A curious video from 2016 went viral on X last week. It celebrated the freshman class of GOP senators as they completed their first two years in Congress. To the tune of “When the Saints Go Marching In,” the fresh-faced lawmakers march in unison around Capitol Hill. The propaganda clip shows the politicians working out, playing with hoverboards, wearing jeans in interviews, and other apparently humanizing moments. The production resembles that of a college football hype video. But rather than getting the audience excited to see their team win on Saturday, it’s designed to get Republican voters pumped to see Thom Tillis and Joni Ernst.
The video is an interesting artifact. This class will mostly be gone from the Senate in a few months. While the video was made after Donald Trump’s surprise victory in 2016, it still exhibits the focus and style of the pre-Trump GOP. It’s a style Trump defeated that same year in the Republican primary and went on to bury in the decade that followed.
What the GOP was like before Trump came down the escalator is being quickly forgotten. The video should serve as a good reminder of the direction the GOP wanted to pursue before Trump upended their plans.
While there’s much debate over Trump and his legacy, we can at least be thankful the GOP no longer dedicates itself to college football hype videos for neocons.
A video like this one could only come about in an era when DC was obsessed with itself. The most popular political book of the time was Mark Leibovich’s This Town, a purported exposé of toxic DC culture that is nevertheless entirely about all the fun parties and powerful people a journalist meets in DC. There’s little substance to the book at all, but it was beloved by political journalists because it put more attention on their favorite topic: themselves. House of Cards was a hit show and became must-watch TV in DC. Like This Town, it was billed as a critique of DC but subtly lionized the Washington scene, making it seem much more exciting than it actually is.
Trump ended this fixation with his insurgent campaign, but the mentality initially remained strong among Republican apparatchiks. These types thought Trump would be a flash in the pan and that everything would return to their preferred normal after his term.
The 2016 hype video encapsulates the establishment’s preferred normal. The majority of these marching senators were “Paul Ryanists” who wanted the party to ditch the culture war, give immigrants amnesty, and focus more on the important stuff—like warging war in far-off lands. Most of these senators barely tolerated Trump, with some becoming vocal critics of the president.
One of them is Ben Sasse, whom we see balancing on a hoverboard. Most know him now as the former senator publicly sharing his brutal battle with cancer, but he was once seen as a rising star in the GOP and the antidote to Trump. He insisted he would never vote for Trump in 2016 and refused to endorse the future winner. He claimed Trump was a racist and attacked his hardline views on immigration. “This is the party of Abraham Lincoln,” Sasse said in one of his more melodramatic 2016 moments. “This is not the party of David Duke, Donald Trump.” Instead of mass immigration, Sasse thought the GOP should focus more on Russia and Syria.
Like many Republicans, Sasse would later dial down his criticism while Trump was president. But Never Trumpers still admired him even if he was no longer calling Trump a racist. They knew he represented their values. Sasse would return to his anti-Trumpism after January 6, becoming one of seven Republican senators who voted to impeach Trump over the incident. Bill Cassidy, also highlighted in the 2016 video, was another such Republican senator.
Sasse was of course not alone in embodying Never Trump principles. Thom Tillis and James Lankford also exemplified this mentality. Tillis is seen in the video doing push-ups; Lankford just walks around with an awkward smile. Both went on to become the staunchest advocates for foreign interventions and mass immigration among Senate Republicans. Lankford attacked Trump’s attempts to restrict refugees during the first term. Both he and Tillis looked to find ways to pass amnesty during the Biden years, with the two usually being involved in discussions with Democrats on the matter. This squishiness was also shared by their fellow class-of-2015 member Cory Gardner—who would win an award from a pro-immigration group for his work on trying to liberalize immigration laws—but it didn’t help the Coloradoan keep his seat in 2020.
While Lankford and Tillis take soft lines on immigration, they never waver in their foreign-policy hawkery. Both have been some of the loudest proponents of more funding for Ukraine and Israel in the Senate. Their hawkery may be rivaled only by Tom Cotton, who was also a member of this freshmen Senate class.
The other Republicans featured in the video were similarly uninspiring. None of them connected to the Trump moment or the anger in the base. Only Cotton aligned with MAGA on immigration, but he has stuck to most of the old guard’s positions, especially on foreign policy.
People who forget what trajectory the GOP was on prior to Trump coming down the escalator should watch the video. The future of the party, as I outline in Whitepill, was eager to follow a Paul Ryanist path that would demand Republicans embrace amnesty, appear more inclusive, obsess over fiscal matters, and learn nothing from the debacle in Iraq. It would’ve ditched the culture war in favor of videos of lawmakers doing pull ups in their Senate offices. It would’ve remained completely out of touch with the Republican base while obsessing over what DC elites think. And it wouldn’t have promised to make America great again. Like Hillary Clinton, they would’ve insisted that America is already great.
The priorities of this freshman class had little in common with the agenda Trump ran and won on in 2016. Whatever you may think about Trump, he saved us from the fate of people like Paul Ryan dictating the future of the GOP. It was a vision Americans rejected in 2012 and Republicans repudiated in 2016.
There are still a number of Republicans who subscribe to Paul Ryanism, but they’re fewer in number and far less influential than they were in 2015. It’s a whole new party, and mostly for the better.
Read the full article here
