As this story from The Economist acknowledges, every change of administration brings a new cast of characters, and with it comes a new slant to the politics of the party in power. Particularly when a party holds both Congress and the White House, there tends to be an alignment of axes, intended to make moving legislation through the pipe more likely. But with Republicans and Donald Trump, this alignment hasn’t represented just a change in the party’s positions or a tweak to underlying philosophies. The Republican Party has converted itself into a PR organization, whose sole reason for existence is to fluff the ego and further the ambitions of Donald Trump. Which is singularly problematic.
The organising principle of Mr Trump’s Republican Party is loyalty. Not, as with the best presidents, loyalty to an ideal, a vision or a legislative programme, but to just one man—Donald J. Trump—and to the prejudice and rage which consume the voter base that, on occasion, even he struggles to control. In America that is unprecedented and it is dangerous.
What The Economist is arguing isn’t that Trump’s policies are right or wrong. But that Trump’s policies aren’t being debated as policies. No one in the Republican Party is actually weighing Trump’s actions for the results, or holding him to promises, or speaking out against statements that simply don’t make sense. Instead the entire Republican Party has become an organization that turns on a dime, configuring itself to support whatever Trump said last, even if what he just said contradicts what he said weeks, days, or minutes before.
The bigger, more urgent concern is Mr Trump’s temperament and style of government. Submissive loyalty to one man and the rage he both feeds off and incites is a threat to the shining democracy that the world has often taken as its example.
Republicans paved the way for Trump by working to split the nation open on racial, religious and economic grounds. They created a campaign strategy that was based on generating fear and teaching American voters to other people, not just in distant lands, but in their home towns. They created not just a world in which immigrants, African Americans and liberals were to be regarded as ravening beasts, but where anyone who didn’t share that view was suspect. And now they have Trump, feeding off the hatred they created, and eating them in the process.
Now Republicans are running a party that enforces loyalty to Trump über alles. Defending their leader even if it means doubling-back on issues that have been part of Republican core beliefs for decades. Whether it’s paying off porn stars, praising Putin or defending literal Nazis, it’s all okay—when it’s done by Trump. Lying in defense of Trump isn’t wrong. It’s expected. Any any Republican congressman or official who thinks otherwise is on his way to becoming an ex-congressman or official.
When power dominates truth, criticism becomes betrayal. Critics cannot appeal to neutral facts and remain loyal, because facts are not neutral. As Hannah Arendt wrote of the 1920s and 1930s, any statement of fact becomes a question of motive. Thus, when H.R. McMaster, a former national security adviser, said (uncontroversially) that Russia had interfered in the election campaign, Mr Trump heard his words as unforgivably hostile. Soon after, he was sacked.
The result is government not just by fiat, but by whim. Items of vital national policy which normally would have been subject to weeks of study and scrutiny, are decided on the momentary mood of one man. And Trump’s ever-hungry ego means that any idea, no matter how idiotic, becomes locked in stone once uttered. Republicans bit their tongues and fall in line, hoisted high by the petard they labored more than three decades to build with AM radio, and Fox News and alt-right websites.
They feel pinned down, because they cannot win elections without Mr Trump’s base but, equally, they cannot begin to attempt to prise Mr Trump and his base apart without being branded traitors.
Republicans have pushed their party to the edge, where every single member of Congress is dependent on falling in line for Trump. And since the only real Republican principle has long been “get elected,” there seems little evidence that they will change that course anytime soon.
The only choice that Republicans have now is the one already taken by 40 Republicans when it comes to 2018—go home.