Those who object to any workable strategy against a Trump revival don’t have one.
Those who object to any workable strategy against a Trump revival don’t have one.
P erhaps predictably, my column on how Republicans should ignore Donald Trump as much as possible over the next few years has drawn quibbles, mainly from people who do not wish to see good advice given to Republicans. Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine makes the closest attempt at turning the knee-jerk response into an argument, but he nonetheless misses the point and reveals in the process the blind spots in his own point of view.
Bad for Republicans
My argument proceeds from two sets of assumptions. The first is that Trump’s continued prominence is bad electoral news for Republicans. Throughout 2016–2020, Trump brought voters into the Republican Party, but he always drove more away, supercharging Democratic turnout to previously unseen levels — partly by activating previous nonvoters, and partly by driving former Republican voters into the Democratic ranks. Elected with a strong cyclical trend at his back, Trump ended up as the first president since Herbert Hoover to lose the House, the Senate, and the White House in a single term. Any case for Trump as an electoral asset requires looking only at one side of the ledger and shutting one’s eyes to the costs and the ultimate outcome.
Chait agrees with that analysis. In fact, he prefers that Republicans keep Trump around precisely because doing so is bad for Republicans. This is the same reasoning by which Chait wrote — 35 years into Trump’s public career, nearly eight months after the start of the Trump campaign, and after Ted Cruz defeated Trump in the Republicans-only Iowa caucus, setting up Trump for a must-win showdown in New Hampshire’s open-to-crossovers primary — a now-notorious column titled, “Why Liberals Should Support a Trump Republican Nomination”:
There are three reasons, in descending order of obviousness, for a liberal to earnestly and patriotically support a Trump Republican nomination. The first, of course, is that he would almost certainly lose. . . . Trump’s candidacy represents, among other things, a revolt by the Republican proletariat against its master class. That is why National Review devoted a cover editorial and 22 columns to denouncing Trump as a heretic to the conservative movement. A Trump nomination might not actually cleave the GOP in two, but it could wreak havoc. If, like me, you think the Republican Party in its current incarnation needs to be burned to the ground and rebuilt anew, Trump is the only one holding a match. . . . The third reason to prefer a Trump nomination: If he does win, a Trump presidency would probably wind up doing less harm to the country than a Marco Rubio or a Cruz presidency. It might even, possibly, do some good.
Yes, Chait was willing to play with fire just to get at National Review — always the only real enemy. He does not want the party of Liz Cheney back; he preferred Trump when there was a true crossroads between those two choices. At the time, Chait argued that Trump was no real danger — not like that dastardly Marco Rubio — because he would merely be a reprise of Arnold Schwarzenegger, whom Democrats had managed to roll over in California:
The Trump campaign may feel like an off-the-grid surrealistic nightmare, The Man in the High Castle meets Idiocracy. But something like it has happened before. Specifically, it happened in California . . . in 2003, when Arnold Schwarzenegger won the governorship. At the time, the prospect of Schwarzenegger governing America’s largest state struck many of us as just as ghastly as the idea of a Trump presidency seems now. . . . Schwarzenegger, like Trump, is only playing a character. The truly dangerous Republicans are the ones who believe their own dialogue.
I was much more alarmed by Trump at the time, back when Chait thought this would all be funny. To be sure, I also thought Trump would lose in November 2016, but I’d happily compare my record of predicting what a Trump presidency would look like against Chait’s.
Bad for America
My second assumption is that the best way to avoid a reprise of Trump’s extended post-election tantrum — and the accompanying effort to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election, which led to the Capitol riot — is to avoid renominating Trump in 2024, and to limit as much as possible Trump’s personal role in leading the party going forward. Chait does not address whether he thinks it matters if Trump is the next Republican nominee (dollars to donuts says he will be writing in 2024 about how Ron DeSantis is worse than Trump), or whether he thinks there is a better strategy to keep Trump from winning that nomination than the one I am proposing.
It would be more morally satisfying, for those of us in the party who were horrified by the Capitol riot and appalled by Trump’s course of conduct after the election, to take a confrontational approach to Trump now. I admire Liz Cheney’s courage in the attempt. But in strategic terms, that has been tried, and it did not work. The time to excise Trump directly from the party was in the aftermath of the Capitol riot. I favored convicting and disqualifying him from future office, but the political support for that step was too thin, and most elected Republicans were unwilling to take the long view and get that far ahead of their voters. So, that leaves us with Plan B: (1) Try starving Trump of attention, (2) keep the party focused as much as possible on unifying against the Democrats, (3) elevate the profile of alternative leaders (such as DeSantis or Tim Scott) who are not Trump so that people do not see “Trump or Biden-Harris” as the only binary choice, and (4) continue the retail work of isolating the fringier figures in the party who do not have Trump’s charisma or fame. Meanwhile, individuals involved in the Capitol riot and in promoting libels and frauds on the courts can and should continue to be held personally responsible for their own actions.
Maybe this will not work, but when Trump is rambling to random gatherings at Mar-a-Lago, obsessing over the past, and writing at a blog with minimal readership, it at least is worth a try to see if age, short attention spans, and the passage of time do to his support what direct confrontation has never achieved. Nobody who has criticized my columns on this point has offered a more realistic strategy for moving on to new leadership.
Chait argues that I prefer not to confront Trump now because — in his telling — I somehow sympathize with overturning the next election:
There is a long-standing belief on the right that Democratic Party victories are inherently fraudulent. . . . The highbrow version of this belief has long been articulated in conservative organs such as National Review. . . . Highbrow right-wing authoritarians look at their lowbrow cousins with contempt and embarrassment. . . . Ultimately, however, their shared beliefs outweigh their differences. So when the next right-wing coup attempt takes place, backed by the overwhelming majority of Republican voters who believe Trump legitimately won in 2020, what will the mainstream Republicans do? The answer should already be clear. The next insurrection will be a Brooks Brothers riot.
