron; Collins, Eliza (December 22, 2025). "After Charlie Kirk's Death, MAGA Battles Over Free Speech". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved January 26, 2026. Now, three months after Kirk was shot and killed at one of those events, his commitment to open debate is at the center of a bitter fight within the MAGA movement over the rise of antisemitic ideas and conspiracy theories.
Axelrod, Tal (November 2, 2025). "MAGA's war within: Right-wing purity tests". Axios. Retrieved January 26, 2026. President Trump's MAGA movement is increasingly at war with itself. The central issue: a purity test over MAGA inclusion. Why it matters: The MAGA fight, ignited by ideological differences over Israel, pulls on a lot of -isms — nativism, antisemitism, racism, sexism and Trumpism.
↑Karni, Annie (January 11, 2026). "'I Think We Don't Like Them': Trump Says MAGA Has No Room for Antisemites". The New York Times. Retrieved January 26, 2026. After years in which Mr. Trump has variously embraced and tolerated far-right figures and groups, the Republican Party is mired in a debate about how expansive its coalition should be and whether it should include figures like Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust denier and avowed antisemite. Mr. Trump's comments stand in contrast to Vice President JD Vance, who said last month that the party did not need 'purity tests.'
Joffe-Block, Jude (September 13, 2024). "How Trump is relying on a racist conspiracy theory to question election results". NPR. Retrieved May 9, 2026. He was also echoing the latest iteration of a once-fringe racist conspiracy theory that has now become mainstream in the Republican Party. The conspiracy — known as the "great replacement" — claims there is a plan to bring nonwhite immigrants into the United States and other Western countries to replace white voters to achieve a political agenda.
Beauchamp, Zack (December 2, 2025). "The dark reality behind Trump's new anti-immigrant policies". Vox. Retrieved May 9, 2026. And the concept of a "great replacement" of Americans by migrants, once the province of tiki-torch marchers at Charlottesville, is now widely proclaimed by the Republican Party's leading figures – from Trump on down.
"Our View: 'Great replacement' lie runs deep in Republican politics". The Portland Press Herald. May 17, 2022. Retrieved May 9, 2026. Once again, the political agenda was "the great replacement" conspiracy theory, an idea born in the fringes of white supremacist movements that is becoming mainstream in Republican politics.
↑Sanger, David E. (February 1, 2025). "To Trump, Tariffs Are Not a Means but an End". The New York Times. Archived from the original on February 2, 2025. Retrieved February 1, 2025. Many presidents use tariffs to force negotiations. But for President Trump, they are the point, a source of revenue as he pursues a Gilded Age vision.
↑Casselman, Ben (February 22, 2026). "Trump's Challenge to Free Market Capitalism". The New York Times. Retrieved February 22, 2026. Stakes in private companies. Handshake deals with chief executives. The president's economic policy has drifted far from the principles that long defined the Republican Party. Is it capitalism at all?
↑"Is British politics broken? Its centre is cracking". The Economist. September 11, 2025. Retrieved September 12, 2025. In fact, the Brexit referendum of 2016 accelerated a trend in which age and education, rather than class, are the best predictors of voting behavior.... This is splitting left-leaning young graduates from right-leaning pensioners.
Wile, Rob (August 22, 2025). "U.S. takes 10% stake in Intel as Trump flexes more power over big business". NBC News. Retrieved August 24, 2025. Trump continues to bulldoze through long-held norms regarding government and business, departing from the free-market ethos that has long prevailed in both major U.S. political parties.
Sutton, Sam; Guida, Victoria (August 22, 2025). "Trump is turning the government into an investment firm". Politico. Retrieved August 24, 2025. From tariff carveouts to pro bono legal work from white-shoe law firms, Trump is exerting power over U.S. businesses in ways that go beyond even Sen. Bernie Sanders's (I-Vt.) aspirations. His ability to inject his agenda into private enterprises and dealmaking has shaken the guardrails that protect businesses from sudden political shifts and defied the free-market orthodoxy that was a hallmark of Republican economic policymaking.
Morrow, Allison (August 13, 2025). "Trump is tightening his grip on the economy, taking a page from China". CNN. Retrieved August 24, 2025. Trump's realignment of American business also bears similarities to China's model of "state capitalism" — a mix between socialism and classic free-market capitalism in which the state is involved in, but doesn't directly own, private businesses.
