'The very thing we feared is in office': Tea Party conservative tears into Trump

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U.S. President Donald Trump holds a cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 30, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

During Barack Obama's presidency, the Tea Party was a major force in right-wing politics — often frustrating both President Obama and then-House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) at the same time. Tea Party Republicans routinely accused the conservative Boehner of not being conservative enough. And even though Obama made a point of seeking centrist positions and reaching out to GOP lawmakers, members of the Tea Party were unreceptive.

But in an article published by the Washington Post on Halloween 2025, reporter Naftali Bendavid stresses that the Tea Party of the Obama years no longer exists thanks to President Donald Trump and the MAGA movement.

"The movement tore across the country with an energy new to American politics — its activists shouting at lawmakers and holding frenzied rallies to demand balanced budgets, an end to deficit spending, sharp tax cuts, fealty to the Constitution and a reined-in presidency," Bendavid reports. "This was the Tea Party movement, which punctuated its arrival 15 years ago with the election of 2010 — a moment that seemed poised to rewrite the rules ofAmerican politics. Yet just a few years later, the Republican Party was captured by the MAGA movement and President Donald Trump, whose agenda, to some Tea Party pioneers, is the opposite of theirs and which dominates the party today."

Although Democrats held the U.S. Senate in the 2010 midterms, Republicans flipped the U.S. House of Representatives that year in a massive red wave that Obama famously described as a "shellacking" for Democrats. And one of the prominent Tea Party figures who entered the House in January 2011 was then-Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Illinois), who only served one term (Rep. Walsh is not the singer from rock band The Eagles).

These days, Walsh is an outspoken Never Trumper. After leaving the GOP and becoming an independent in 2020, Walsh expressed his disdain for Trump and MAGA by joining the Democratic Party earlier this year.

Walsh told the Post, "We feared government tyranny. We feared a strong executive. We feared oppressive government, any president who would take a flamethrower to the Constitution. Now, the very thing we feared is in office."

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) told the Post, "I think (the Tea Party has) largely been supplanted by something else. We aren't organized around ideas anymore. We're organized around a person."

Read Naftali Bendavid's full report for the Washington Post at this link (subscription required).

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