It was all so preventable
After everything we know about Donald Trump–the sexual abuse, January 6, the destructions of norms, the lying, the threats–he’s still the frontrunner for the GOP nomination for president. After everything we know about him, the GOP leadership will support him if he gets the nomination. It’s a remarkable transformation of a conventional political party into an authoritarian one. Its members and leaders are no longer loyal to the country. They are loyal to the Republican Party.
As the GOP presidential field unfolds, it looks like a repeat of 2016. A host of lesser candidates joins the race and Trump consolidates his plurality. This year, though, candidates will emulate Trump instead of trying to differentiate themselves. Back in 2016, Trump’s primary opponents tried to look like serious people in contrast to the carnival barker who called people silly names. This time, they’ll try to look like authoritarian blowhards, too.
The transition of the GOP from Reagan conservativism to reactionary populism happened disturbingly quickly. The strain of anti-democratic authoritarianism that dominates the party has always been in the country’s political bloodstream, but it hasn’t been this dominant in one party in decades, maybe since before the Civil War. The fact that it has largely gone unchecked is the result of a failure of leadership and an irresponsible right-wing media ecosystem.
The Republican Party of 2015 has devolved into three groups. The largest are those who have fallen in behind Trump. Many quietly harbored the views he said out loud. They resented immigrants and minorities, feeling that their lives were threatened by outside forces. They are dominated by evangelical Christians, the same people who justified slavery and Jim Crow in religious terms. They are solidly behind Trump and will rationalize anything he says or does in the name of their vindictive God.
On the other extreme are the never-Trumpers. They fall into two camps, those who believe Trump is an existential threat to the country and those who enable him because they believe Democrats are worse. The former group is composed of true patriots who mostly maintain their conservative beliefs but will support people and policies that curtail the influence of the authoritarian strain in the party.
The latter group loudly proclaims that they didn’t support Trump, but largely supports the authoritarian shift in the party. They’re people who once proclaimed themselves adherents of libertarian and free-market, but today rationalize extreme abortion restrictions and book bans. They probably won’t vote for Trump in the primary or general election if he’s the nominee but they’ll do their part for his re-election by bashing Democrats as just as bad while justifying various disinformation campaigns pushed by right-wing media outlets.
The final group are the people who indicated before 2016 that they would never support Trump and yet have capitulated today. Think Lindsey Graham who said that if they GOP nominated Trump they would lose and deserve it. Or Mitch McConnell who said that he would support whoever is the GOP nominee in 2024. These people could have stopped Trump. They had the keys to party. They controlled much of the fundraising apparatus and the control of the party operations. Instead of leading, they followed. They were more concerned about control of the Supreme Court than the well-being of the nation. They put power before patriotism.
We’re heading into 2024 with an unabashed authoritarian as a front-runner and a bunch of authoritarian wannabes as challengers. And it was all so preventable. The GOP had the responsibility to rein in Trump and their right flank and they ignored that duty. They could have voted to impeach Trump, if not for trying blackmail Ukraine with US aid, then for trying to prevent the transfer of power. But they didn’t.
Instead, it’s déjà vu all over again. An empowered Trump, spouting increasingly anti-democratic rhetoric, opposed by a slightly less authoritarian group of opponents trying to peel off a piece of his fanatical base. It’s a mess created by feckless Republican leaders who abandoned patriotism and enabled authoritarianism.