Bill Weld's Whig-out playbook: Whigs split into short-lived Know-Nothings & lasting Liberty/FreeSoil/Republicans. & now...

07/21/2016

Ryan Lizza writes:

Weld compared the Republican Party, in its crisis over Trump’s nomination, to the Whig Party in its final years. The Whig Party splintered in the mid-eighteen-fifties, Weld noted, and some former members drifted into the anti-immigrant Know-Nothing Party. Like Trump’s rallies, Weld said, Know-Nothing rallies “had a lot of violence, they fomented a lot of conspiracy theories about people trying to overthrow the United States. They were nativists ... they were everything that Mr. Trump’s overtones are today. And they became very powerful for a few short years, and then they disappeared.”