A recent poll shows ~90% of Republicans approve the job Trump has done. He has strong - somewhat sycophantic - support among Congressional Republicans. People like Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul who ridiculed him during the primaries of the 2016 election are now staunch defenders of his presidency and the president himself.
The Republican Party is the Party of Trump. But for how long?
The youth turn-out in 2018 helped the Democrats. Coupled with Democrats sweeping offices in states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan which twice went for Obama but switched to Trump in 2016, plus Red states like Texas and Georgia being a lot closer than usual, signs from the mid-terms could signal big trouble for Trump.
Suppose next year the Democrats regain the White House, the Senate and retain the House…that’s quite a message from the American people. To boot out the sitting president up for re-election has just happened twice since Hoover. And if there is no wall, no healthcare reform, no immigration reform, will there be a reckoning within the party that a President Cruz will have done exactly the same things (tax cuts, conservative judiciary appointments, reducing regulations, repeal individual mandate of Obamacare) without all the bickering and polarisation? And Trump gets treated as an abberation?
The flipside is the economic numbers are very good and that can carry him for another four years. The recession some predicted hasn’t arrived. And if he gets four more years to fulfill his campaign promises such as the wall will Trump be put on a pedastal for years to come like Ronald Reagan? A conservative deity who in twenty years time will be brought up in presidential debates as candidates try to compare themselves to, as they have done with Reagan for the last twenty years.
The Republican Party is an exceptionally malleable party. They go right along with whomever happens to be at the helm at the time. Prior to Reagan and George W. Bush, Republicans were a party of fiscal conservatism (or at least claimed to be,) yet they didn’t blink when Reagan and Bush ran up large deficit spending.
So to answer the OP, once Trump leaves, Republicans will instantly be molded into…whomever the successor happens to be. And that’ll be their new Trump.
However…there may very well be someone like Tom Cotton who will take power, who will be like Trump, except even tougher than Trump and more serious than Trump. He’ll release his tax returns, no problem, and probably have a lot less corruption if president, but would really out-Trump Trump on things like the border wall and deportations.
I’m a Republican and I don’t approve of many things that went down in the executive branch since '16. Take the tax bill, for instance. Or the terribly unbalanced budget. Or his handle on Korea, Russia, and the Middle East. I mean, objectively the only thing he’s done “right” is successfully appoint two supreme court justices. But that was all McConnell, and it wasn’t actually done right.
If Trump loses in 2020 Republicans will suck it up in 2024 and either run the biggest damn American Hero they can find, or some exciting youngish, clean-cut, Paul Ryan type.
However, if Trump completes two entire terms (and the Democrats need a really good candidate in 2020, not just a not-Trump,) the Republican coalition of whackos, pro-life religious conservatives, disaffected blue-collar workers, and nice suburban folks worried about taxes will be at each other’s throats with their own ideas of what the One True Successor will be.
As stated earlier, I think many of those people are simply putting their support into their party’s president. If Paul Ryan had won, those people would still stand behind him. If the next president is republican, I think it’ll be business as usual for them.
Look at how strongly those people (or at least Lindsey Graham) defended Brett Kavanaugh when, even ignoring the accusations, all of the words that came out of his mouth and his body language said that he wasn’t fit for the job…but he was a republican and they stuck with him.
I think Trump proves that affiliation to the Republican party has little to do with policy. The did an about face on every imaginable issue; family values, low taxes, paying off the deficit, tariffs. Everything.
It is the party of grievances and pointing the fingers at others. As long as the 2020 candidate does that, whether his policies bare any resemblance to Trump’s or Reagan’s matters not a whit.
There were a considerable number of Obama voters who went Trump in 2016. This might be them. Or perhaps the conservative Joe-Manchin-Democrat type, maybe rural Rust Belt or labor-union democrats.
It has more to do with my parent’s affiliation, local political skew, and the closed primaries in my state. That’s not to say I agree with all of the major Democratic positions either.
Those 12% of “Democrats” who approve of Trump are probably folks who’ve voted R for every race for every position for the past 30 years, but dammit, they’re still Democrats.
And yes, there are still pro-life Democrats. What’s changed lately is that there are no longer any pro-life Republicans. Haven’t been, since at least 2009.