Jack Balkin has a long piece on what he sees as the inevitable destruction of the Republican Party, now being played out.
As a political regime grinds to its conclusion, the dominant party turns to heterodox outsiders who promise to restore past greatness, but instead find themselves overmatched by circumstance. They unravel the regime and create an opening for a new regime led by another political party.
Trump brings his own set of problems, but those problems and the fact that the Republicans chose such a flawed candidate are part of the destruction.
By this point in his Presidency, Trump’s political strategy has been reduced to radical gestures that please his populist base, no matter how much they may outrage the rest of the country. Indeed, he welcomes the scorn and calumny of his political opponents: the more outrageous his speech and actions, the more he signals that he is standing up to the globalists and the elites—and that he is on the side of the real Americans. In this sense, the Arpaio pardon was less a dog whistle than an air raid siren.
Coalitions decline and fall when their constituent parts factionalize and turn on each other, and when their agenda becomes irrelevant to the problems that the country faces. In some cases, the coalition may be the victim of its own success. Its solutions—and its ideological agenda) may be a cause of the problems the country faces. The New Deal coalition unraveled in the tumult of the late 1960s and 1970s; something structurally similar is happening to the Reagan coalition today.