The ironic legacy of Biden’s first year: A strengthening Republican Party

What, if anything, does the Republican Party stand for? The closest thing Republicans have to a positive agenda is support for Donald Trump — up to and including his false, destabilizing claim that the last presidential election was stolen from him. Candidates in GOP primary elections for the 2022 midterms contradict Trump at their peril.

To be sure, the party’s negative message is clear enough. Republicans have even reduced it to the snarky catchphrase “Let’s go, Brandon.”

And yet, after a year of unified Democratic government in Washington, with President Biden at its head, the deeply flawed GOP — organized around little more than rejection of the Democrats, to the point of downplaying the pro-Trump attack on the U.S. Capitol — is not losing adherents. It might, in fact, be gaining them.