Grand Old Party by name and by nature. The US Republican Party actually has a certain seniority: today the first meeting, in Wipon, Wisconsin, of the militants who shortly thereafter, on March 166, 20, officially constituted one of the longest-lasting parties in international history, celebrates the beauty of 1854 years . The date on which the history of the GOP is considered to have begun is therefore February 28th, when some exiles from the Whig parties (founded by the sixth US president, John Quincy Adams) and Suolo Libero (anti-slavery formation), together with militants from pre-existing anti-slavery movements, founded a party that today we commonly consider center-right, associating it with the memory of the more recent exponents or the current figure of Donald Trump, but which in reality was born as a "leftist" formation.
In fact, the Republicans were born to oppose the then government led by the Democrats and in particular to counter the feared expansion of the southern states' slave system into the West, positioning themselves "to the left" (let's allow ourselves the simplification) of the Democratic Party in economic and social matters. The first Republican president was Abraham Lincoln in 1860, still considered one of the most enlightened presidents, who spent his time against slavery and modernized the US economy. At least until 1912, when the Democrats moved to the left (even more markedly in the 30s with the New Deal of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in office until 1945), the GOP was therefore considered a more liberal-progressive party than its opponents, to the point that conservative-populist Southern Democrats long supported racial segregation).
It was from the 1950s and 1960s, dominated by presidency of war hero Dwight D. Eisenhower, in a Cold War climate characterized by the intensification of anti-communism and the departure from the statist politics of the New Deal, as well as the civil rights movement of the 1960s (endorsed by the Democratic Party during the presidencies of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson) and the so-called Southern strategy which envisaged racist rhetoric to attract the consent of the whites of the South, that the Republican Party definitively assumed the modern conservative physiognomy. To then even become turbo-liberal in the 80s with the presidency of Ronald Reagan and conquer the White House several times again, with the Bushes father and son and three years ago with Donald Trump.
The Republican Party voiced 19 US presidents, against 15 for the Democratic Party: the first was Lincoln, as mentioned, then we must remember those - numerous - from the post-war period onwards, starting with the aforementioned Eisenhower (1953-1961) passing through Richard Nixon (1969-1974), Gerald Ford (1974-1977), Ronald Reagan (1981–1989), George HW Bush (1989–1993), George W. Bush (2001–2009), Donald Trump (2016–in office.
