The Republican Party needs to be reinvented, and that moment comes right after President Donald Trump leaves the White House, Bobby Jindal wrote in a column for The Wall Street Journal.
Republicans must keep the best parts of Trump that helped grow the base, but discard the "crude behavior" that has divided America and cast distrust on the country's institutions, wrote Jindal, former governor of Louisiana.
"It is possible that it took him to broaden us and that our subsequent existence will depend on his disappearance," Jindal wrote.
"We need to take over and reinvent the GOP. Mr. Trump won't be the man to do it," Jindal wrote. "We should create a more populist — Trumpian — bottom-up GOP that loves freedom and flies the biggest American flag in history, shouting that American values and institutions are better than everybody else's and essential to the future."
Jindal's worry is that for all of Trump's accomplishments, they won't be for the betterment of the GOP in the long term.
Trump is a "man, not a movement; he embodies executive strength, not a philosophy," Jindal writes.
Congressional Republicans have been complicit in the razing of the party's foundation.
"Trump voters elected a president, causing them to think they had won the revolution. They hadn't. Their power is one man, and he has an expiration date," Jindal writes. "It's not clear that the GOP, as a party, has learned anything.
"The Republican elite's desire for self-preservation, along with its recognition of the obvious populist conservative wave, has resulted in a temporary truce within the party," Jindal writes.
"But the GOP will not be a populist conservative party as long as the current congressional leadership remains in place. These leaders would rather lead a shrinking GOP to contain and crush the populist uprising," Jindal wrote.
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