The Rebranding Is Complete
Add the Republican party to the list of things Trump has destroyed
Donald Trump understands branding. He spent his life slapping his name on everything in his sight. Buildings. Casinos. An airline. A “university”. Steak. Water.
The allure of the Trump brand was success. Donald Trump branded himself a winner, therefore anything with his name on it shared the attributes of winning. He was famous, glamorous and allegedly rich. Associate yourself with his name and you could be these things too.
The reality, of course, was quite different, but that doesn’t matter much when you can sell the fantasy. The reality of the Trump brand is flimflam, deceit, smoke and mirrors—a gaudy veneer covering a cesspool of lies. It’s closer to the truth that his legacy is a litany of failure.
Now Donald Trump has worked his magic on the Republican party. In the first months of his second presidency, he has successfully rebranded it and set it on a course to share the same fate as the Trump Shuttle, Trump University, and Trump Steaks.
The process culminated with the passage of the monstrous bill he signed into law on Friday.
From Ronald Reagan’s election through Trump’s first presidency, Republicans maintained a strong brand identity that allowed them to dominate politics for more than a decade, then compete effectively with Democrats as the electorate became more balanced.
If the key to a successful brand is simplicity, Republicans had it during the Reagan era.
You could distill the Republican brand to a few words. Fiscal responsibility. Family values. Peace through strength.
It’s so simple, you could write it on an index card.
Even when this branding didn’t match up very well with reality, it served as a highly effective messaging tool. Republican presidents could explode the deficit but the party’s candidates could still run as responsible fiscal stewards because the brand was so enduring.
And because politics comes down to a choice between options, if you’re the brand that’s responsible, wholesome and strong, what does that make your opponent? For decades, Democrats struggled with being branded the party of profligate taxing and spending, out-of-the-mainstream crazies, and global weakness.
That is now changing, and the ramifications will extend well into the future.
Because of Donald Trump, Republicans are now the party of pain and suffering that helps the rich at your expense.
Three distinct events have combined to cement Trump’s rebranding of the Republican party.
It started on day one with Trump’s broken promise to lower prices—the promise that most likely made the difference in the election. Of course, the idea that any president could magically lower prices was always ridiculous, but had Trump simply done nothing he was in position to take credit for the robust economy he inherited from Joe Biden.
Instead, he plowed ahead with his chaotic tariffs that can’t actually be called a policy, upending markets and supply chains while raising the cost of goods and making it harder for businesses to plan. While it may take months or longer to realize the full effects of Trump’s tariff mayhem—with his next moves remaining unpredictable—Trump’s standing took a precipitous dive following the initial tariff announcement and has not recovered.
At the same time Trump was breaking his core promise about prices, he was letting Elon Musk hack the bureaucracy. It did not go over well. After several weeks of hatchet-wielding, Musk left both the government and his personal brand deeply damaged. By the time he parted ways with the administration, Musk had made himself a symbol of uber-rich excess and arrogance. He had become deeply disliked by the public.
Against this backdrop, Trump bludgeoned his party to approve a bill so obscenely damaging that before passage it was already one of the most unpopular legislative proposals in the history of polling. Despite Trump’s efforts to turn this reality on its head and claim the bill is both popular and glorious, it is that rare political document that offers nothing for anyone—except those at the very top of the financial pyramid. Some of the hardest hit will be rural voters in red states.
There’s a good reason why Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, one of the most vulnerable House Republicans, disappeared from view to avoid the withering pressure he knew was coming from the White House after he voted against advancing the legislation to a floor vote. If not fearful of Donald Trump’s every whim, it is doubtful congressional Republicans would have allowed such a destructive—and self-destructive—measure to become law.
Now they have to live with the results. And those results should reverberate loudly and for a long time.
During every political regime in American history, one party enjoyed an electoral advantage over the other by virtue of having more support in the electorate. And those majority parties enjoyed a form of branding that resonated with the public strongly enough to reinforce their advantage until changing circumstances and weakening coalitions inevitably undermined it.
During the New Deal era that stretched through the 1960s, Democrats and liberals were associated with improving the lives of working people. During the Reagan era, Republicans and conservatives were associated with economic and international strength.
Although the alliances that made up the Reagan coalition were already fraying before the first Trump presidency, some of the stickiness of the Republican brand endured. It wasn’t difficult to find voters last year who looked positively on what they remembered as a sturdy pre-Covid economy under Trump, crediting him with being strong economic leader.
In less than six months, he has blown that apart. Now codified as legislation, the damage Trump has done to his party will last long after he is gone, with the potential to define his party in the political alignment that emerges from the ashes of the Trump era.
Trump’s tariff regime and the destruction brought about by DOGE have focused our attention on the cruelty of economic policies that disregard the needs of ordinary people, with Elon Musk as a symbol and the megabill—now megalaw—an emphatic statement of what Republican priorities really are.
Add these things together and you have the rebranding of Republicans as the reverse Robin Hood party, hurting the working class and needy to give to the rich.
It’s so simple, you could write it on an index card.
I really like that simple Robin Hood branding one liner for the Repubs: take from the poor and give to the rich.
Yes, it's branding, but that's the very point. We've gotten to where Democrats just can't compete w/Republicans when it comes to messaging, no matter how many different ways they try to. Republicans could cause nuclear war and Democrats could save the world, but when all's said and done, Republicans would STILL win elections because they're better at convincing people to accept what they say. Policies and their consequences just don't seem to matter anymore; it's all in what the wording. Instead of calling it the "Fighting Oligarchy" tour, Bernie and AOC should probably call it the "Fighting the greedy-rich-lying-sadistic pigs tour." Then maybe they'll get some real traction (and I'm only being slightly facetious).