Pat Buchanan was the Donald Trump of his time. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say Donald Trump is the Pat Buchanan of our time.

Buchanan was a typical conservative most of his career, forceful but still part of the conservative establishment, until circa 1987 he began writing and speaking out against de-industrialization and off-shoring while advocating tariffs and protectionist economic policies.

Buchanan also changed his views on foreign policy, espousing America’s traditional stands of armed neutrality, Fortress America, and friendship toward all and entangling alliances with none. When during the first Gulf War, Buchanan referred to Congress as Israel’s “Amen Corner” along with a few other taboo statements, he was instantly demonized by the usual suspects, who of course remained in charge of America’s foreign policy until the 2024 presidential election, growing ever more demented and fit to be locked up in loony bins than even the neo-conservatives of Buchanan’s time.

Pat Buchanan on the campaign trail

Buchanan always did champion traditional values in the culture wars. Putting all that together, Buchanan was a very potent force for America First and making America great again when he ran for President as a Republican in 1992 and ’96, winning primaries and seemingly on his way to the nomination when, just as happened in 2020, “irregularities” suddenly occurred in the vote counts in some key primary states and ended his chances.

But on both occasions when Buchanan ran and was a prominent presidential candidate, there was no follow-up, both while he was running and then afterwards. Pat accompanied by his sister Bay and pretty much no one else would appear at gatherings around the country, and then. . . vapor trails. There was never any concerted efforts made at signing up Buchananites — and there were millions of fervent ones — around the country to become active in the GOP in their communities and to help recruit Buchananite candidates for office. As a result Buchanan was eventually absorbed by the Party Elders and by 2000, when he ran as the presidential candidate of the hopelessly splintered and ineffective Reform Party, Buchanan was a complete non-entity.

In a similar vein, one must hope that those in charge of the “Trump Phenomenon” are making an all-out effort to recruit their millions of true-blue supporters to become active in the Republican Party where they live. Trump is the “man of the people” and is off to a great start in his second term, but unless his movement is serious about taking over the GOP starting from the bottom, all the fantastic headway currently being made is in danger of being reversed in 2028, and possibly even in 2026 if the Democrats turn around their current woeful condition and win back control of Congress.

The Republican Party is very weak at the local state levels. Well, not necessarily weak when it comes to keeping the party predominantly a closed country club for grifters and Chamber of Commerce nerds; it’s the elected politicians of the party across the country who are weak because they too often consist of collaborators and emasculated cowards when it comes to standing up for their country in its time of dire need.

It should surprise Trump’s MAGA base that the Republican Party is the weakest in the “reddest” states, the ones where it should be establishing and then exporting rock-ribbed alternatives to the communist wastelands of California, Oregon, Washington State, Illinois, New York and the other “blue” strongholds.

Take Texas. Not only is the state represented in the U.S. Senate by toxic RINO John Cornyn, the Texas legislature may be even worse. According to a recent report by The Gateway Pundit:

“The Texas House, under the leadership of newly elected Speaker Dustin Burrows (R-Lubbock), has not only appointed a Democrat, Joe Moody of El Paso, as Speaker Pro Tempore but has also handed over the leadership of half of the chamber’s newly created subcommittees to Democrats.

“This decision comes despite a clear Republican majority in the House. Texas is a solid red conservative state that went to Trump in 2024 by 14 points! Thanks to the disgraceful support from 36 supposed Republicans and 49 Democrats, he managed to cling to his position. Now, he’s repaying his Democrat cronies by handing them significant roles in the legislative process.”

There’s a reason Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is about the only Republican Party governor one ever hears about on a national level; because most of the rest are nondescript fence straddlers and worse.

Although the numbers have changed a bit following the 2024 election, this report from The Daily Wire of April 12, 2023 gives a solid summary of why the Republican Party has failed to become a legitimate opposition to the Democrat Party, which has devolved in recent years to be America’s communist/globalist party:

Republicans hold governorships and legislative majorities in 22 states, compared to 17 for Democrats and 11 states in which government is divided. Yet an analysis of voting records found that some of the most-Republicans states have some of the least-conservative Republican lawmakers. . .

It seemed like a slam dunk: Wyoming, the most conservative state in the country, was poised to introduce school choice, a policy overwhelmingly supported by conservatives that also enjoys support from most Democratic voters, especially minority ones.

There was no doubt the bill had the votes to pass: Out of the state House’s 62 members, 57 are Republicans. A majority of the chamber was not only supporting the bill, but had co-sponsored it.

