With nine months to go before the 2026 midterms, and one year into the second Trump presidency, a major issue already facing the Republican Party is how to prepare for a post-Trump world.
The future of the GOP was the subject of a Dartmouth Political Union debate on Feb. 3 between frequent CNN sparring partners Ana Navarro, who is also a cohost of The View talk show, and Scott Jennings, a Republican strategist from Kentucky who served in the George W. Bush administration and has advised Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.
“How do you convert people who love one person into party faithful? That is the biggest tactical and technical issue facing the party,” Jennings told the audience of 115 in Filene Auditorium, with another 70 viewing the livestream. DPU ambassador John Coleman ’26 moderated the debate, which was co-sponsored by Dartmouth Dialogues.
Both Jennings and Navarro agreed that the second Trump presidency has been hugely consequential domestically and internationally, with President Donald Trump bending the Republican Party to his will on the economy, tariffs, immigration, the role of NATO, globalism, the extradition of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro to the U.S., and his demands on American colleges and universities.
But when Trump is no longer president?
“There is no doubt in my mind that the reason Trump won as many Latinos as he did was because they thought he would be better for the economy. And I think a lot of them are disappointed on that,” said Navarro, who grew up in Florida after her family left Nicaragua in 1980 to escape communist rule.
In the 2024 presidential election, Navarro said, Trump scored “historic gains” with young African American men and the Latino vote. Whether that continues in the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election is the question.
“What I’m interested in seeing is if those trends hold up. What’s going to happen when Trump is not on the ballot? Are those people who cross the aisle?” said Navarro, who voted a straight Republican ticket from age 18 on, until Trump won his first term in 2016, when she voted for Hillary Clinton.
Jennings said that the GOP will continue to hold the advantage in presidential elections “as long as the Democrats adhere to a cultural platform that is so far outside of the mainstream, we couldn’t see it with binoculars. The Republicans are going to retain a lot of the new constituents that they’ve had.”
In the midterm and off-year elections, the historic advantage has tended to go to the other party, he added.
Both Navarro and Jennings agreed that Trump is sui generis, a candidate who shattered assumptions of what it meant to run for and then assume the presidency.
Navarro likened President Trump to a “perfect storm”: a candidate and president who is “measured by a different measuring stick than practically any other politician or human out there.”
From brash New York real estate mogul to host of the TV reality show The Apprentice to presidential candidate, Trump has continually shrugged off the disapproval of liberal-leaning media, the Democratic Party and its voters, and those Republicans who have left the party because they did not like his policies or deportment.
“I don’t know that there is any other person running for President or even for dog catcher that could have survived the Access Hollywood tapes or the mocking of the disabled (New York Times) reporter,” Navarro said, alluding to scandals that dogged candidate Trump in 2016.
Jennings agreed with the “perfect storm” analogy, saying that Trump “gets measured a little differently because people didn’t consider him a politician to begin with. Trump speaks in a way that gives millions of Americans the feeling that he is saying what they would say if anybody ever bothered to hand them a microphone.”
There’s no doubt that Trump’s actions as president have been consequential, Navarro said, but “I don’t think he’s been consequential for the good. Whether you like it or not, and I don’t, he has changed the Republican Party to his image. He has changed the role of the presidency.”
Trump’s ascent heralds the end of the slick, over-rehearsed politician, Jennings said. “Our entire communications ecosystem in this country has been changed because of a failure of the elites across a number of institutions. Trump came along at a time when people were tired of political pablum, and he gave them the opposite.”
Navarro and Jennings agreed that removing Maduro from power was a good thing, but disagreed on what the long-term effects would be economically and politically, both for this country and for Venezuela. On the subject of the Republican approach to immigration policy enforcement, the two parted ways.
Navarro said that Hispanic Trump voters were initially in agreement with the president on closing the border but now say “he’s gone overboard. He’s gone too far on the way that immigration is being enforced.”
Calling it “performative cruelty,” Navarro cited such events in Minneapolis as the detention of a 5-year-old boy and his father, the removal of an older Laotian-American from his house while wearing boxer shorts and slippers, and the two fatal shootings of protesters Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
Jennings took the opposite tack.
“What’s happening in Minnesota right now is incredible to me,” Jennings said. “In Minnesota, Gov. Tim Walz has referred to Minneapolis as the new Fort Sumter. He told people to fight like it was the third day of Gettysburg. These people are living out a fantasy that somehow the federal government doesn’t apply to them in Minneapolis. The president really ought to put down this insurrection, this rebellion. In my opinion, the president is enforcing the law.”
When asked by a student what role that colleges and universities should play in shaping their students into future citizens of a democracy, Jennings said that “universities ought to have a core mission of American exceptionalism. And I think universities that don’t carry that as part of their mission are going to fail. I think universities ought to teach people to be good citizens, but I don’t think they necessarily should teach people that only one ideology is good and the other ideology is bad.”
Navarro said that the leading objective of any college is “to educate and to make students ask hard questions of their teachers and of themselves. It’s the time when students can explore what is important to them, and set the priorities that are going to guide them through their lives. What are their values? What are the lines in the sand that they’re not willing to cross?”
Having left the political turmoil of Nicaragua behind to immigrate to the U.S., Navarro said that “when you flee political turmoil, you either want nothing to do with politics, or you realize that politics really matters, and that being informed and engaged matters. Democracy is fragile.”
After the talk, Catherine Horner ’26, a politics, philosophy, and economics major, said that “the DPU always puts on a super-professional, polished, well-researched and thoughtful event.”
When analyzing the differing political positions of Navarro and Jennings, and debaters in general, Horner added she thinks that “a lot of this actually comes down to personality more than it does always to actual concrete policy suggestions.”
DPU ambassador Samay Sahu ’27 said he thought the debate “was a great and respectful conversation. It was great to see them talk to each other, as well as the audience, as colleagues, rather than combatants, which is something that you expect to see, right?”
