If you hear something funky in the background, it just might be the sad trombone revving up for an encore performance during Wednesday's joint congressional session to certify the Electoral College vote.
Fresh off dual losses in the Georgia runoffs that thoroughly cemented their minority status in Washington, House and Senate Republicans will team up for one last hurrah as Donald Trump's party of traitorous cultists. In the background, Trump will be beating his drum of conspiratorial grievance as he readies to target any and every congressional Republican who doesn't prove sufficiently loyal to him and his seditious efforts. Let's just say that Vice President Mike Pence's time in the barrel appears to be coming, to borrow a phrase. Pence will be getting exactly what every Trump loyalist ultimately gets and deserves: nothing but the shame and humiliation of having sold your soul for the momentary adoration of people who will despise you for the rest of time. It must feel oh-so-sweet.
But after it's all over except the tweeting and seething, the Republican Party will be retreating into the purgatory of an increasingly bitter civil war fueled by total electoral uncertainty. Even the dozen or so Senate Republicans who bet their political futures on Trump by supporting his fascist coup will be left wondering if they saddled their rising stars with the baggage of an epic loser. One among their ranks—the soon-to-be retired Sen. Kelly Loeffler—might have an answer for them.
The bet that Sen. Mitch McConnell and his caucus made in supporting Trump's fascist effort to disenfranchise the American people was that they could reap the benefits of animating Trump's base voters without sacrificing the support of conservative-leaning voters in the suburbs. After all, Joe Biden had outperformed Democratic Senate candidate Jon Ossoff in the Atlanta metro area by some 50,000 votes. Republicans took that to mean that while many suburbanites couldn't stomach Trump, they would still stick by the Republican Party going forward. So McConnell, along with GOP Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, went full-on Trump.
Turns out they took a bath on that bet. The anti-Democratic racist appeals by Perdue and Loeffler to the Trump base didn't sit particularly well with those conservative-leaning suburban voters, even as Trumpers still left them hanging at the ballot box. As FiveThirtyEight's Geoffrey Skelley noted early Wednesday, "the more heavily a county backed Trump in the November general election, the more its runoff turnout tended to drop relative the general." That was true particularly in Northwest Georgia, where Trump campaigned on Monday night to supposedly juice turnout.
And while the numbers aren't final, GOP performance in the suburbs doesn't appear to have been that solid either.
"Suburbs, my friends, the suburbs," a former top aide to McConnell tweeted late Tuesday night. "We went from talking about jobs and the economy to Qanon election conspiracies in 4 short years and - as it turns out- they were listening!"
Of course, QAnon conspiracies weren't the only things Republicans talked about. The GOP candidates’ healthy heaping of racist dog whistles about holding the line against a "radical socialist" like Democrat Raphael Warnock—a historic African American candidate—almost surely contributed to historic Black turnout as well.
While the numbers aren't final yet, what it is undoubtedly true is that whatever formula for success Republicans thought they had concocted turned out to be a loser. It's particularly unclear whether they can continue to turn out the Trump cultists who have now failed to show up in multiple races (including the 2018 Kansas and 2019 Louisiana gubernatorial elections where Trump begged his people to show up). Plus if they spend all their time courting the cultists, they may just wind up permanently alienating the moderate GOP voters who helped deliver a Democratic House majority in 2018 and thoroughly rejected Trump again at the ballot box in November.
All of this uncertainty will be swirling in the mix as the GOP's crew of eternally self-interested and opportunistic presidential hopefuls place their bets on how to best position themselves to lead the party for 2024 and beyond. On one side, you've got the Josh Hawleys and Ted Cruzes of the world. On the other, you've got the spawn of Dick Cheney rising. It's going to be a long, bitter battle that frankly won't be particularly healthy for American democracy overall.
"The Liz Cheney's of the world, we've gotta get rid of them," Trump said at his pro-sedition grievance rally on Wednesday in the Ellipse, shortly before his cultists marched to the U.S. Capitol and violently clashed with law enforcement officials protecting the building.
Trump, the ultimate dead-ender, is going to make life hell for as many people as humanly possible after his epically humiliating loss. Count on it. Hell hath no fury like a pathological narcissist scorned.