President Trump is a Globalist RINO?
He sold weapons and nuclear tecnology to the Saudi's.
Was Trump a conservative president? No. So he was a RINO.
resident right-leaning columnists David Brooks and Bret Stephens
discussed how "the party and a radicalized conservative movement have left them feeling alienated."
New York University professor and media critic Jay Rosen noted how Republicans "are frequently called 'conservatives' — and the most destructive among them the 'most conservative' — by reporters and editors who no longer know why they're using the words they habitually use."
All of which is to say that the latest instances of GOP infighting have thus revived a years-long conversation about what it even means to be conservative — and if that is even still the ideology at the center of the Republican Party.
Trump the (maybe) conservative
Debates over the party's ideology have been going on for a very long time, of course. But that conversation arguably got louder when Donald Trump ran for president in 2015.
NPR's Scott Simon asked right-wing radio host Glenn Beck back then whether Trump was a conservative.
"I don't think he is," Beck answered. "I haven't heard him talk about the Constitution or small government."
And a recent study shows just how much they did — it shows that Trump, who campaigned this past weekend in New Hampshire and South Carolina, in fact
changed how people define conservatism. Researchers surveyed people who were particularly active in partisan politics. They presented those activists with pairs of senators, and then asked the respondents to name which senator was more conservative or more liberal.
"By April 2021, when we did this survey, Donald Trump had, even for these political activists, largely redefined what it was to be conservative around support for Trump and his style of politics," said Daniel Hopkins, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and a study co-author.
Even those with conservative voting records (as measured by
NOMINATE, a widely used measure of members' ideologies based on their voting records) were seen as more moderate than their colleagues if they were also Trump critics.