The Removal Of Trump Isn't Going To Cure The Problem
Some people are still hoping the Republican Party will, as an entity, come to its senses. Those people aren’t looking at what makes up the Republican Party today— at who those people are what they want. On Wednesday, Seth Masket wrote that there’s no pivot coming. This is Donald Trump’s Republican Party, not your great grandfather’s. “People waiting for the ‘fever’ to break or for the party to return to ‘normal,’” he wrote, “are examining it through the wrong lens… [T]here is a populist, nativist faction within the modern Republican Party that has a long, long history in the United States but has rarely controlled a major party. It has championed candidates like George Wallace in 1968, Pat Buchanan in 1992, and others who advocate for strict limits or even the elimination of immigration and have a distinct white conservative Christian worldview they seek for national politics… For decades, Republican leaders in DC made modest overtures to them but never really wanted them in charge. Yes, they’d share some of their cultural claims on abortion and guns, but party leaders like Reagan, Bush, Romney, McCain, and others would still favor some sort of immigration and would leave this faction feeling used or ignored. The faction was put down for years by party leaders who told them that some of their views had merit, but only through moderation could they win national office; sometimes that worked, sometimes it didn’t. The populists complained, but they just didn’t have the numbers to take over the party. And then Trump came along.”
Trump was exactly what most party leaders in DC had been trying to keep out of power. He wasn’t committed to the conservative program. He wasn’t respectful of party traditions. He threatened to blow up the fragile coalition they’d crafted. But he also championed the populist faction, and thanks to his own popularity independent from politics, he was able to turn that minority faction into a majority. He was what the populists were told they couldn’t have, because it would cost the party dearly. Instead, he put their faction in charge, and they won the White House.
Now, of course, the Republicans who were prominent in politics before Trump came to town— Lindsey Graham, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, the beneficiaries of the Reagan-Bush coalition, etc.— recognize that the faction that brought them into power is no longer in charge. They’ve adapted in their own ways, with some leaving Washington, and others rapidly changing their tunes. But they describe Republican politics to DC pundits, especially off the record, in a particular kind of head-hanging, sighing manner. The party has lost its head, but it’s temporary, and they’re doing what they can until cooler heads are back in charge.
But they’re the minority faction. The folks who run the party now are the populist grassroots outside DC. They decide who gets nominated for office and who doesn’t. They don’t see this as a temporary madness; they see this as the movement that put them in charge and actually cares about the things they care about. They don’t see any need to “snap out of it”; that concept doesn’t make sense to them. Indeed, calling for them to snap out of it is essentially asking them to give power back to the previous faction that never took them seriously in the first place. Why would they want to do that? They’re in charge, and as far as they’re concerned they’re winning.
So no, they’re not going to abandon the guy who put them in power. Not even if he’s convicted, not even if he’s in prison. And yes, that means the country has a potentially awful election year coming up, in which the nation’s official institutions have deemed one party’s leader guilty and sentenced him and the nearly half the country considers those institutions illegitimate. It is a toxic, tragic, and potentially violent cocktail.
Jonathan Chait explained it a little differently for New York Magazine readers yesterday: “Trump’s legal jeopardy is easily explained: His private sector record was a long history of shady associations with gangsters and running scams. His presidency was a continuous procession of his own advisers pleading with him not to do illegal things while he complained that his attorneys weren’t as unethical as Roy Cohn, the mob lawyer he once employed… [C]onservatives have constructed an alternative reality that obscures these facts. Right-wing news sources serve up a curated version of events that ignores or justifies misbehavior by conservatives and magnifies or invents crimes by their opponents, creating a belief system resting upon a foundational premise that Democrats are evil and criminal and always get away with it.”
Obama was a criminal. Hillary Clinton was a criminal. Bill Clinton was a veritable criminal mastermind. (Conservative organs as respectable as The Wall Street Journal editorial page, not to mention its seedier competitors, routinely accused Clinton of murdering Vince Foster and running a secret drug-smuggling operation out of Arkansas.)
It is a strange twist of fate that years of hysterically accusing every leading Democrat of criminality culminated in Republicans falling behind a presidential candidate who came to politics from the world of crime.
For some Republicans, the ascension of a transparently amoral swindler precipitated a psychic break from their party. But for most of them, it served merely to deepen the belief system they already subscribed to. Trump’s campaign and presidency followed directly from a mentality that detached the notion of criminality from any actual behavior and turned it into a partisan identity. Trump’s mantra — “The crimes are being committed by the other side” — has become a partywide doctrine.
But this idea, which has tightened its grip on conservative minds over the last generation, is now the dominant theme of the campaign. Trump’s indictments have intensified their humiliation and created an insatiable demand for revenge. The party is no longer running on policy or even culture war. It is now consumed above all with turning the criminal-justice system into an instrument of revenge.
Yesterday, team of 4 NY Times reporters took a look at if and when Trump will be tried— let alone sentenced and put in front of the firing squad he has earned. They note that “a morass of delays, court backlogs and legal skirmishes will prevent anything from moving quickly. “Some experts predicted that only one or two trials will take place next year; one speculated that none of the four Trump cases will start before the election… There are simply not enough boxes on the calendar to squeeze in all the former president’s trials.”
Any delay would represent a victory for Trump, who denies all wrongdoing and who could exploit the timeline to undermine the cases against him. Less time sitting in a courtroom equals more time hitting the campaign trail, and his advisers have not tried to hide that Trump hopes to overcome his legal troubles by winning the presidency.
If his lawyers manage to drag out the trials into 2025 or beyond— potentially during a second Trump administration— Trump could seek to pardon himself or order his Justice Department to shut down the federal cases. And although he could not control the state prosecutions in Georgia or Manhattan, the Justice Department has long held that a sitting president cannot be criminally prosecuted, which very likely applies to state cases as well.
…Norman Eisen, who worked for the House Judiciary Committee during Trump’s first impeachment and believes that prosecutors might be able to squeeze in three Trump trials next year… argued that voters deserve to know whether Trump was convicted of subverting the will of the people in the previous election before they vote in the next one.
“There could not be a more important question confronting the country than whether a candidate for the office of the presidency is innocent or guilty of previously abusing that office in an attempted coup,” he said.
…Before any trial, Trump’s cases are also likely to become bogged down as his lawyers review and potentially argue over large amounts of documents and other case material turned over by the government. Certain judicial rulings could also lead to drawn-out pretrial appeals.
In the Florida documents case, disputes over the use of classified information could delay the proceeding as well. And in the federal court in Washington, which is already contending with lengthy backlogs amid prosecutions of hundreds of Jan. 6 rioters, Trump’s lawyers have suggested they plan to litigate complex constitutional issues, including whether some of Trump's false claims about the election were protected by the First Amendment.
Even the jury selection process could drag on for weeks or months, as courts summon huge pools of prospective jurors for questioning over whether they harbor bias in favor of or against the polarizing former president.
Michael Mukasey, a former U.S. attorney general and longtime Manhattan federal judge, said because of the complex issues raised in all four of Trump’s cases, “I think the odds are slim to none that any of them gets to trial before the election.”