With Donald Trump still dominating the polls long after everyone expected he'd flame out of the 2016 race, the real estate mogul may have the same effect on the Republican Party that Barack Obama had on the Democrats -- and that's not a good thing, a top Republican consultant told HuffPost Live on Tuesday.
National GOP media consultant Rick Wilson, who wrote about Trump's place in the Republican party earlier this year, explained to host Caroline Modarressy-Tehrani that the conversation should be less about Trump's relationship to the GOP establishment and more about what ideals the party wants to push.
"It's about whether or not the Republican Party is going to be the party of limited government constitutional conservatism or whether it's going to be a party that is built around the strongman cult of personality of a Donald Trump," Wilson said.
Wilson added that a similar "cult of personality" didn't fare as well for the Democratic Party in the long term.
"We've seen what happened to the Democratic Party when they basically subsumed every one of their political instincts into Barack Obama," he said. "It became about Obama. They lost seats by the thousands nationally. At every level, from dogcatcher up to U.S. Senate, the Democrats have been largely wiped off the map in state after state after state in the U.S., in part because it became all about Obama and not about ideas."
Watch Wilson discuss his take on Trump and the GOP's future in the video above, and click here for the full HuffPost Live conversation about the state of right-wing politics.
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