Washington Free Beacon editor in chief Matthew Continetti said Friday that America has three parties: Democrats, Republicans, and "the Party of Trump."
Continetti appeared on MSNBC's "Meet the Press Daily," where host Chuck Todd brought up a column by Charles Krauthammer. Krauthammer had written that institutional "guardrails" have held Trump in check. Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus partially agreed with Krauthammer, but said that Congress had really not been a check.
Continetti replied to Marcus that the political situation prevents Congress from taking Trump on too strongly.
"If Congress wanted to stand up to Trump, they couldn't," Continetti said. "Because again, these trends that predated Trump and are continuing through his presidency, the dysfunction of Congress is one of them."
"Is it a Trump problem? Yes, partly, but it is also a congressional problem," he said. "And the fact of the lack of the power of the committee system, the lack of power of the leadership — all of these predated Trump."
"His unique political identity makes them all worse," he added about the aforementioned trends. "We have three parties: the Democrats, the Republicans, and the party of Trump. And figuring out how the Republican Party relates to the party of Trump is kind of the defining issue of our time."