Republicans Morally Deserve Trump, Right?
While we’re all sitting around waiting for Marge this evening to cement her reputation as the most repulsive Member of Congress, let’s look at her boss’ chances of getting back into the White House. On his blog this morning, John Ellis reminded his readers that many have told us that Trump can’t possibly win a general election in 2024. It is said that this indictment makes Trump’s general election impossible… There is no evidence (from the most recent public opinion polling) to support this assertion. In poll after poll (of late) Biden and Trump are statistically tied in a hypothetical 2024 match-up.” Most Americans don’t like Trump and don’t like Biden and don’t want either of them to run again. If they do, it will be the most classic lesser of two evils race ever.
Also reporting this morning, David Leonhardt interviewed Trump-whisperer Maggie Haberman just as Trump prepares to fly from Florida to New York to be arrested and arraigned. She told Leonhardt that “While Trump is not said to be throwing things, he is extremely angry and his family is, not surprisingly, rattled… Republicans who dislike Trump are saying privately they wish this case wasn’t first because they view it as more trivial than the others… Georgia has bothered Trump personally for a while, possibly because there are tapes of him telling officials to find votes. Some of his aides are very worried about the documents investigation that the Justice Department has. It’s a clearer-cut issue, and a federal judge overseeing grand jury matters showed in a recent ruling that she’s taking the government’s claims seriously… Trump has been trying to avoid being indicted since he was first criminally investigated in the 1970s. He actually hasn’t faced enormous criminal legal threats since then. He has instead operated in a world in which so much is based on machine politics and what Marie Brenner, the journalist, once described as New York’s ‘favor economy.’”
All that said, conventional wisdom— backed by consistent poll results— shows Trump politically strong, at least among Republicans, if not with normal people. Or, as Ross Douthat put it yesterday, “There is a presumption among a certain kind of analyst— rooted, I presume, in a deeply buried belief in the vengeance of Almighty God— that because Republicans morally deserve Donald Trump they will be stuck with him no matter what. That having refused so many opportunities to take a righteous stand against him, they will be condemned to halt at the edge of a post-Trump promised land, gazing pathetically across the Jordan even as they cast in their lots with the False Orange Messiah once again.”
He wrote that the electoral politics of the indictment are “murky” and claims that one can imagine “a world where the sheer mess involved in his tangle with the legal system ends up being a reason for even some Trump fans to move on to another choice.” He has a wilder imagination that I do when it comes to members of his party.
David Frum’s imagination is always much easier to grok, as it was today in Never Again Trump— Can The GOP Stop An Indicted Ex-President? His premise is that for whatever the reason, “Republican interest in the DeSantis brand of Diet Trump has dwindled. Republican politics in the Trump era has been an exercise in dominance. Trump behaves as an abusive bully. Potential rivals meekly submit. He looks like the leader of the pack; they look like weaklings. DeSantis presented himself as a fearless tough guy, as in this reelection ad from 2022, titled ‘Top Gov.’ In a flight suit and with a B-roll of combat jets, DeSantis vowed: ‘Never, ever back down from a fight.’ But when Trump started fights with him, DeSantis always backed down. When Trump promoted a meme accusing DeSantis of grooming teenage girls with alcohol, DeSantis scarcely retorted. When Trump denounced one of the governor’s most cherished bills as ‘the biggest insurance company BAILOUT to Globalist Insurance Companies, IN HISTORY,’ DeSantis did not defend his measure. He abjectly retreated, barring cameras and reporters from the signing ceremony for his new law.”
The DeSantis campaign has been built on an impossible contradiction. His message to his party was: I offer you Trump’s style, minus Trump’s scandals. That offer only made sense on the assumption that Trump’s scandals were bad. Yet when any major new Trump scandal has erupted, DeSantis has jumped to deny or defend it.
…Now, with the indictment, DeSantis has again raced to Trump’s side. He has damned the indictment as “un-American” and repeated his “weaponization” language. But if all of this is true, then what would be the case for running against Trump?
The only case for DeSantis— or any alternative, be it Nikki Haley or Glenn Youngkin or Mike Pompeo or Mike Pence— is to acknowledge that it’s a problem that the past president stands criminally accused; to acknowledge that Trump is not a victim, but the author of his own legal trouble. Otherwise, who needs a replacement for the original? Why hire the tribute band?
Many prominent Republicans want Trump gone. But they are caught in a trap of their own bad faith: They want prosecutors to do for them the job they are too scared and broken to do for themselves. But they also, for their own crass political advantage, want to pretend to be on Trump’s side during the prosecution— while inwardly cheering on the prosecutors.
Bad faith is a coward’s method, and these bad-faith Republicans are earning the coward’s reward. They hope that the legal system will rescue them from their own humiliating submission, but they are acting to deliver the Republican nomination to Trump for a third time. If Trump does win the nomination, they’ll submit again.
When Trump ran for president in 2016, he at least paid lip service to issues Republican voters cared about: immigration, opioid addiction, trade disparities, and so on. The corruption, authoritarianism, and incitements to violence were present even then, of course. And they continued. In 2020, ABC News counted 54 instances in which people who committed or plotted violence specifically cited Trump’s words as their motive or their justification.
This time, however, Trump is offering no lip service. On his social media and in his opening-rally speech in Waco, Texas, on March 25, Trump has celebrated and justified the deadly events of January 6, 2021. On Truth Social, he predicted “death & destruction” when he was indicted.
Republicans nodded along when Paul Ryan assured CNN’s Jake Tapper that Trump was fading on his own. They took solace when Rupert Murdoch instituted a “soft ban” against Trump on his TV network, which instead hailed DeSantis as the party’s new leader.
Inwardly anti-Trump Republicans reassure themselves that Trump at least cannot win the presidency again. Maybe they will have to endure him for a few more excruciating months— but November 2024 will arrive soon enough, and after that they’ll be done with him. This is false comfort. If Trump secures the Republican nomination, of course he can win the election. Maybe because of his bad record and personal obnoxiousness, he’s got a little less than the usual 50–50 chance, but not much less. The incumbent president and vice president have electoral vulnerabilities, too. And there could be anti-incumbent shocks— a recession, a natural disaster, a border crisis— between now and Election Day. Maybe Trump cannot win on his own merits, but Biden can fall victim to events.
The former New Jersey governor— and early Trump endorser— Chris Christie now describes his past support for Trump as a “strategic error.” He’s not wrong, if several years late. Suppose that enough Republicans had deserted Trump in 2016 to convert his popular-vote deficit into an Electoral College defeat. What would have happened next? Hillary Clinton would have won the presidency, and of course Republicans would not have liked that. But there would have been a Republican-controlled House and Senate to check her— with margins that surely would have expanded in the midterm elections of 2018. Republicans would have scored important state and local gains that year too. Then the coronavirus pandemic would have struck, and the election of 2020 likely would have resulted in a GOP landslide. So not exactly the end of the world from a Republican point of view— better than things are now, right?
The inhibitions against correcting the strategic error of 2016 are daunting even to people of character— and the anti-Trump dissenters within the party elite are not all people of character. Yet the price of repeating the error will be heavy— heavy for Republicans if Trump costs them the presidency once again, or tragically heavy for the United States and the world if Trump somehow scores a second win.
