Politico’s Tim Alberta: GOP Base Is No Longer Conservative, It’s Trumpian

Politico’s Tim Alberta explained on Tuesday why speakers at the Republican National Convention are soon keen to defend and promote President Donald Trump. Speaking to MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Alberta argued that the party’s base was now under his control.

“Well, look, I think for many of them they feel as though there’s no choice, right,” Alberta said.

“Especially in the context of a convention and make no mistake, this is not a convention to project a great, coherent vision for the country. This is not a convention to make the arguments for Donald Trump’s, you know, grand plan for governing America. This is pure and simple the Trump show.”

“There’s a reason that, again, you go through the speaking lineup last night, you listen to some of the rhetorical through lines. There’s one viewer who’s sitting in the auditorium offering feedback on these things and it’s the President himself. I think, obviously, if you’re going to speak at this convention, you had better be equipped with a forceful defense of Trump.”

“You had better be sure to make the argument that this guy is not nearly as bad as everybody else is gonna make him out to be, really he’s misunderstood, that I know him a way you don’t know him, we heard a lot of that last night.”

“For somebody like Nikki Haley in particular, this is somebody that probably wants to be president one day and recognizes even as she has the potential to try to rebrand the party and expand its appeal and reach out to new and nontraditional Republican voters that that element of a political strategy can only work if first and foremost you have secured a base.”

“And this base is no longer a conservative base, it is a Trumpian base. The President controls the American right in a way that no politician, I would argue even Ronald Reagan, never did. So Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, any of these folks who want to have a future in the party they can’t afford to not embrace the President and embrace his base in a way that allows them to at least have a foothold for those people to then hear the rest of what they have to stay.”

Watch the video above, via MSNBC.