On Thursday, Congressman Charlie Dent, a Republican from Pennsylvania
first elected in 2004, announced that he would not seek reëlection next
year. Dent was the second House Republican this week to announce his
retirement rather than run for office in what promises to be a
challenging 2018 midterm election for the G.O.P.

Dent is the leader of a group of moderate Republicans in the House that
calls itself the Tuesday Group, and he is well-known in Washington for
speaking his mind against the rise of the far right in his party and the
forces that elected Donald Trump. I caught up with him on Friday
afternoon as he was driving back home from D.C. after voting for the
deal that raised the debt limit and financed an aid package to help
those affected by Hurricane Harvey. Dent was in a jovial mood as he
reflected on the state of the modern G.O.P. and the age of Trump.

His restatement was a long time coming. He’d been thinking about it ever
since the 2013 government shutdown, a seminal moment for the G.O.P.,
when the most conservative members of the House Republican conference
steered the party into what moderates like Dent thought was an insane
strategy of forcing a shutdown to leverage policy concessions from
President Obama.

There was a recent rally in Dent’s district by about a hundred
conservative activists who support his ouster, but Dent said the event,
which was cheered by Breitbart, and the primary challenge from a local
politician, Justin Simmons, didn’t affect his decision. “It was a
buffoon bus, and it was a freak show,” Dent said. “That had nothing to
do with it. This decision had been made.” As for Simmons, when the
candidate attacked Dent for not being sufficiently supportive of Donald
Trump, Dent released text messages between them in which Simmons, in
2016, inquired as to whether Trump could be booted off the Republican
ticket. “He’s a phony,” Dent told me, noting that Simmons also texted
him asking for his support in another campaign. “He’s out there trashing
me while on the other hand he was begging for my endorsement.” He added,
“It was fun to do that.”

During his time in Congress, Dent has had similar amounts of fun
smacking around his colleagues to his right, which is one of the reasons
that he has drawn opposition from the online conservative world. In
2016, he refused to vote for Trump and wrote in the name of Evan
McMullin, the fiercely anti-Trump independent candidate. Earlier in the
day, he had been at an event with John Kasich, the governor of Ohio, and
John Hickenlooper, the governor of Colorado. Kasich is clearly mulling a
primary challenge to Trump, and Dent did not rule out supporting a Trump
opponent, noting that the President himself has been supporting
challengers to Republican incumbents.

“It’s not helpful if the President is encouraging primaries against
sitting Republican senators like Jeff Flake,” he said. “The more he does
that, the more likely I think it is that he suffers the same fate. You
keep hearing about the allies of the White House, like Breitbart, are
encouraging this kind of thing, and it’s probably not helpful for the
President going into 2020.”

Dent is in many ways a victim of the changes in his party that he traces
back to 2013. “Washington has had a difficult time performing the basic
tasks of governance in recent years, and I think this culminated,
probably, in September or October of 2013, when the government shut
down,” he said. “Back then it was, could we provide relief to Hurricane
Sandy victims? Can we re-authorize the Violence Against Women Act? Can
we prevent the country from going into default? Can we keep the
government open? Can we ever reach a budget agreement? Basic fundamental
tasks of government have become extraordinarily difficult to enact. And
because of that, because so much energy is expended and wasted on those
issues, it is very, very difficult for all of us to focus on major
policy issues like tax reform, infrastructure, and health care. It’s
very hard to take on big policy issues and make major changes if we
can’t get the basics down.”

The former Speaker of the House, John Boehner, was a victim of those
previous battles, and Dent said the current Speaker, Paul Ryan, is in
danger of being toppled by the same forces. “The dynamics that led to
the departure of John Boehner are still there to plague Speaker Ryan,”
Dent said. “Paul knows that. He knew that when he took the job. Those
dynamics are still there, and it’s hard to change those underlying
dynamics.” It’s often assumed that Ryan is more popular with the right
than Boehner was, but Dent wasn’t so sure. “Ryan’s position is probably
a little bit more solid than Boehner’s,” Dent said. “The difference is
the people who didn’t like John Boehner were direct with him. They told
him they didn’t like him, and that they were going to try to take his
legs out from under him. With Paul Ryan, a lot of them will say they
like him and they want to help him, and then they’ll try to take his
legs out from under him.”

Like many other Republicans who vote to raise the debt ceiling and avoid
government shutdowns, Dent has been complaining about his colleagues to
the right for years. Because Boehner and Ryan rarely had the votes to
accomplish those basic tasks, they need Democrats, whose votes always
come with a price tag and thus inevitably move the deals to the left.
That is exactly what happened this week, when Trump caved to Nancy
Pelosi and Chuck Schumer’s demands for a three-month extension of the
debt ceiling that would allow the Democrats another moment of leverage
in December. Ninety Republicans ended up voting against the deal, even
though the Harvey aid was attached to it.

“Both under Speakers Boehner and Ryan, there’s been far too much
consideration given to people who intend to vote no on a given matter,
and not enough consideration is given for those who were voting yes on
most matters,” Dent said of the Republican leadership’s kowtowing to the
right. “They’ve spent a hell of a lot of time and energy trying to
placate people who aren’t voting for the bills.”

Dent was particularly amused by the fact that Mick Mulvaney, the Office
of Management and Budget director, came to the Hill on Friday to
convince House Republicans to support the debt ceiling and Harvey deal.
Mulvaney is a founding member of the Freedom Caucus, which precipitated
the government shutdown in 2013 and whose members rarely support raising
the debt ceiling. Dent missed the meeting, but his chief of staff gave
him giddy reports about Mulvaney squirming in front of his old
colleagues as he took the exact opposite position from that during his
years in the House. “It was a beautiful thing,” Dent said. “We should’ve
sold admission tickets for the performance.”

As for the future of his party, Dent predicted that 2018 could be a
wakeup call. “Let’s be perfectly honest—this has been a pretty rough
start for the Administration,” he said. “Starting with the
ill-considered and poorly executed travel ban, to the way the Comey
firing was handled, to Russia, to Charlottesville. It’s been rough, and
it’s causing a lot of concern.”

A senior Trump adviser who champions exactly the ideas that Dent was
talking about once told me that the real long-term effect of Trumpism
will come over the next few electoral cycles. If Republicans like Dent,
he suggested, retire, and are replaced by Trump-like candidates, the
populist movement will have succeeded. We won’t know until next November
if Dent is replaced by a self-proclaimed Trumpian populist, like
Simmons, or an establishment Republican or a Democrat. But Dent’s
retirement opens the way for the kind of replacement that the Trump
adviser was hoping would occur. Dent is an early casualty of Trump’s
takeover of the G.O.P. “It’s just been a tough several months, and it’s
been pretty damn exhausting,” he told me.

Dent said that he placed the blame for the party’s difficulties on Trump
and the right-wing populism the President has championed. “I am
concerned about the three-headed monster of protectionism, isolationism,
and nativism,” Dent said. “And sometimes there’s a touch of nihilism in
this, too. These three attributes have infected both political parties
to varying degrees. And these are not attributes of a great nation.”