This piece will be running as an op/ed in newspapers in my very red congressional district (the 2012 version of VA-06, which includes Lynchburg.)
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The midterm elections seem to have set American politics up for considerable turmoil—different in nature from the turmoil we’ve lately been through. Most of it is due to the Republican world’s disappointment with an outcome falling so far short of their hopes as to be a defeat.
Even their “victory” – likely control of the House – seems more likely to create a battlefield for intraparty strife, as a margin of perhaps a couple of votes will make that “majority” ungovernable.
(That majority might be able to be unified in preventing the President’s party from accomplishing anything legislatively for the next two years. But it is also not inconceivable that the Democrats might peel off a few Republicans to get something passed.)
Of the foreseeable conflicts — including over who will be Speaker of the House, and who the Republican leader in the Senate — the most profound isa war brewing between Trump and his allies, on the one side, against other major powers of the Republican world.
This battle has already begun with some powers of the American right who are already blaming Donald Trump for having cost them some very winnable seats.
Trump got his base to nominate a number of weak candidates he’d chosen just because they’d kissed his ring. In states like NH and GA, many voters showed they’d vote for less MAGA Republicans but not for Trump’s sycophants. The result was the Republicans suffered some avoidable defeats.
While today’s Republican Party can tolerate a lot of things – they had no hesitation acquitting a President who’d set a standard for committing impeachable offenses that will never be equaled – the one thing they can’t tolerate is a strategy that costs them power.
Major players in the Republican world now see Trump as having led them into three straight defeats: After a good 2016, Trump generated the Blue Tsunami in 2018, then lost the Presidency in 2020. Now, in 2022, Trump played a big and visible role in depriving the Republican Party of powers it might have won.
Exemplifying those powers of the right have already pushing Trump to leave the stage is Rupert Murdock, whose Wall St. Journal, NY Post, and Fox News, have all been putting out the message that Trump should surrender his control of the Party.
With anyone else, that might be the end of it. But with Trump, that will mean war.
We know that there’s no way Trump will accept defeat or criticism of any kind. (He’s declared that the way he played his role in the Midterms was “perfect.”) On the contrary, the more he feels under attack, the more intense his counterattack.
Trump apparently will demonstrate his defiant posture quite soon by announcing his candidacy for 2024, despite all the Republican voices imploring him to hold off until the run-off in Georgia on December 6. (The Party remembers how Trump’s conduct during the period leading up to the Georgia run-offs of 2020 cost the GOP those two seats, unexpectedly giving the Democrats control of the Senate.)
(Trump is not the only reason the electorate handed the Republicans this electoral disappointment:
- the majority of Americans opposes where the Republican-appointed Supreme Court is trying to push the nation on abortion,
- and more Americans — than many people believed (and I feared) — actually do care about protecting American democracy.
But it would require fundamental change in the Party itself to address either of those matters. Unsurprisingly, the Republican Party would rather focus on the part of the party’s problem that doesn’t require them to change: Trump’s leadership.)
For six years, Trump has subordinated the GOP to his will. One perceptive conservative says that Trump assumes that he can subdue the Party again. But that looks unlikely to me: in a nation where elections are still the route to power, a Party whose driving force is getting power cannot afford to keep following a leader who repels too many Americans away from the GOP.
Neither side will back down – not Trump because of his extraordinary character, and not the major Republican powers who cannot accept forfeiting powers they could win if Trump were out of the picture.
So, it will be war.
As long as it rages, the war will damage the Republican world. How much will depend considerably on the Republican base.
(It is the base — with its willingness to punish Trump’s enemies — that has always given Trump his power over the GOP.)
I expect most of the base will stand by Trump. With the Party, the relationship with Trump has always been a matter calculating optimal strategies for getting and wielding power. But for the base, I believe, there’s something much deeper going on: a genuine enthusiasm for and loyalty to a leader who is important to them.
When that war has passed, two Republican futures seem possible once the reverberations from the American electorate’s relative rejection of the MAGA spirit have played out:
The lesser possibility is that we’ve seen an awakening in the American electorate that will gradually drive the Republican Party to return to its former ways as a normal conservative Party.
More likely, is that Republican Party will continue to operate in the MAGA spirit, but in less blatant ways that alarm Americans less.
American democracy will likely be on the ballot for a number of election cycles to come, with the outcome dependent on how aware the electorate is of the nature of the stakes.