Republicans say their party will need to do a lot of soul searching to find its direction before President Trump leaves office in 2029, something that is coming into sharper focus with the approaching midterm election and the realization…
Page B1From§Eachthe sunrise edition — 31 August 2026
Washington Examiner declares 'the end of an era'; The Hill confirms GOP soul-searching for life after Trump.
As it ran on the front
OBITUARY: An Era, self-declared deceased this week by its own chronicler at the Washington Examiner, under the headline 'The end of an era — my era.' Survived by a Republican Party already, per The Hill, deep in soul-searching over what life after Trump looks like, a search reported to be ramping up rather than winding down. Preceded in death by several other eras this reporter has buried in this space over the years, most of which also announced their own passing before anyone else was quite ready to say it.
The era in question does not have an obituary in the traditional sense — no cause of death listed, no date of birth given, no hospital named — because eras of this kind rarely die of anything specific. They are not struck down. They wind down, get talked around, get quietly succeeded, and the last honest thing anyone in them does is write the piece announcing it themselves, which is, this reporter will note, a kind of dignity. Not everyone gets to write their own notice.…
…(cont) What the soul-searching itself tells us, gently, is that the successor era has not been named yet. A party doing this kind of searching in public, at length, is a party admitting the plan for what comes next is not written down anywhere, which is its own kind of penny-ante estate planning — a lot of talk about the will, not much sign anyone's filed one.
This business of eras ending has been going around a long while now, whippersnapper political columns declaring the death of this or that consensus every few years, and most of the time what actually happened is smaller and slower than a death: a shift, a retirement, a name that stops getting said as much at the podium. This one might be different. This reporter has been wrong about that before and been right to say so.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that mourners write down, plainly and before the next election, what they intend to stand for instead — and hand it to a reporter, on the record, before the era gets buried a second time by somebody else's headline.
“When a party starts writing its own obituary in the op-ed page, that's not grief, that's a press release. The soul-searching piece always runs a few years before the actual funeral.”
“Every party goes through a period of reflection between cycles, that's healthy, that's not decline — the columnist calling it 'the end of an era' was probably just a stylistic choice, not a signal of anything. Though I notice he did call it his own era ending, too.”
The receipts
THE END OF AN ERA: I’ve been writing this morning newsletter for more than 10 years. At first, it was a team effort, but after a few years, I began writing it by myself. It was just me and an overnight copyeditor, whose thankless job was…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.