This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, August 5th, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown as the GOP struggles to discover whether the Donald Trump phenomenon is a Black Swan event

or a broader shift in its base and

priorities. There is no denying that some internal reflection is in order.

Ben Dominic, publisher of the Federalist, says when parties are mere vehicles the ideas espoused by

those vehicles can change quickly and dramatically.

After 2012, the Republican Party was going to do some soul searching, do some sort of outward bound retreat,

and talk about what went wrong and why they couldn't capitalize on the substantial weaknesses that

that President Obama had.

And we go up through 2015 and 2016, and suddenly there's this elephant in the room that is Donald

Trump trying to take over and at least with some success has taken over a large swath of the Republican Party.

So what didn't Republicans do and what should the lessons have been?

Well, I think that they approached the lessons of 2012

with basically the attitude of we ran a candidate

who didn't really match up with what people wanted to hear

and that they needed to expand their tent, that they needed to appeal to a broader

swath of Americans, not just more white working class people who didn't come out in Pennsylvania and in Ohio, but also Hispanics

in Florida and other key states.

And I think that was the general attitude of the party.

The problem is that everything that happened after 2012, I think,

catered to an opinion on the part of Republican Party leadership that their problems were really

due to a fracture within the problem, within the party that was more ideological and was basically between purists

...