Then, it died. Speaker Albert Sommers, a Republican, refused to let the bill come to the floor for a vote, saying in late February that “I am not going to bring that bill out from the Senate that’s identical to the one that already failed in my Education Committee.”

According to Wyoming legislature records, the Wyoming Freedom Scholarship Act was not rejected by members of the education committee, but “died in committee” February 7 after it was never brought for a vote by deadline. Despite the rejection stoking shock and outrage among conservatives nationally, the chairman of that committee, David Northrup, seemed unfamiliar, responding to The Daily Wire’s questions about the “school choice bill” by asking for the bill number so he could “review it and get back to you.” After being provided the bill number, he never responded.

South Dakota, North Dakota, Idaho, and Oklahoma all are more than 80% Republican-controlled, but their brand of legislating ranks among the least conservative in the country–at 36th, 37th, 31st, and 35th.

The truth is that most of Wyoming’s Republican legislators, who chose the speaker, aren’t particularly conservative. One analysis of Wyoming lawmakers’ voting patterns found that 31 legislators were “very liberal” — and all but two of them had Rs behind their name. That put 29 Republicans further to the left of three Democrats, who were merely “liberal.” At the federal level, Wyoming elected anti-Trump Republican Liz Cheney.

And the state is not an outlier. Utah, another overwhelmingly Republican, rural state, elected “moderate” Republicans Sen. Mitt Romney and Gov. Spencer Cox. At the less-scrutinized state level, many states whose populations overwhelmingly vote Republican actually run their state capitols as moderates.

In Texas, Republicans even allow Democrats to chair committees. All of that means that in some ways, there is no conservative answer to states like California, Oregon, and Washington state.

A Daily Wire analysis compared the American Conservative Union’s ratings of state lawmakers with the partisan makeup of the legislatures they served in, and found paradoxically that the more “red” a red state is, the more moderate its Republican lawmakers tend to behave.

South Dakota, North Dakota, Idaho, and Oklahoma all are more than 80% Republican-controlled, but their brand of legislating ranks among the least conservative in the country — at 36th, 37th, 31st, and 35th. (For purposes of showing the balance between Republicans and Democrats, the analysis excluded independent politicians.)

The restraint that many Republicans show stands in contrast to the behavior of Democrats in places like Virginia, who briefly took both chambers in 2019 and immediately began ramming through far-left legislation despite the narrowest of mandates.

Thomas Bradbury, the director of advocacy and policy at the American Conservative Union who helped craft the voting-record rankings used in The Daily Wire’s analysis, said, “The ratings really illuminate the fact that we aren’t governing as much conservatively as you’d believe they would be.”

“When Democrats get in charge of a state, they ram through as many bills as possible. There’s no dissent. When Republicans get control, we pass basically nothing,” he said. Leading the charge against Wyoming Speaker Sommers were conservatives like Rep. John Bear.

“We have a lot of people who run as Republicans but have very progressive beliefs,” said Bear, a member of the Freedom Caucus, a band of conservatives with eleven state chapters that is sounding the alarm about one of the most baffling mysteries in politics — why deep-red Republicans don’t act like it.

The analysis showed that the average South Carolina Republican was more liberal than every state’s Republicans except Hawaii, despite Republicans controlling the governor’s mansion and both state houses there. And dramatic scenes playing out in the historic state capitol of Columbia this year bear it out.

After South Carolina conservatives organized a Freedom Caucus — and some candidates allied with it defeated entrenched incumbents — the party apparatus went to war against its conservative members, demanding that they sign an oath not to campaign against any incumbent and kicking 16 members out of the Republican Caucus when they refused to do so.

Separately, the Freedom Caucus was barred from raising money for electioneering on the basis that only party caucuses and those based on race or gender were allowed to do so. The Freedom Caucus filed a federal lawsuit against the House Ethics Committee as a result. South Carolina Freedom Caucus members say that most Americans don’t realize that the state is run by what they call “extreme moderates”. . . https://www.dailywire.com/news/why-did-wyoming-kill-school-choice-deep-red-states-often-dont-act-like-it-data-shows

While the Trump administration continues to do a fantastic job draining the swamp and exposing the hard-to-believe level of grift and criminality that has reigned unchallenged for so long, the administration and the RNC must also concentrate on “draining the RINOs” who populate so many red state legislatures, by recruiting MAGA primary opponents and exposing and outspending as many incumbent RINOs as possible. That is the best way to ensure that the MAGA Revolution will have very sturdy and long-reaching roots for many years to come.

https://donwassall.substack.com/p/postcards-from-the-empire-c6c