It isn't normal for an American political party to cling to a defeated, one-term president. But by all indications, since the Nov. 3 election, nearly the entirety of the Republican Party appears to have collectively committed itself, for the foreseeable future, to the fortunes of a demonstrably unstable and mercurial reality TV show personality—one whose political acumen over the course of the past four years has been questionable at best.
I say “at best” because the worst seems to have escaped their notice. The plain fact that American voters rendered a decisively negative verdict towards this person, consigning him to that uncomfortable circle of hell generally reserved for one-term-only American presidents, doesn’t seem to have made any impression at all up to this point. Nearly every member of the GOP has dutifully fallen into line, actively supportive or in complicity while silently regarding Dear Leader’s post-election tactics despite the incredibly corrosive effects those efforts have had on our country. And all of them seem to agree that their best course of action over the next four years will be to cleave tightly to his Twitter feed, acting as willing hostages while he (presumably) continues staging his rallies.
That’s just strange, quite honestly. I can’t recall Republicans clinging to the mantle of George H. W. Bush after Bill Clinton defeated him in 1992. Nor can I recall such enthusiasm or deference towards the memory of Gerald R. Ford after 1976. Nor, for that matter, can I recall the Democrats pining for President Jimmy Carter after his crushing loss to Ronald Reagan in 1980. What we’re seeing isn’t normal in any sense. Yet it’s being treated as a fait accompli, a capitulation to a rabid cult led by a patently flawed, lesser man than any of these who is supposedly marching the GOP into a bright new dawn.
Here we are, with many in the GOP seemingly resigned—and some, in fact, delighted—with the notion that Donald Trump will continue to be their party’s North Star for many years to come. Some of them are even anticipating that he’ll run again in 2024 to reclaim his “mantle.” The thinking behind this appears to implicitly assume his grip on the party is unassailable, and that it will spawn an always-reliable pool of voters willing to keep the GOP alive. It assumes that millions of Republicans will march in the midterms (and beyond) in lockstep to the tune of Trump’s tweets.
Which makes it surprising that the editors of the conservative National Review are now signaling a clear dissent to a Republican future dominated by the offstage presence of Donald Trump.
[M]ake no mistake: The chief driver of the post-election contention of the past several weeks is the petulant refusal of one man to accept the verdict of the American people. The Trump team (and much of the GOP) is working backwards, desperately trying to find something, anything to support the president’s aggrieved feelings, rather than objectively considering the evidence and reacting as warranted.
in case anyone had doubts about the editors’ position, it is diametrically contrary to the Trump line being pushed right now by fringe right-wing media—the same line which, in the fairy tale, will cast an aura of “illegitimacy” over President-elect Joe Biden’s presidency. On the contrary, the editors at the Review acknowledge the obvious: “Almost nothing that the Trump team has alleged has withstood the slightest scrutiny.”
In particular, it’s hard to find much that is remotely true in the president’s Twitter feed these days. It is full of already-debunked claims and crackpot conspiracy theories about Dominion voting systems.
In a passage that could have been taken from The Nation, the Review’s editors declare that “(f)lawed and dishonest assertions like this pollute the public discourse and mislead good people who make the mistake of believing things said by the president of the United States.”
They then proceed to pick apart and tear down Trump’s cynical legal maneuvers, essentially calling them un-American.
Trump’s most reprehensible tactic has been to attempt, somewhat shamefacedly, to get local Republican officials to block the certification of votes and state legislatures to appoint Trump electors in clear violation of the public will. This has gone nowhere, thanks to the honesty and sense of duty of most of the Republicans involved, but it’s a profoundly undemocratic move that we hope no losing presidential candidate ever even thinks of again.
The National Review, now edited by Rich Lowry, came out against Trump in the 2016 GOP primary (they preferred Texas Sen. Ted Cruz), but the staff hasn’t been a monolithic block of “Never-Trumpers” by any means, thus rendering such a vehement takedown rather surprising.
It’s possible that NR understands that however mightily Fox News and other more virulent right-wing media attempt to prop him up for the next four years, they are dealing with an inherently unreliable gamble in Trump, whose signature characteristic these last four years has been feeding his own ego and filling his own coffers. It’s possible they understand that broadly speaking, a relatively younger generation of American voters who are repulsed by Trump’s blatant racism—including many of the newly politically engaged who will be voting for the first time during the next four years—may well outpace the aging and undereducated voters who will continue to cling to him. It may even be the pending criminal indictments coming down the pike against Trump that worry them.
Or it may be that their distaste simply stems from the fact that Trump is incapable of what they perceive as true “conservatism.”
Whatever their reason, they are laying down their marker now.
