Look at that picture up top. The GOP has lost.
Not in 2016 – not the current Senate – perhaps not even in 2020, given the level of skullduggery it’s apparent the president* wants to commit to avoid the slammer after leaving office.
But in the long run, they’ve lost the game. America’s demographics are changing around them. We are browner and blacker. We’re younger. We aren’t gayer – our LGBTQIA friends and relatives were always here – but we’re now more able to see them and support them and let them tell their own story. Progressive values are ever more mainstream. In the long run, the GOP and its foul brand of authoritarian conservatism is losing the hearts and souls and opinions of Americans. They can’t go back. We can’t and won’t go back with them.
But they’re still out there swinging. The GOP is still – obdurately and insanely – clinging to the coattails of Donald Trump, despite his clear unfitness for office. He’s a liar: they don’t care. He’s a grifter: not only do they not care, but many of them are trying to get in on that game. He’s a babbling chump in public: they defend him.
So, then – why? Why are the majority of Republicans in government lining up behind the half-mad fool in the Oval Office?!
They are trying to cling to power, and more importantly, to their version of America.
For Republicans, Trump the person does not matter. That is to say, Trump the actual, particular, individual human being is not the point. They are not desperately clinging to Trump for Trump’s sake.
In a very important way, HE is not what they are defending. He is a symbol; not just the living embodiment of the world that they see passing with every day, he is also one of the main bulwarks against it in this modern, diverse, progressing world of women’s empowerment, #MeToo, #RefugeesWelcome, and #BlackLivesMatter. This is their last gasp.
Republicans know that with every election of a person of color or a woman, with every law that empowers and uplifts people who have hitherto been repressed, subjugated, or underserved, the foundations of their cherished old school American world are being chipped further and further away, and they are already beginning to mourn. And to panic.
They will never forget that they narrowly missed losing to a woman last time out. The dread must be palpable for next time. The GOP’s collective sense of shuddering relief at Trump’s Electoral College “victory,” that ghastly, tremulous feeling – as when you pull your car out of a skid just as it’s about to plunge over a bridge – must be profound.
They know that if Hillary had won (not just the popular vote, but the whole racist-holdover Electoral College system shootin’ match) after 8 years of Obama, that would have been game over for their narrow, crabbed, racist/nationalist, male-centric, straight-centric, mostly white world. Eight years of Obama followed by eight years of Hillary? That’s Republican HELL.
They are so freaked out and sticking so hard to Trump right now because they realize that a Republican president, no matter how foul, is what’s allowing them to pack the courts, gerrymander, cancel voting rights, lock up immigrants and keep them out, and retain some semblance of the world they saw slipping away under Obama. Every day Trump isn’t impeached is a day with Mitch McConnell at the conn, shooting down legislation and doing everything in his reptilian power to grease the wheels for the Stale Pale Males to stay “on top of the world, Ma!”
So no. It isn’t really about Trump.
I don’t believe that it’s about Russian kompromat, either. Maybe #MoscowMitch is a little too involved in some financial shenanigans, and who knows what Dana Rohrabacher was up to, but I think it’s much more straightforward to explain the GOP’s passionate public attachment to POTUS by understanding how they are feeling in this historic moment, how terrified they are of the changes they see all around them, and how they’re panicking with the knowledge that the singular power white men in America have enjoyed since the 17th century is slipping inexorably away.
Remember what we won under President Obama – the wonderful things that we progressives applaud and cheer, and that terrify the GOP? Before Obama, there was no:
- Marriage equality
- The ACA
- DACA
- Dodd-Frank
- Sonia Sotomayor, the first Hispanic and Latina Justice on the Supreme Court
- Elena Kagan, who is the fourth woman to serve as a Justice of the Supreme Court (and FWIW, also the person who brought the number of sitting justices who are Jewish to three)
- Normal relations with Cuba
- Hunger-Free Kids Act
And don’t forget:
- Obama repealed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”
- He signed the Hate Crimes Prevention Act.
- He signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.
- He launched My Brothers Keeper.