↑Stanley D. Solvick, "William Howard Taft and the Payne-Aldrich Tariff." Mississippi Valley Historical Review 50.3 (1963): 424–442 onlineArchived March 7, 2021, at the Wayback Machine
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↑John H. Barton, Judith L. Goldstein, Timothy E. Josling, and Richard H. Steinberg, The Evolution of the Trade Regime: Politics, Law, and Economics of the GATT and the WTO (2008)
↑McClenahan, William (1991). "The Growth of Voluntary Export Restraints and American Foreign Economic Policy, 1956–1969". Business and Economic History. 20: 180–190. JSTOR23702815.
↑Swedberg, Richard (2018). "Folk economics and its role in Trump's presidential campaign: an exploratory study". Theory and Society. 47: 1–36. doi:10.1007/s11186-018-9308-8. S2CID149378537.
12Grumbach, Jacob M.; Hacker, Jacob S.; Pierson, Paul (2021), "The Political Economies of Red States", in Hertel-Fernandez, Alexander; Hacker, Jacob S.; Thelen, Kathleen; Pierson, Paul (eds.), The American Political Economy: Politics, Markets, and Power, Cambridge University Press, pp.209–244, ISBN978-1316516362, archived from the original on November 23, 2021, retrieved November 10, 2021
↑Paul Kiel, Jesse Eisinger (December 11, 2018). "How the IRS Was Gutted". ProPublica. Archived from the original on December 11, 2018. Retrieved December 11, 2018.
↑Grossmann, Matt; Mahmood, Zuhaib; Isaac, William (2021). "Political Parties, Interest Groups, and Unequal Class Influence in American Policy". The Journal of Politics. 83 (4): 1706–1720. doi:10.1086/711900.
↑Rhodes, Jesse H.; Schaffner, Brian F. (2017). "Testing Models of Unequal Representation: Democratic Populists and Republican Oligarchs?". Quarterly Journal of Political Science. 12 (2): 185–204. doi:10.1561/100.00016077.
↑Lax, Jeffrey R.; Phillips, Justin H.; Zelizer, Adam (2019). "The Party or the Purse? Unequal Representation in the US Senate". American Political Science Review. 113 (4): 917–940. doi:10.1017/S0003055419000315.
↑Rappeport, Alan (June 19, 2025). "Record Debt Limit Increase Would Break Republican Precedent". The New York Times. Retrieved June 20, 2025. This year, the party of fiscal conservatism is poised to discard that philosophy as Republicans prepare to press ahead with domestic policy legislation that combines nearly $4 trillion in tax cuts with a $5 trillion increase to the debt limit. An increase of that magnitude would be a record and underscore the ideological flexibility that many Republicans are willing to embrace when they are in power.
12345Dunlap, Riley E.; McCright, Araon M. (2008). "A Widening Gap: Republican and Democratic Views on Climate Change". Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development. 50 (5): 26–35. Bibcode:2008ESPSD..50e..26D. doi:10.3200/ENVT.50.5.26-35.
12Davenport, Coral; Lipton, Eric (June 3, 2017). "How G.O.P. Leaders Came to View Climate Change as Fake Science". The New York Times. ISSN0362-4331. Archived from the original on September 14, 2017. Retrieved September 22, 2017. The Republican Party's fast journey from debating how to combat human-caused climate change to arguing that it does not exist is a story of big political money, Democratic hubris in the Obama years and a partisan chasm that grew over nine years like a crack in the Antarctic shelf, favoring extreme positions and uncompromising rhetoric over cooperation and conciliation.
↑Båtstrand, Sondre (2015). "More than Markets: A Comparative Study of Nine Conservative Parties on Climate Change". Politics & Policy. 43 (4): 538–561. doi:10.1111/polp.12122. The U.S. Republican Party is an anomaly in denying anthropogenic climate change.
