President Donald Trump’s recent comments about renaming the Republican Party after him could ignite a serious reconsideration of just what the Republican Party stands for and where its going.
Some will write off Trump’s ruminations about changing the name to “Tpublican” as another of his egomaniacal rants to distract the media from learning about playboy Trump’s earlier years with Jeffrey Epstein.
Bob Kustra
Yet few believed Trump would tear down the entire East Wing of the White House to create a Mar-a-Lago North. This is the American president who has plastered the Oval Office with gold, now converted to the Trump family cash register with real estate deals and crypto scams ringing up sales for the billionaire family.
Most Americans would not expect a sitting president to approve a dollar coin with his portrait on it, but it is in the planning stages. There seems no end to Trump disgracing the office of the presidency with his monumental ego and tacky taste.
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The latest Gallup poll shows Trump and his party in trouble, with only 36% of Americans approving of his job performance. So fair-weather Republicans and independents who voted for Trump in 2024 because he wasn’t Kamala Harris may reconsider their vote for Republicans in the future. Signs of dissent at the polls emerged with the recent elections of Democratic governors in New Jersey and Virginia.
The stakes are high for the Grand Old Party. Republicans are in danger of losing control of Congress in the 2026 midterm elections with the economy worsening.
The Senate Republican majority is signaling that Trump’s behavior can no longer be ignored. In response to Trump’s efforts to convince Senate Republicans to kill the filibuster, Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., stiffed Trump, saying not enough of his colleagues were willing to make it happen.
In another sign the times are changing, Republican Sen. Roger Wicker, chair of the Armed Services Committee, joined with his Democratic counterpart to investigate allegations that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered that no one survive U.S. strikes on boats off South America. The House Committee followed suit, assuring bipartisan oversight in both chambers.
Trump’s feckless leadership of the Republican Party is reminiscent of Rip Van Winkle’s experience. Van Winkle woke up after a 20-year sleep to find the world changed around him. Similarly, the GOP has awakened from the day President Ronald Reagan admonished Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall to Trump’s mismanaged and dangerous foreign policy.
Trump is outfoxed by Chinese President Xi Jinping on tariffs at the expense of American farmers, and the war criminal Vladimir Putin plays Trump for a fool in the Russian president's murderous assault on Ukraine.
Once the law-and-order party, Republicans are now led by a president who pardoned a Honduran ex-president serving a 45-year term for receiving millions in bribes and partnering with narcotics traffickers. Trump also commuted the sentence of a private equity executive who began a seven-year sentence for a $1.6 billion scheme that defrauded thousands of investors.
But Trump had no problem calling for the execution of Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., a war hero who reminded our military forces they did not have to follow orders that break the law.
Those who recently spoke at former Vice President Dick Cheney’s funeral service offered a considerable contrast to Trump’s brand of leadership. Cheney leaves behind a career of disastrous foreign policy blunders, but he also will be remembered for endorsing Harris as the only alternative to Trump in 2024. His daughter, former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wy., read a letter Cheney wrote to his grandchildren, stating that “bonds of party must always yield to the single bond we share as Americans.”
To justify what had to be his most difficult political decision, he said, “There has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump.” In the end, Cheney got it right, leaving his beloved Republican Party for his one vote against Trump in 2024.
Republicans in Congress may be waking up to the fact that Trump will not be around forever. With an increasingly self-absorbed and unhinged president losing ground with some Republicans in Congress, it hardly seems the moment to attach any semblance of the Trump surname to their party.
Now is the time to rebuild the Republican Party with Trump as a mere footnote of times gone bad.
Kustra, who served as the Republican lieutenant governor of Illinois and as a state legislator, writes for the Idaho Statesman and hosts “Readers Corner” on Boise State Public Radio.
