Political parties often respond to electoral defeat by spending time contemplating, with varying degrees of seriousness and success, why they lost and how they need to change their approach to win in the future. Following President Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection, for example, the Republican Party commissioned and published a 100-page report which pinned the blame on Mitt Romney’s weakness with Hispanic voters and called for a more benign policy toward undocumented immigrants. But the party backed off after a revolt by prominent right-wing media commentators, and in 2016, Donald Trump seized the GOP nomination and eventually the presidency with a nativist campaign that both halves of the 2012 Republican ticket criticized as racist.
GOP leaders are trying to avoid a similar scenario in the wake of Trump’s 2020 defeat. They are circulating a memo that seeks to chart the party’s course by keeping it closely aligned with the former president — and with Fox News.
The document represents another datapoint in the ongoing merger of the right-wing media and Republican politics. Under Presidents Bush and Obama, Fox served as the GOP’s communications arm. With Trump’s ascent, the feedback loop between the network and the administration gave Fox unrivaled influence. Now, the Republican Party seems to have completely capitulated to the whims of its propagandists. Continue reading.