12Chait, Jonathan (September 27, 2015). "Why Are Republicans the Only Climate-Science-Denying Party in the World?". New York. Retrieved September 20, 2017. Of all the major conservative parties in the democratic world, the Republican Party stands alone in its denial of the legitimacy of climate science. Indeed, the Republican Party stands alone in its conviction that no national or international response to climate change is needed. To the extent that the party is divided on the issue, the gap separates candidates who openly dismiss climate science as a hoax, and those who, shying away from the political risks of blatant ignorance, instead couch their stance in the alleged impossibility of international action.
↑Matthews, Chris (May 12, 2014). "Hardball With Chris Matthews for May 12, 2014". Hardball With Chris Matthews. MSNBC. NBC news. According to a survey by the Center for American Progress' Action Fund, more than 55 percent of congressional Republicans are climate change deniers. And it gets worse from there. They found that 77 percent of Republicans on the House Science Committee say they don't believe it in either. And that number balloons to an astounding 90 percent for all the party's leadership in Congress.
↑"Earth Talk: Still in denial about climate change". The Charleston Gazette. Charleston, West Virginia. December 22, 2014. p.10. ... a recent survey by the non-profit Center for American Progress found that some 58 percent of Republicans in the U.S. Congress still "refuse to accept climate change. Meanwhile, still others acknowledge the existence of global warming but cling to the scientifically debunked notion that the cause is natural forces, not greenhouse gas pollution by humans.
↑Oberlander, Jonathan (March 1, 2020). "The Ten Years' War: Politics, Partisanship, And The ACA". Health Affairs. 39 (3): 471–478. doi:10.1377/hlthaff.2019.01444. PMID32119603.
↑Hertel-Fernandez, Alexander; Skocpol, Theda; Lynch, Daniel (April 2016). "Business Associations, Conservative Networks, and the Ongoing Republican War over Medicaid Expansion". Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law. 41 (2): 239–286. doi:10.1215/03616878-3476141. PMID26732316.
12Hacker, Jacob S. (2010). "The Road to Somewhere: Why Health Reform Happened: Or Why Political Scientists Who Write about Public Policy Shouldn't Assume They Know How to Shape It". Perspectives on Politics. 8 (3): 861–876. doi:10.1017/S1537592710002021.
↑Chapin, Christy Ford, ed. (2015), "The Politics of Medicare, 1957–1965", Ensuring America's Health: The Public Creation of the Corporate Health Care System, Cambridge University Press, pp.194–232, doi:10.1017/CBO9781107045347.008, ISBN978-1107044883
↑Fordham, Benjamin O.; Flynn, Michael (2022). "Everything Old Is New Again: The Persistence of Republican Opposition to Multilateralism in American Foreign Policy". Studies in American Political Development. 37: 56–73. doi:10.1017/S0898588X22000165.
↑Thomas, George (February 9, 2026). "America's Illiberal Internationalism". Washington Monthly. Retrieved August 11, 2026. The Republican Party's turn against liberal internationalism is not a passing Trump aberration but a reversion to long-standing illiberalism on the American right.
↑Brownstein, Ronald (February 18, 2024). "The GOP Has Crossed an Ominous Threshold on Foreign Policy". The Atlantic. Retrieved August 15, 2026. Since Donald Trump emerged as the GOP's dominant figure in 2016, he has championed an isolationist and nationalist agenda that is dubious of international alliances, scornful of free trade, and hostile to not only illegal but also legal immigration. His [first] four years in the White House marked a shift in the party's internal balance of power away from the internationalist perspective that had dominated every Republican presidency from Dwight Eisenhower through George W. Bush.
↑"Trump admin approves new sale of anti-tank weapons to Ukraine". ABC News. Retrieved October 1, 2019. The Trump administration first approved the sale of Javelins to Ukraine in December 2017 – a step that former President Barack Obama never took and that Trump allies have pointed to as a sign of Trump's toughness on Russia.
↑Schnabel, Landon Paul (2013). "When Fringe Goes Mainstream: A Sociohistorical Content Analysis of the Christian Coalition's Contract With The American Family and the Republican Party Platform". Politics, Religion & Ideology. 14 (1): 94–113. doi:10.1080/21567689.2012.752361.
↑Williams, Daniel K. (2011). "The GOP's Abortion Strategy: Why Pro-Choice Republicans Became Pro-Life in the 1970s". Journal of Policy History. 23 (4): 513–539. doi:10.1017/S0898030611000285.
