Bound to No Party, Trump Upends 150 Years of Two-Party Rule
WASHINGTON — When Donald J. Trump
set his sights on the presidency in the 2000 election, he pursued the
nomination of the Reform Party, a home for disenchanted independents.
“The Republican Party has just moved too far to the extreme right,” he
explained. “The Democrats are too far to the left.”
In the end, he dropped the campaign and the Reform Party, the leftover construct from Ross Perot’s two independent presidential candidacies during the 1990s. It was one of at least five times that Mr. Trump would switch party affiliations over the years. “I’m the Lone Ranger,” he once said in another context.
Now
in the White House, President Trump demonstrated this past week that he
still imagines himself a solitary cowboy as he abandoned Republican
congressional leaders to forge a short-term fiscal deal
with Democrats. Although elected as a Republican last year, Mr. Trump
has shown in the nearly eight months in office that he is, in many ways,
the first independent to hold the presidency since the advent of the
current two-party system around the time of the Civil War.
In
recent weeks, he has quarreled more with fellow Republicans than with
the opposition, blasting congressional leaders on Twitter, ousting
former party officials in his White House, embracing primary challenges
to incumbent lawmakers who defied him and blaming Republican figures for
not advancing his policy agenda. On Friday, he addressed discontent
about his approach with a Twitter post that started, “Republicans,
sorry,” as if he were not one of them, and said party leaders had a
“death wish.”
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