RUTHFULLY YOURS

Now that the Republicans have wrapped up their hugely successful convention and as calls for President Joe Biden to step down are accelerating, the question that must be asked is: Can the Democratic Party survive? Donald Trump made one key decision this week that could seal the party’s fate.

First, some history.

When Ronald Reagan won the Republican Party’s nomination in 1980, Democrats were in a similar bind as they are today. The party was in disarray, the nation fed up with clueless leaders, and voters were ready for the bold conservative leadership Reagan promised.

But Reagan made one fatal mistake.

After he’d won the nomination, he still hadn’t decided on a running mate, and a scramble ensued. Reagan had the chance to nominate a smart, talented – and young – conservative who shared his vision and would build on it. Instead, he listened to party insiders who said he needed to “broaden his base” by naming an establishment Republican and he picked George H.W. Bush.

This was the worst possible choice. Bush was an establishment hack, an inside-the-Beltway elitist, and the guy who had handed the left its best attack line – “voodoo economics.”

As soon as Reagan was gone, establishment Republicans regained power, shoved conservatives to the side, and systematically undermined Reagan’s achievements, all while mouthing conservative platitudes they knew could win elections.

They turned the GOP from a landslide-winning party to one that has managed to win the popular vote only once since 1988.

We are at a similar crossroads today.

Despite having won five of the last eight presidential elections, the Democratic Party today is in far worse shape than it was in 1980.

It has been completely overrun by its America-hating, DEI-ESG-CRT-socialist-Marxist-spewing radical fringe, which obsesses over things such as “transgender” rights and a phony climate crisis instead of jobs and opportunity.

Democrats don’t even speak the same language as the working class anymore, which helps explain why the head of the Teamsters Union spoke at the Republican convention — for the first time ever — saying how Trump “truly cares about working people.” (To which the Democrats responded with anger and a sense of betrayal, as though they own union workers.)

Biden has been reduced to buying votes with hundreds of billions of dollars in borrowed money, and has been reduced to calling anyone who isn’t sufficiently woke a fascist.

Today’s Democratic Party is so devoid of talent that it handed the nomination to an 81-year-old who can barely put two words together. Democrats are now running around like Keystone Cops trying to find their way out of this mess — faced with the even more dismal prospect of nominating the supremely unqualified Kamala Harris.

To sum up, the Democratic Party is ripe for the taking.

The second reason that Democrats may be on the road to ruin is Trump’s pick for his running mate.

In an editorial this week, we said that Trump’s decision to tap J.D. Vance for the job was a political “masterstroke.”

But it also shows that Trump learned from history. He is thinking less about this election and more about the ones to come. Like a good executive, Trump is grooming the next generation of leaders who can carry his vision forward.

True, Vance was once a never-Trumper. But he came to realize that he and Trump were aligned on all the important issues long before Trump selected him. That’s in stark contrast to H. W. Bush, who pledged to support Reagan’s agenda only if Reagan named him as his running mate.

At the Republican National Convention earlier this week, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recounted how the Democratic Party in his state now “lies in ruins, the left is in retreat,” for which his bold leadership deserves credit. “Electing Donald Trump,” he said, “gives us the chance to do this all across America.”

He’s right, and Trump is off to a good start.

His decision to place Vance — a millennial who is just 39 years old — on the ticket could turn out to be one of the wisest of his career, if indeed it does usher in an era of unbroken conservative governorship.

Of course, anything can happen. Trump could lose the election. His second term could be a disaster. Vance could fall to some catastrophic scandal.

But at the very least, conservatives for the first time in decades have a reason to hope that a century of losing ground to the left may finally be coming to an end.