Republicans and Their Donald Problem

Trump is popular with the GOP base and where else exactly?

Mar 07, 2021

In April 2016, as Donald Trump moved closer to securing the Republican nomination for President, I wrote about the effect his candidacy was having on the party.

“Just as an ice pick breaks a block of ice into smaller chunks, the success of Donald J. Trump’s campaign for the Republican Presidential nomination is fracturing the conservative coalition of corporate interests, free-market libertarians, evangelicals, and culture warriors that has sustained GOP electoral success for over three decades… In cracking open the Republican coalition, the Trump campaign has also exposed flaws in our political system. [He] is exposing the inherent weakness of our two-party system, a system that depends on both parties being viable if it is to represent valid political choice.”

The overall theme of the post was that both parties were in danger of fracturing, and I felt if the Republicans were moving towards a breakup, then the Democrats, given the tension between their centrist cohort (the Hillary Clinton wing) and progressives (led by Bernie Sanders) were much closer to such a schism. Historically, the Democrats were the party given to squabbling among themselves, the party that gathered disparate groups under its big tent only to fight over policy and platform. The Republicans were more disciplined, ruthlessly committed to winning elections.

I was wrong.

Donald Trump was something novel not only to Republican politics but to American politics generally. He was vulgar, not interested in policy, more cunning than bright. It worked well for him. Earlier that Spring, Matt Taibbi pointed out in Rolling Stone that “we let our electoral process devolve into something so fake and dysfunctional that any half-bright con man with the stones to try it could walk right through the front door and tear it to shreds on the first go.”

“And Trump,” Taibbi emphasized, “ is no half-bright con man, either. He’s way better than average.”

Trump, with serendipity on his side (Russia, Comey, an unpopular opponent, and the Electoral College), won the election. His victory made Trumpism, the cult of personality, the core ethos of the Republican Party.

While campaigning, Trump may have been the Entertaining Trump, President Trump was not much fun, not for the country and not for the Republican Party he’d hijacked. As it turns out, electing a better-than-average-half-bright con man to the nation’s high office came with a large downside. Trump’s governance-by-personality rather than by competent leadership was marked by chaos and erratic policy choices. The two major accomplishments of his tenure, the 2017 tax cut bill and appointing conservative judges and Supreme Court Justices, were long-time Republican goals. If any of the other GOP hopefuls in 2016 had wound up as President, they also would have signed the tax bill and appointed conservative judges. His last year in office was a tragi-comic farce, more tragic (hundreds of thousands deaths) than comic (injecting disinfectant). His inimitable performance in handling the coronavirus pandemic had disastrous consequences with which we are still dealing. Trump entered the White House with Republicans in control of both Houses of Congress, was ousted after one term with the Democrats having regained control of both the House and the Senate. Although popular among GOP voters, Trump never polled higher than 49% nationally. The first President to be impeached twice, he survived both Senate trials only by dint of the refusal of GOP Senators to convict him even though both cases against him were very strong.

The pièce de résistance of the Trump Presidency was the January 6 attack on the Capital. Trump claimed the election was fraudulent and his victory stolen from him. He incited mob violence in the hope of preventing Congress from accepting the Electoral College votes. It was a coup attempt, executed with the ineptitude that is the hallmark of the Trump era. He’d failed as President and he failed as a losing candidate. He never conceded defeat and never congratulated President Biden. He went to court 61 times attempting to overturn the election. No longer President, Trump faced a host of potential criminal investigations and civil lawsuits.

After four years, it would seem the Republican Party would be ready to move on from Trump.

As for the Democrats, they mustered a strong enough show of unity in the general election to elect centrist Joe Biden President and Kamala Harris Vice-President. They were aided by the strong tailwinds of anti-Trump sentiment. While the tensions between the party’s centrists and progressives are visible, they united this week to pass Biden’s American Recovery Act through both houses on party line votes. (It is notable that the Republicans were united in opposing the bill.)

Oxymoronic Politics

Trump is out of office but Trumpism lives on. Polling shows the majority of Republican voters continue to support the former President, but he is unpopular with the business interests and donors who represent the establishment faction of the party led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. These Republicans fear that Trumpist candidates in the House and especially the Senate will cost the GOP any chance they have to regain the majority in either or both Houses in the 2022 mid-term elections. McConnell would no doubt be happy to see Trump be a non-factor in either the mid-terms or the 2024 Presidential race.

He may not get his wish. At CPAC last week, Trump delivered a rambling speech chockablock with self-congratulatory claims. Near the end, he turned his ire on those Republicans who had voted for impeachment in the House or conviction in the Senate- “Mitt Romney, little Ben Sasse, Richard Burr, Bill Cassidy, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Pat Toomey; and in the House, Tom Rice, South Carolina, Adam Kinzinger, Dan Newhouse, Anthony Gonzalez… Fred Upton, Jamie Herrera Butler, Peter Meyer, John Katko, David Valadeo. And of course… Liz Cheney.”

Trump’s hit list evoked memories of Richard Nixon’s enemies list. He intends to “actively work to elect strong, tough and smart Republican leaders” and will support challengers against those he finds disloyal, the “RINOs”. He has started a new SuperPac to raise money, purportedly to support this effort.

Besides his continued popularity with the base, Trump has secured influence over much of the party’s infrastructure. He supported loyalist Ronna McDaniel’s relection in January as chairwoman of the Republican National Committee. Some Republicans, fearing Trump will use his clout with the RNC to deny its resources to other GOP Presidential hopefuls if he decides to run in 2024, have urged the committee to preserve its independence. More significantly, beginning in 2019, Trump campaign operatives, wishing to forestall primary challenges to the incumbent President prior to 2020, began installing Trump loyalists in the party’s state and local committees. The result of this program was obvious in the wave of censures of elected Republicans who voted to impeach or convict Trump after January 6.

Yesterday, it was reported Trump “has sent a cease-and-desist letter to at least three Republican organizations demanding they stop using his name and likeness to fundraise… Trump has been angry that those groups could use his name to support Republicans who voted to impeach him a second time”.

All of these machinations leave the Republican Party with a dilemma that will be resolved in November 2022: support radical Trumpist candidates and risk losing to the Democrats or back moderates with a better chance of winning. There is the possibility that Trump’s legal problems may finally short-circuit his political ambitions, but he will not go quietly. Despite their efforts to obstruct the Biden agenda in Congress and the efforts by GOP state legislatures to suppress voting, it seems obvious that, in the long term, the Republican struggle will be internal.

1hundredsixty8

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?