Bound to No Party, Trump Upends 150 Years of Two-Party Rule<br />Although elected as a Republican last year, Mr. Trump has shown in the nearly eight months in office<br />that he is, in many ways, the first independent to hold the presidency since the advent of the current two-party system around the time of the Civil War.<br />“The truth is that he is a political independent, and he obviously won the nomination and the presidency by disrupting a lot of norms<br />that Republicans had assumed about their own party and their own voters,” said Ben Domenech, publisher of The Federalist, a conservative website.<br />“This week was the first time he struck out and did something completely at odds with what the Republican leadership<br />and establishment would want him to do in this position.”<br />None of which means that Mr. Trump has suddenly transformed himself into a center-hugging moderate.<br />While some conservatives complained about the apostasy of cutting deals with Senator Chuck Schumer of New York<br />and Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, others applauded his assault on establishment Republican leaders like Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.<br />At a conference in Washington this past week featuring prominent political veterans from both<br />parties, Republicans often expressed harsher assessments of Mr. Trump than Democrats did.<br />Would he run as an independent?”<br />The more immediate question is whether he will continue to seek agreements with Democrats.
