Will Rahn — Commentary: The GOP's coming civil war

Washington Republicans, with their tax-cutting zeal and love of open markets, always saw the GOP base as an extension of themselves. This is the major reason that they never thought Trump could win the primary, let alone the general.

And it was the hope of Ryan’s fellow ideologues that Congressional Republicans would essentially run the government, at least from a domestic policy standpoint, once the GOP retook the White House. As the conservative power broker Grover Norquist said in 2012, the job of the next Republican president would be “to sign the legislation that has already been prepared.”

The legislation is indeed ready to sign. But when Norquist made that comment, it’s unlikely he was imagining Trump would be the guy with the pen.

How much of the GOP agenda is Trump really willing to expend political capital on?….

Bannon, meanwhile, has a habit of describing politics as a zero-sum game between competing groups, namely working- and middle-class Americans versus an ascendant elite class. And the populism Bannon talks about is, in a sense, neither left nor right, and instead all about serving the interests of the downwardly-mobile.

“Trump is a builder,” as Bannon said to Bloomberg’s Joshua Green this fall. “And what he’s built is the underlying apparatus for a political movement that’s going to propel us to victory on Nov. 8 and dominate Republican politics after that.” 

And this movement, Bannon has made clear, is not about enacting the Ryan agenda. It’s about displacing Ryanism, and the whole modern conservative project, with populism and economic nationalism.

To paraphrase Old Blue Eyes, "When an irresistible force meets and immovable object, something gotta give, something's gotta give, something's gotta give…"

CBS News
Commentary: The GOP's coming civil war
Will Rahn, political correspondent and managing director, politics, for CBS News Digital