This indictment has the virtue of being unpolluted by the evidence. If Chait’s readers were wondering what I would do if Donald Trump attempted to overturn the results of an election, they could simply look up everything I wrote between November 2020 and January 2021. See, just for a sample, here, here, or here. Space does not begin to permit a recounting of everything National Review published in that period — including editorials — against the theory that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen, against efforts to overturn the outcome, against the Capitol riot, and in favor of placing the responsibility for that riot on Trump and others who peddled the same theories. Naturally, Chait has no room for any of that in his narrative.
My assessment of the relative threat Trump poses to our democratic, republican, liberal, constitutional order has long been based on four main pillars. One, Trump is corrosive to our system because he is willing to say and do things that no other Republican would attempt, and his popularity with the party’s base puts unique pressure on other Republicans to go along. Remove Trump’s irreplaceable persona, and that threat goes away. Roy Moore tried to pull the same antics in Alabama, but not only did nobody go along, Moore in his next go-round got annihilated by Tommy Tuberville and Jeff Sessions. Kris Kobach got rejected by the primary voters in Kansas and, just yesterday, the Republican convention in Virginia rejected Amanda Chase.
Two, the threat posed by Trump’s illiberal instincts was always limited by Trump himself. Trump was too old, too lazy, too undisciplined and unorganized, and too lacking in physical daring to mount an assault that would present a genuine threat to the system. His legal team was a clown show. The Capitol rioters were dangerous enough in their own way, but few of them were the sorts of experienced and coordinated street cadres that one finds in the world of left-wing protest. The military and law enforcement were never seriously tempted to assist Trump. I do not undersell the harm all of this did, but it was always doomed to failure.
Three, Trump was constrained by the nature of the party he chose. More than a few Republicans were willing to play along with a cynical fraud of posturing in Trump’s favor when they knew it would fail. At the moments of actual decision, however, people who were in the party before Trump bravely thwarted him at every turn because they believe in the American system and could not see themselves as people who would attack it. Think of Chait’s 2016 line that “the truly dangerous Republicans are the ones who believe their own dialogue” — those are precisely the people who took that stand. Mitch McConnell loudly denounced the effort to challenge the legitimacy of Biden’s victory and publicly pinned responsibility for the Capitol riot on the president. Mike Pence stood up to intense pressure to intervene in the counting of electoral votes. Georgia governor Brian Kemp, Arizona governor Doug Ducey, Michigan senate majority leader Mike Shirkey, Michigan speaker of the house Lee Chatfield, Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, and other key Republican figures refused to break the rules. None of the six Republican-appointed justices on the Supreme Court showed any inclination to rule in Trump’s favor. Going forward, the party needs to continue to support these people and others like them. Dwelling upon the open sores of 2020 makes it harder to do that.
Fourth, in the final analysis, the American system as a whole has a strong immune response to the kind of threat that Trump presents; it has, as I have previously detailed, vastly weaker antibodies against the sort of threat that, say, Kamala Harris presents. The latter is partly a threat presented by the long-standing Wilsonian project of hollowing out the power of elected bodies and popular referenda in favor of administrative “experts” and activist judges wielding a protean “living Constitution,” and partly about undermining cultural faith in our exceptional American heritage, but it also extends to not accepting the outcomes of our elections.
Attacks on the legitimacy of American elections from Republicans are striking to us because they are a relatively novel phenomenon. As I have chronicled repeatedly, however, rejecting the legitimacy of any Republican election victory is routine for Democrats, and routinely amplified by their cheering section in the media. Democrats have not accepted a Republican presidential victory since 1988, and even then, they blamed the whole thing on Willie Horton. The groundwork for another assault on the outcome was laid extensively in case of Trump winning in 2020, and they tried the same in House races they lost in 2020.
These are the people who have made Stacey Abrams into a secular saint for refusing to concede the legitimacy of her election loss in 2018. Democrats are the ones currently pushing assaults on the legitimacy of the presidency (Change the Electoral College!), the Senate (Change the filibuster! Attack the equal suffrage of states as undemocratic! Add new states to pack the Senate!), the House (Gerrymandering!), the Supreme Court (Court-packing!), the conduct of elections (Voter suppression!), and free speech (Citizens United!). And unlike on the right, their intellectual class typically leads the charge on this sort of thing rather than trying to moderate or resist it. Chait himself cannot get through a paragraph about the legitimacy of elections without a “Brooks Brothers riot” crack about the legitimacy of George W. Bush’s victory in 2000.
The real danger of Trump to the survival of our system was, from the very beginning, not that his misbehavior would do direct harm, but that it would embolden an illiberal reaction from progressives, who do not face the same internal or external constraints when their ambitions collide with long-standing American institutions or with the opinions of the American people. Which is precisely why Republicans who care about the American system cannot simply fight a one-front war against Trump while letting Democrats run wild.
At the same time, for the same reason, even if Kevin McCarthy feels the need to separate House Republican leadership from Liz Cheney’s ongoing fight against Trump and the 2020 election — a defensible posture, as disappointed as I am to say that — McCarthy and other leaders are doing that strategy no favors by continuing the pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago and the pro-Trump fundraising emails. A strategy of moving on from internal division requires both sides to move on. There is still much in America worth conserving, and nobody else who cares to do it.