Moments before Donald Trump boarded Air Force One for the final time on Wednesday morning, he offered this cryptic message to his supporters:
“We will be back in some form. Have a good life.”
Which, undoubtedly, struck fear in the hearts of every Republican politician (See: “McConnell, Mitch“) who has spent the last days and weeks trying to ensure that Trump never, ever comes back.
While trying to decipher what Trump means — you’re coming back but also we should have a good life? — is no simple task, there was a hint of what he might have been talking about in the news on Tuesday night.
Trump, according to The Wall Street Journal, is considering the possibility of starting a new party, which he has contemplated calling the “Patriot Party.”
If Trump is serious about starting a party to rival the GOP (and Democrats), it would be an utter disaster for Republicans.
As WSJ’s Andrew Restuccia noted:
“The president has a large base of supporters, some of whom were not deeply involved in Republican politics prior to Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign.”
Yes, yes, he does. And if Trump urges all of those supporters to flock to a more Trumpian party than he believes the Republican Party is positioned to be, it immediately splits the traditional GOP vote into two factions. And neither of those factions is large enough to be a majority in a general election.
A Trump-backed splintering of the Republican base — or, even worse, an open war between the Trump party and the GOP — could cripple the chances of conservatives regaining power in Washington not for months, but for years.
The Point: Does Trump know the havoc he could wreak on the party he led for the past four years? Does he even care?
