JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Democrats and Republicans promised different visions of the role of government. For decades, it seemed clear what each party stood for, but those lines are becoming less and less clear as President Trump continues to rewrite the rules in Washington. So we've asked senior White House correspondent Tamara Keith and congressional correspondent Barbara Sprunt to help us make sense of how these parties are shifting. Welcome.
TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: Hello.
BARBARA SPRUNT, BYLINE: Hi, Juana.
SUMMERS: So, I mean, for decades, it seemed incredibly clear what each party believed. It was big government versus small government, intervention versus isolation. But now it just feels like those lines are getting incredibly, incredibly blurrier. What is happening here?
SPRUNT: Yeah. I mean, if you saw an R or a D next to someone's name, you could generally guess what that person's political philosophy was. You know, it was a pretty fair proxy. Democrats - government isn't a problem but a solution. Republicans favor small government, more socially conservative. But that has changed in a really big way in the Trump era. I talked to David Barker, a professor of government at American University. He says it's no longer entirely clear what exactly it means to be a conservative anymore.
DAVID BARKER: People - I tend to associate the term with just being, like, really pro-Trump, but there are a lot of elements to the MAGA right that are largely or wholly inconsistent with what we used to think of as conservatism in the Reagan and Bush eras.
KEITH: And in the second Trump term, these differences are even more stark. Republicans used to be all about free markets and free trade. Trump has imposed sweeping tariffs. In business, he picks winners and losers and has even pushed for the government to take a portion of certain companies. When it comes to foreign policy, Trump has had little use for long-standing alliances, but America First hasn't meant pure isolationism. Look at the strikes on the Iranian nuclear facilities or the buildup of U.S. military might near Venezuela happening now.
SUMMERS: And all of this, of course, makes me think about Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who, of course, used to be one of Trump's closest allies, but she announced last week that she is going to step down in January. And that decision - all of this - it's about her disagreements with President Trump. How does she fit into all of this?
KEITH: Well, it would be hard to find someone more MAGA than Congresswoman Greene. But in the past few months, she had begun to openly question whether Trump was living up to his campaign promises. So he turned on her, called her a traitor, promised to primary her, and she quit. Greene is an iconoclast. She says she never really fit in in Congress, but she's casting herself as a representative of common Americans, the very people who Trump's version of the Republican Party appealed to, the working-class voters who gave him a winning coalition.
SPRUNT: Yeah. And, you know, Greene started to talk a lot about these issues that were important to the base - affordability, no foreign intervention and, of course, the Epstein files. She defended those as being core to MAGA. So this presents an interesting question, I think, about the movement itself. Is it about that core set of values, or is it about the man himself?
SUMMERS: I mean, it makes sense that Trump's shifting vision is upending his Republican Party, but Democrats also seem to be struggling to define themselves right now. What are each of you seeing?
SPRUNT: As Trump has remade the Republican Party in his image, you know, so have Democrats sort of centered their party on being anti-Trump, and a byproduct of that is that the party has less identity outside of just opposing Trump. For a lot of moderate and independent voters, and to be honest, some Democratic voters I talk to as well, just being anti-Trump isn't enough.
KEITH: Trump is the main character in everyone's political lives right now, and that puts Democrats in a position of always responding to him.
SUMMERS: The next political test, of course, is next fall in the midterm elections. How are Republicans and Democrats thinking about who their parties are going forward?
SPRUNT: Well, the party is shaped by who runs and who wins, right? So I talked to the folks running recruitment efforts in the House on both sides of the aisle. Georgia Congressman Brian Jack is leading recruitment for Republicans, and I asked him, what does the party stand for?
BRIAN JACK: Ultimately, I think, for many people, the Republican Party today has been completely overhauled by President Trump in a positive way because it's a party of blue-collar, working-class folks who want to see our country put first.
SPRUNT: And this gets at another way that Trump has transformed the parties. I mean, Democrats have lost their lock on white, working-class voters.
KEITH: It is remarkable just how significantly the party's electorates have changed in the past few decades. Bill Clinton, in the 1990s, was elected by a coalition that included a whole lot of working-class, white voters. Republicans were the party of the elites. And then Trump came along, and now it's almost completely reversed. Steve Teles is a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University.
STEVE TELES: There's this tension between all the things people had previously committed to and the fact that now, like, all these things are shaken up in terms of who's in what coalition.
KEITH: And he says there's a really big question of whether those voters will stay with Republicans once Trump is gone.
SUMMERS: OK. So that was Republicans. Barbara, you mentioned that you talked to both parties about this. How did Democrats respond?
SPRUNT: Well, I asked Colorado Congressman Jason Crow, who's leading recruitment for the Democratic side, what does he think the party stands for?
JASON CROW: I'm not looking for government to solve my problems. I'm not looking for a handout. What I want is a level playing field. Working-class Americans - they all know it's rigged, right? So I'm a Democrat because this is the party that consistently tries to unrig that system.
SPRUNT: Now, Juana, if you didn't know that that was a Democrat, what would those first few lines make you think of - you know, like, working-class, not looking for a government handout? I'm betting that, you know, you might say Republican.
SUMMERS: I might. I mean, hearing Congressman Crow say that, it's a little surprising given the large and very vocal left wing of his party.
SPRUNT: Yeah. And he's certainly a centrist Democrat. But the language around unrigging the system is also very much in line with the far-left of the party too. Unlike the Republican Party, navigating what conservatism means and what MAGA means from a policy level, the challenge for Democrats is different. It's about how to rebuild key parts of their party, like the working-class that we talked about.
KEITH: And how they rebuild trust with voters. There are a lot of people who feel like the system just isn't working for them, and electoral success for Democrats and Republicans alike may well come down to who most persuasively can say, we hear you and here's a solution.
SUMMERS: That's senior White House correspondent Tamara Keith and congressional correspondent Barbara Sprunt. Thanks to both of you.
KEITH: You're welcome.
SPRUNT: Thank you, Juana.
SUMMERS: And for a deeper dive on all of this, take a listen to today's NPR Politics Podcast. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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