This week’s Super Tuesday results set up the distinct possibility that the general election could come down to a Donald Trump v. Hillary Clinton showdown. But the real race to watch is amounting to an intra-party row between a guy whose signature line is “You’re fired!” and a GOP careerist: Mitch McConnell.
In fact, McConnell already has The Donald in his crosshairs—instructing his Senate colleagues to fillet the likely GOP nominee during their re-election bids in order to keep their seats. It’s political opportunism at its best, sacrificing Trump on the way to keeping hold of his precious Senate.
But McConnell is as much at fault for creating the sweet spot Trump has tapped as anyone. He famously convinced his colleagues in 2009 to block President Obama at every turn—no matter what the issue was. As Michael Grunwald pointed out in an incisive Twitter rant Tuesday, it’s exactly this type of blind partisan crusade absent a shred of intellectual honesty that primed the GOP base for an ideological wild card like Trump.
“My basic critique of the GOP was that it wasn't on the level. It wasn't about conservatism. It was about politics and power,” he wrote, pointing to Republicans’ appetite for endless tax cuts and military spending “while raging about deficits.”
Grunwald went on to name a handful of ways in which Republicans voted against Obama despite GOP support for nearly identical policies.
It’s an intellectual inconsistency that progressives have routinely tracked over the years. And it was McConnell’s laser beam focus on defeating Obama that helped totally divorce the party from any guiding principles other than winning elections.
Enter Trump, who really has no ideological moorings other than chasing ratings and wins (one and the same, in his book), which is exactly why so much of what he says about issues like single-payer healthcare, Planned Parenthood, and trade policy bears no resemblance to long agreed-upon party orthodoxy.
On many issues, he is the ultimate RINO (Republican In Name Only) and yet much of the GOP base can’t get enough of him. As Grunwald notes, Trump is nothing but marketing and branding devoid of actual policy, and that’s the Kool-Aid McConnell has been selling for years even if in a slightly different flavor.
But the problem with Trump’s candidacy for Washington Republicans is not only that he’s going off script on the trail, it’s that he may just be building a new coalition of voters that includes both evangelical Southerners (many of whom prefer him to Bible-thumping Ted Cruz) and more moderate secularists in the North. Indeed, he has generally excelled more in states that have open primaries (and are presumably peeling away some Democratic voters) than in closed Republican-only primaries.
For that very reason, some Republican ideologues find the notion of Trump being elected president even scarier than him losing the White House. As National Review editor Jonah Goldberg explained on NPR, a Trump triumph would be a total rebuke of conservative principles.
A lot of people on the right believe that he will be actually a huge victory for liberalism if he wins the presidency because he's in favor of all sorts of ideological heresies on the right.
Let’s resist the urge here to engage Trump as a “victory for liberalism” here and instead focus on the fact that these elite conservatives would rather lose than reevaluate sacred cows like trickle-down economics (though Trump has hewed to conservative thinking somewhat on tax policy). Still, Trump’s success suggests that the GOP base isn’t really aligned with many of the policies ideological conservatives have long cherished.
In other words, Trump represents a total realignment of the Republican Party inside of Washington, which is exactly why he is as threatening to conservative purists as he is to a GOP tactician like McConnell, who has so carefully cultivated his power over three decades in Congress.
Ironically, “winning” has really been the organizing principle of McConnell’s career, as Alec MacGillis, author of The Cynic: The Political Education of Mitch McConnell, notes:
The best way to understand Addison Mitchell McConnell Jr. has been to recognize that he is not a conservative ideologue, but rather the epitome of the permanent campaign of Washington: What matters most isn’t so much what you do in office, but if you can win again.
But the rise of Trump’s popularity with the Republican base is a wholesale rejection of both McConnell and what he’s actually accomplished over the years for GOP voters, which is pretty much nothing.
Trump is proof positive that when you relentlessly sacrifice intellectual honesty in pursuit of power, you create voters that aren’t loyal to anything but power. And so 2016 has become the ultimate power struggle between two people who have spent their careers unabashedly worshipping at its altar.