Whatever happened to the Tea Party in the Republican Party? How Donald Trump destroyed the grassroots movement
The Tea Party movement burst onto the political stage in 2009 taking over the Republican Party, but just a decade later it was tossed overboard.
Prior to the American Revolution, a group of colonists famously protested British taxes in the Boston Tea Party by ransacking ships docked in the city’s harbor and dumping their cargo of tea into the water. That famous act of rebellion took place on the night of 16 December 1773.
The spirit of that historical event would be used to give birth to a “grassroots” movement in the 2000s, the Tea Party. Not only did the movement appropriate the name of the earlier protest, but also various other symbols from the American Revolution.
The movement, which formed inside the Republican Party and has been called an “astroturf” movement, sought to shrink the size and scope of government, cut spending, reduce the national debt, and, of course, opposed taxes.
However, the Tea Party movement would not last more than a decade, with one of its key tenants being thrown overboard during the first term as president of Donald Trump, much like the Boston revolutionaries did with the British tea over two hundred years earlier.
The rise of the Tea Party
The beginnings of the Tea Party can be traced back to 2007 but gained traction with the presidential campaign to lead the Republican Party of then-Congressmen Ron Paul the following year. John McCain would go on to earn the GOP nomination but ended up losing to the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama, who won the presidential contest of 2008.
President Obama, with a unified Congress under Democratic control, signed into law landmark legislation to address the massive economic crisis caused by the 2008 housing crash as well as healthcare reform. But this would eventually provide a unifying focal point for the nascent movement.
The economic stimulus package of 2009 to help the nation recover from the Great Recession led to a rant by CNBC analyst Rick Santelli on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange floor on 19 February 2009. This was seen as the official birth of the Tea Party.
The Democratic policies were used to build support for the movement and helped lead to a “red wave” in the 2010 election cycle. That in turn allowed the Tea Party to push through the Budget Control Act of 2011 during the debt-ceiling crisis that year. In exchange for fiscal constraints on the federal government they agreed to raise the debt ceiling.
The fall of the Tea Party
That 2011 “crown jewel” achievement by the Tea Party was the movement’s high-water mark. Polling began to turn against the movement over its unwillingness to find compromise.
The decline of the Tea Party picked up pace with the rise of Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again movement. The new standard-bearer of the Republican Party paid lip service to rising deficits and the growing national debt.
The final nail in the coffin, so to say, came on 22 July 2019, with an agreement on a two-year budget deal between Trump’s White House, and Democratic and GOP leaders in Congress to unravel the controls put in place by the 2011 Budget Control Act and suspend the debt ceiling through July 2021.
While some of its members like Senator Rand Paul, son of Ron Paul, are still around and some of its core ideas still shaping the party’s policy, the movement has been basically absorbed into the right-wing of the Republican Party nowadays.
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