- He expanded embryonic stem cell research.
Quibble with any of those accomplishments if you will, or mourn how the gawdawful swamp creatures in this administration have gutted them, but one thing you cannot deny is that each and every Obama-era accomplishment that we applaud was a gut punch to the GOP’s raison d’etre, which is to keep America as white and as segregated as possible, cis-het, aggressively capitalist and “pro-business,” nationalistic, authoritarian, racist, and ruled by men.
The world that they sense slipping away – the world described in the sentence above – is the world where a mediocre white man will get the job EVERY SINGLE TIME over a woman or any person of color.
The world that they sense slipping away is the world where rigid hierarchies prevail, and they are the beneficiaries of that brutally enforced stratification.
It’s the world where law enforcement sees what color a person is, applies their brutality accordingly, and can count on everyone in power averting their eyes to the shocking treatment of POC.
It’s the world where they don’t have to feel “the ickies” by being forced to acknowledge or think about anyone else’s sexuality or gender if they don’t understand it, or it is different from theirs.
It’s the world where their opinions count the most.
It’s the world where their woman is subordinate and not in control of her own body. She knows her place – all women do. If you wanna grab or leer, it’s okay. That’s your right. If the wife has a job (the GOP’s cruel “conservative” end-stage-capitalist economy being what it is, most women have to work these days) she gets paid less than they do, and when she comes home, she does most of the heavy lifting. The second shift? You’ve heard of it. These assholes probably haven’t, but they approve of the concept.
It’s the world where immigrants, too, know their place. And can be blamed for anything.
It’s the world where a white man can have a black buddy, but the buddy sure as hell doesn’t live next door, and his presence mostly serves to signal how much of a Good Not Racist you are.
It’s the world where you can admit only your peers and buddies to the country club, glad hand with The Big Guys, and slip each other lucrative no-bid contracts, no questions asked.
It’s the world where Edith doesn’t just put up with Archie’s constant anger and haranguing and hate speech, but she defends him to the Meathead like a lioness.
It’s the world where dumpy schlemiel and serial-failure Ralph Kramden not only manages to keep Alice Gibson, the fiercely capable razor-witted beauty, as his wife, but HE DESERVES HER.
Trump fits perfectly into this paradigm. He is its apotheosis.
Not blessed with a particularly keen intelligence, he’s white, and so is given every opportunity nevertheless. (This would apply even if he were lower or middle income. There’s always someone a Republican can crap on, after all).
He advances steadily in the business world, but when he fails, he’s bailed out – over and over and over.
He pulls glamorous models and statuesque hoofers and Playboy bunnies. He can pick up and cast off women at will. Then he cheats and philanders (and, apparently, assaults) without hesitation or repercussions.
He has cherry-picked “friends” of color while at the same time freely pursuing violently hateful acts of racism, as with the Central Park Five and Birtherism. He’s got “black friends” so his conscience is clear as he actively works to demean, subjugate, punish, and limit the opportunities of people of color.
And he’s a terrible president. A bumbling embarrassment and a ham-handed, no-nothing fool. But with him at the helm, meretricious slime like Mitch McConnell can do their damndest to extend the lifespan of GOP World a few more years. They can furiously strip away regulations. They can overturn executive orders. They can pack the courts to the best of their ability.
But despite this (and despite all the hard graft we’ll have to do once we’ve got a Democrat in the White House to repair the damage they have done in these last desperate months) GOP World is slipping away. Their cherished old days, in which one had only to be a mediocre white man to stand astride the globe like a colossus, is dwindling in the rear view mirror.
To let go of Trump – to admit he’s a failed president, a criminal, and a loon – is to reap the whirlwind.
After all, what’s next? Their greatest fear must be a post-impeachment interim Pence presidency that will inexorably lead to a crashing Blue Tsunami in 2020.
And so they cling desperately to him in all his sniffling, shambling, barely-literate neon orange glory. They defend him like wounded lions. And they do so despite knowing – they have to know – that he’s a monster, because he is in some important way the last of their type, and in another way, was their last Hail Mary.