On Super Tuesday, a majority of Republican Party voters voted for the seditionist. With those awarded delegates and polling leads in this week’s Republican presidential primaries, as well, AP is now forecasting that Donald Trump will clinch the party’s nomination for president of the United States.
It was always going to end up that way, of course. Polling has long shown that the majority of the Republican base—the very white, very angry, very racist, very conservative Republican base—would be choosing the Republican who plotted out a very real, if very stupid, attempt to topple the United States government over any of the also-rans who offered themselves up as alternatives. By this time next week, Trump will have enough delegates to be declared the presumptive Republican nominee—and at no point in the race did anyone appear who had a credible chance of taking it from him.
What that means is that at this point, we can do away with three years of caveats and take it as a confirmed fact. When Republican voters in 14 of 15 states on Tuesday went to vote for who they believed best represented their party and should run the whole of government, they chose the man who launched the most consequential insurrection against the government since the Civil War.
Because that is who they are, and we all ought to be very damn tired of anyone who claims otherwise.
There is no question that Trump fomented the violence. There is no question that he assembled a mob for the explicit purpose of thwarting Congress' counting of electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021, turning the mob—which Trump knew was armed—on the Capitol at precisely the day, hour, and minute needed to accomplish that goal.
There is no “No, but” when it comes to supporting the architects of an attempted coup. There is no “Well, I don't approve of his attempt to nullify an American election rather than admit his own defeat but I sure like him on policy grounds,” because there is no policy more substantive than promising to keep the government intact even if it personally makes you sad. There is no backsies on a violent coup. There's no coupon you can present to try a little coup, just a wee one mounted by a bunch of addled conspiracy cranks and egged on by a disinformation campaign orchestrated by your own phalanx of crooked coup-backing advisers.
No, if you vote for Trump, you are voting for the man who attempted to topple the United States government. And that is who every Trump voter is, and you can tell them so.
Some will pretend not to believe you. Some will throw every conspiracy theory they've ever heard at you, claiming the coup attempt was staged by government agents or globalists or dirty hippies and that Trump was completely innocent, as he sat on his ass in the White House, watching his mob beat police officers and break windows, and did not a damn thing to stop it.
But mostly, you will get the more honest response: “I don't care.” Or the even more honest response: “And he was right to try.” The two versions are functionally identical—anyone who says one also means the other. There is a very large percentage of Republicans who believe that America should be run by a fascist dictator if the choice is between that or religious and social inclusiveness, and that notion is finding purchase throughout the institutions of conservatism.
There’s no plausible evidence that Republican voters are opposed to acts of sedition but will begrudgingly tolerate them if that is the only option available. Trump’s Republican competitors had been parroting nearly all of his flamboyantly ridiculous policies, only to be shot down by those very voters. You can offer up a Nikki Haley, but it will go nowhere. You can lob a Ron DeSantis onstage, full of hydraulic fluid and have him mimic the same Trump mannerisms and grievances and demands for violence—not just persecution but bullet-to-the-head violence against immigrants—and they won't bite.
They like Trump. They want Trump, and when presented with candidates who are not facing 91 criminal charges, not found to have committed sexual assault, not proven to be a lifelong tax and bank cheat, and not the ratbastard personification of malice, they will not bite.
This is a movement premised on ending the government itself if that's what it takes to assuage paranoia about globalist cabals and plotting immigrant hoards.
We saw Sen. Mitch McConnell bend the knee on Wednesday in a statement delivered so early in the day as to be assuredly pre-written. It was inevitable. That is who McConnell is and always has been: a person who would embrace harm to the nation with vigor rather than face even the smallest loss of Republican power.
Other Republicans are beating the same drum. West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice was quick to pipe up with a fawning but vapid declaration that "[o]ur nation needs President Trump now more than ever." For Justice, Trump is more valuable after his attempted coup than he was before it.
Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, formerly Trump's most sycophantic and dishonest press secretary, declared that it was "time to unite" around the indicted fascism-promoting would-be strongman.
And Jeebus McCrackers, we are still arguing this. In 2024.
To Republican voters and their elected leaders, attempting to overthrow the United States government isn't a dealbreaker.
Our democracy is in very big trouble, here in 2024. And there is not a single incentive for any Republican in power to steer us away from danger.
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We're recapping all of Tuesday's primary night action on this week's episode of "The Downballot"! Co-hosts David Nir and David Beard go coast-to-coast, setting the table in Texas' Senate race and picking apart the bloodbath in the state House. Then it's on to North Carolina, where GOP extremists dominated at all levels of the ballot—and where one notorious election fraudster is now on his way to Congress. We wrap with California, whose troublesome top-two primary system made its quirks felt in a whole bunch of races, from Senate on down.
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