In the long run, the much-anticipated red wave’s failure to materialize may help the GOP wean itself off Trump.
In the long run, the much-anticipated red wave’s failure to materialize may help the GOP wean itself off Trump.
F rom the start, smart Democrats spotted the GOP’s glass jaw in this midterm cycle, which I’ve described a number of times, including back in March, when the party’s Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, rightly blasted the Republican National Committee’s self-destructive decision to censure GOP representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for their service on the House January 6 committee:
Understandably, people’s time is mostly spent worrying about soaring prices, rising crime, failing schools, and the Biden administration’s overbearing-yet-ineffectual response to a now-endemic virus that our overmatched president foolishly vowed to “shut down.” On the rare occasion that Americans reluctantly find themselves diverted into renewed consideration of the riot, it is because Narcissus can’t let it go. The former president continues to peddle the “stolen election” tripe that fueled the riot. He still wields outsized influence over a Republican Party that lacks the self-preservation instincts to burn him. And he is toying with another presidential run. That means the RNC, under the thumb of Trump loyalists, can’t let “stop the steal” go either.
In the post-Capitol riot world, Representative Cheney has been right that the Republican Party has to get Donald Trump out of its system, though wrong about how best to accomplish that end. The Trump presidency did a lot of good, but whatever useful qualities Trump may have provided the GOP — mainly, his zeal to fight the right enemies, often for the wrong reasons and less effectively over time — long ago ceased to be useful. Where Cheney had it wrong is that you can’t force a dedicated base of supporters — one whose leaders have more of a stake in Trump’s future than in the Republican Party’s — to do an instant volte-face just because you’ve had an epiphany and suddenly decided enough is enough.
Almost all of us conservatives who supported Trump in 2016 had preferred somebody else (usually, many somebody elses) in the primaries. But Trump won because the GOP field was too big, his celebrity towered over it, and he built an insurmountable lead driven by the momentum of a devoted fan base. Then, he did something miraculous: He beat a Clinton, which the GOP had never been able to do — and he did it after two presidential cycles in which Obama had drubbed a moderate, establishment-minded GOP nominee. The Trump base’s loyalty intensified after that, particularly when he kept playing to it rather than building out from it. Given that he had a good shot at being reelected before Covid, his base took over many of the state GOP organizations and secured often-decisive influence over the RNC. It became a significant factor in what much of right-of-center media chose to cover, and how.
You can’t erase those kinds of gains overnight; you have to let them erase themselves over time. We all wish it would happen more rapidly than it has, but it hasn’t. That’s the lesson of last night’s midterms.
Cheney made herself a pariah by insisting that everyone take the harsh medicine right this instant. A correct diagnosis and the right medicine, however, are no guarantee of a cooperative patient. The only realistic strategy for peeling Trump supporters away from Trump has always been the maddeningly slow long game: simultaneously spotlight and oppose the Democrats’ radicalism, ignore Trump (or at least sidestep him when practical), navigate the 2022 midterms through Trump’s damaging interventions, and get positioned for a non-Trump 2024 nominee who can win.
Trump’s die-hard backers were not going away, and his brand of hyper-personal vendetta politics was always going to make prominent Republicans fearful of challenging him directly (Cheney-style, if you will). But Trump was still at a disadvantage: He would have to play vendetta politics from the sidelines. He was out of power, he could not affect the big issues of the day as he once did, and it was left to other Republicans to fight the Biden administration and woke progressives on the national stage. Over time, other leaders would emerge and Trump’s influence would fade. Most of all, Republicans would want to win and would have to learn — the hard way, unfortunately — that winning and fealty to Trump were antithetical. (And, incidentally, they would be antithetical even if Trump weren’t staring at a Justice Department indictment, which is likely to drop sometime after he announces that he is running.)
Democrats had a very good night on Tuesday, not so much because they succeeded in putting Trump on the ballot but because they expertly highlighted that the Republican Party chose to put Trump on the ballot by nominating the deeply flawed man’s preferred deeply flawed candidates. And let’s, please, quit whining about how Democrats are hypocrites for backing Trump’s candidates in primaries, calculating that they’d be easier to beat in November. That’s politics . . . and these candidates could not have won unless Republicans voted for them. Unfortunately, a political base really punches above its weight in primaries. Normal people, including persuadable Democrats, independents, and Republicans, have no interest in relitigating 2020; but for too many people involved in the primaries, that was a priority.
Non-Trumpist GOP nominees would have made the election about Biden rather than his predecessor. They would have won their races and made the midterms a full-throated rejection of progressive Democratic rule — what you would normally expect for midterms two years into a failed presidency. But it wasn’t to be. The much-anticipated red tsunami turned into a red ripple (if we’re lucky). That’s the problem with a gradual turn away from ruin: It’s gradual.
I’ll end with what I said a year-and-a-half ago:
If Republicans are going to have any chance of stopping the ruinous Democratic reign by winning in 2022 and 2024, they must stop relitigating the lost presidential election of 2020. Trump will never let that go, but Republicans have to. Keep in mind: across the nation [in 2020], down-ballot conservative Republicans significantly outperformed Trump — whereas in Georgia, Trump single-handedly cost Republicans the Senate seats they needed to stop Biden’s demolition of the economy and conveyor-belt appointment of woke-progressive judges and bureaucrats.
Donald Trump cannot win the presidency again. He is popular in a number of places, but poison in most others. The former president will never again have what he’d need to win a national election: the reluctant support of doubters who, for the sake of stopping Democrats, were willing to take a chance on his flawed character. Had it not been for Trump’s bizarre post-election performance, culminating in the disgraceful Capitol riot, congressional Republicans would be in a position to stop Democrats right now. . . .
The reasons for Trump’s political rise and the many positive aspects of his presidency hold important lessons for Republicans. But those positive aspects mainly involved enabling conservative advisers and subordinates to implement policy — often against his instincts, which are not conservative. The future of the party has to be conservative. If the future is Trump, it will no longer be the conservative party, and it will be in the wilderness for a very long time.
I don’t think we’ll remain in the wilderness for a very long time. But last night’s crushing disappointment probably had to happen before we could get out of it.