For the longest time, I couldn’t figure out why the Republican leadership was supporting Donald Trump. It has been blatantly obvious from the instant that Mr. Trump won the primary that a majority of the elected members of the party want nothing to do with him. They have given him their grudging support, even as they have had to constantly run interference for him whenever Mr. Trump wedges his foot further into his mouth. It is baffling that they would continue to pledge their support to a candidate they deem racist, un-American and unfit to lead. I had previously chalked up this bewildering behavior to a severely miscalculated, albeit impressive, sense of party loyalty.
However, I now think that there is a deeper motivation to their tepid support of their party’s candidate for President. Mr. Trump, with his outrageous and provocative statements, farcically shallow understanding of the rule of law and transparently thin skin, whose only moral guiding principle is his own overweening ambition, is so clearly incapable of being a functional commander-in-chief. It is a foregone conclusion that, if Mr. Trump were to actually gain the White House, he would immediately run the government into the ground. When Mr. Trump inevitably oversteps the limits of the great office that he is seeking, it is not hard to imagine Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell gleefully impeaching President Trump. This would give them the opportunity to rid themselves of a troublesome leader, while also burnishing their party’s credentials as a party of law and order. Governor Mike Pence, Mr. Trump’s likely Vice-Presidential pick, a man with sterling conservative credentials and considerably more experience governing than Mr. Trump, would then kowtow to Mr. Ryan and declare, “our long national nightmare is over”. This is what the Republican strategy in supporting Donald Trump has been all along. The only logical explanation for why Paul Ryan and other clear-eyed members of the Republican party would willingly tie their brand to a sinking ship like Mr. Trump, is that they are using him as a stalking horse, a patsy to do an end run around the will of their constituents and get a more pliable Republican into the Oval Office, who will do Mr. Ryan’s bidding.
Unable to proceed with their agenda of enriching the ultra-rich even further, in the hope that they can enrich themselves as well, by suckling on the teat of corporate America (the only true way supply-side economics actually works), Republicans debased themselves to the small-minded, the ignorant and the hateful and used the tried-and-true tactic of fear-mongering to stir up support. However, their wellspring of support is drying up. Mr. Ryan and the other members of the Republican elite saw the writing on the wall in the “autopsy” of the 2012 election. Without a broader base of support, the Republican Party will die. However, any attempts to diversify the ranks of the party by making concessions on immigration or social issues are shot down by the party’s true believers, who voted for Mr. Trump, an amoral con-artist without any scruples or governing ability whatsoever. Therefore, the only way for Mr. Ryan and the other business conservatives to extricate themselves from Mr. Trump and his followers, is to get in bed with him, secure in the knowledge that he will fail spectacularly, giving them the opportunity to end their troubled marriage to far-right elements of social conservatism, while retaining their continued vitality as a major political party.
Unfortunately, Mr. Ryan and the others have outfoxed themselves. A Trump presidency would do such damage to the party’s image that 2018 and 2020 would see tidal waves of support for the Democrats, wrecking any legacy Mr. Ryan might seek to secure. He and his allies will go down as Trump collaborators, tarred with the same brush they seek to paint him with.