The Tea Party movement was a fiscally conservative movement within the Republican Party which was founded on 19 February 2009 when CNBC reporter Rick Santelli called for another "Boston Tea Party" from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in response to President Barack Obama's fiscal policies. A protest and activist movement of libertarians, right-wing populists, and conservatives emerged, co-opting symbols of the American Revolutionary War such as the Gadsden flag, the phrase "taxation without representation", and even colonial clothing for their rallies. The movement called for lower taxes, a reduction of the national debt, decreased government spending, and opposition to universal healthcare, and it supported a small government and strict constitutional originalism. On 19 July 2010, Michele Bachmann formed the "Tea Party Caucus" in the US Congress, and Bachmann, Rand Paul, Mick Mulvaney, and Tim Huelskamp emerged as its leaders. The Tea Party's divisive rhetoric, some of which included strong criticism of immigration and Islam, led to increased party-line voting in the American government as several Tea Party members (including 2016 presidential candidates Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, and Ted Cruz) rose to leadership positions within the Republican Party and shifted it further to the right. By 2013, 10% of Americans (and 20% of Republicans) identified as supporters of the Tea Party movement. The Tea Party movement declined after 2010, with the number of Tea Party chapters declining from 1,000 in 2009 to 600 in 2012, and, by 2016, the mainstream Republican Party had largely co-opted most of the Tea Party movement's views, leading to its death as an independent political movement. Trumpism bears many similarities to the right-wing populist ideology of the Tea Party movement, namely its anti-elitist, neoliberal, nativist, Islamophobic, socially conservative, and xenophobic rhetoric.
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