What the Tea Party Tells Us About the Trump Presidency

The Tea Party movement foreshadowed Donald Trump’s winning the US presidential race. Vanessa Williamson, writing for Brookings, describes the grassroots activists as a coalition of older, white conservatives and a conservative media infrastructure funded by ideologue billionaires who oppose taxes and regulations. “Donald Trump was willing to address immigration in terms substantially more extreme than his primary opponents, and this allowed him to harness rank-and-file Republicans’ sense of cultural resentment and ethnic nationalism,” she writes. Trump, backed by Republican control in the US Congress, must replace old patterns of gridlock with governance. Divisions could emerge, or extreme tax and program cuts in Kansas could foreshadow Republican plans for the United States. When tax cuts failed to produce growth or jobs for Kansas, state administrators cut quarterly economic reports. Strong democracy requires full and accurate informaiton. The Tea Party was committed to “small-scale everyday engagement, a style of democracy that has long been imagined to protect America against demagoguery and tyranny,” Williamson notes. “That their work has empowered a genuinely anti-democratic leader is an irony, and a tragedy.” – YaleGlobal