↑Doherty, Carroll (January 19, 2023). "How Republicans view their party and key issues facing the country as the 118th Congress begins". Pew Research Center. Archived from the original on January 21, 2023. Retrieved January 21, 2023. There are fissures in the GOP coalition. The same typology study found fissures in the GOP coalition, including over economic fairness, tax policy, and in views of abortion and same-sex marriage.
↑Gould, Eric D.; Klor, Esteban F. (2019). "Party hacks and true believers: The effect of party affiliation on political preferences". Journal of Comparative Economics. 47 (3): 504–524. doi:10.1016/j.jce.2019.03.004. S2CID241140587.
↑Levine, A. D.; Lacy, T. A.; Hearn, J. C. (February 18, 2013). "The origins of human embryonic stem cell research policies in the US states". Science and Public Policy. 40 (4): 544–558. doi:10.1093/scipol/sct005.
↑Blendon, Robert J.; Kim, Minah Kang; Benson, John M. (November 17, 2011). "The Public, Political Parties, and Stem-Cell Research". New England Journal of Medicine. 365 (20): 1853–1856. doi:10.1056/NEJMp1110340. PMID22087677.
↑Leonhardt, David (April 6, 2023). "The Power and Limits of Abortion Politics". The New York Times. ISSN0362-4331. Archived from the original on April 6, 2023. Retrieved April 7, 2023. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe last June and allowed states to ban abortion, more than a dozen quickly imposed tight restrictions. Today, abortion is largely illegal in most of red America, even though polls suggest many voters in these states support at least some access.
12Astor, Maggie (September 22, 2022). "For First Time in at Least 25 Years, No Democrat Has Top Grade From N.R.A."The New York Times. Archived from the original on September 22, 2022. Retrieved September 11, 2023. The Democratic break from the National Rifle Association is complete: For the first time in at least 25 years, not a single Democrat running for Congress anywhere in the country received an A in the group's candidate ratings, which were once a powerful influence in U.S. elections.
↑Siegel, Reva B. "Dead or Alive: Originalism as Popular Constitutionalism in Heller." The Second Amendment on Trial: Critical Essays on District of Columbia v. Heller, edited by Saul Cornell and Nathan Kozuskanich, University of Massachusetts Press, 2013, p. 104.
↑Haberman, Maggie; Goldmacher, Shane; Swan, Jonathan (July 8, 2024). "Trump Presses G.O.P. for New Platform That Softens Stance on Abortion". The New York Times. Archived from the original on July 18, 2024. Retrieved July 9, 2024. The platform is even more nationalistic, more protectionist and less socially conservative than the 2016 Republican platform that was duplicated in the 2020 election.
12Wyatt-Nichol, Heather (November 21, 2025), "Political Attacks on the Lgbtqia+ Community", LGBTQIA+ Communities, Pandemics, and Policy Responses, New York: Routledge, pp.23–41, doi:10.4324/9781003566687-4, ISBN978-1-003-56668-7, retrieved May 9, 2026, This chapter explores the sociopolitical contestation of power in the fight for LGBTQIA+ rights by examining the rightward shift in the Republican Party and its use of anti-LGBTQIA+ tropes during pandemics, and as a political wedge strategy that contributes to the polarization of Americans.
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Lewis, Andrew R. (August 28, 2019). "The Inclusion-Moderation Thesis: The U.S. Republican Party and the Christian Right". Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.665. ISBN978-0-19-022863-7. Considering all the evidence, the most apt description is that conservative Christianity has transformed the Republican Party, and the Republican Party has transformed conservative Christianity ... With its inclusion in the Republican Party, the Christian right has moderated on some aspects ... At the same time, the Christian right has altered Republican politics.
Trollinger, William (October 8, 2019). "Fundamentalism turns 100, a landmark for the Christian Right". The Conversation. ISSN2201-5639. Archived from the original on May 7, 2022. Retrieved July 3, 2022. The emergent Christian Right attached itself to the Republican Party, which was more aligned with its members' central commitments than the Democrats ... By the time Falwell died, in 2007, the Christian Right had become the most important constituency in the Republican Party. It played a crucial role in electing Donald Trump in 2016.
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