[This piece has appeared as an op/ed in newspapers in the very red congressional district (VA-06) where I live.]
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Trump stands out as a figure in American history — more unique and impactful than just about anyone in our two-plus centuries. Historians will look at this phenomenon with their mouths agape at its extraordinariness.
Historians will see a man extraordinary in his ability to inspire the devoted following of millions of people (and to intimidate a major political Party into becoming his lackey)—all this despite his exhibiting quite openly almost every important moral defect (bullying, lying, cheating, cruelty, greed). They’ll see a genius in attracting attention, and in damaging much that his society has traditionally valued.
But, I believe, historians will also see that there proved to be a limit. It turned out that – despite his genius at dividing and degrading and deceiving -- he proved just too destructive and ugly for the nation.
Bit by bit, battle by battle, the American body politic gradually expelled him. This process -- not yet complete -- unfolded in stages.
Trump’s rampant trampling on constraints on the use of presidential power eventually compelled the Democrats– long fearful of a fight – to impeach him (for just one of his impeachable offenses).
Then in 2020, the American majority– after all they’d witnessed -- voted to remove him from the Presidency.
Trump’s unprecedented attempt to launch a coup d’etat then led those in Congress not under Trump’s thumb to expose Trump’s criminal attempts to hold onto power against the will of the American people.
Meanwhile, the Rule of Law has been catching up with this one-man crime-wave, from Atlanta to New York to our nation’s capital. He will be indicted soon, and that, too, will push Trump away from power: the nation dominating the criminal, rather than the criminal shaping the nation according to his somewhat deranged emotional needs.
That has left two major elements of the American body politic upholding Trump’s power: the Republican Party and the base. Despite Trump’s defeat, and despite his attacking the constitutional order with his Big Lie, Trump again showed himself extraordinary in retaining great power over both.
That power enabled Trump to play a big role in the Republican campaign in the 2022 Midterms. But the role he played – fatally distorted by his emotional brokenness (his complete focus on his own needs, including the need to deny his defeat at all costs) – undermined those last bastions of Trump’s power.
When it turned out that the American majority was repelled by what Trump insisted on offering, resulting in bitter disappointment for a Party hungry for a return to power, a substantial portion of the right’s power structure launched an effort to squeeze Trump out of the Republican picture.
(Not for moral reasons, but for the winning-is-the-only-thing reason that Trump has proved too “toxic” – meaning that the center-of-gravity of the American electorate has decided Trump’s too ugly and destructive for them.)
That battle has just begun. But the handwriting is on the wall: Trump has proven too broken for the American body politic to reward. And although Trump maintains many allies in the Party, that means his leadership no longer leads to victory. So the Party will want him gone.
That leaves the Republican base.
That base was the broken place already present in the American body politic through which Trump climbed to power. It was a base that had been cultivated (by sociopaths like Limbaugh and Gingrich) so that, by 2015, they could look at a man like Trump -- who was already obviously lying, who had a reputation as a con man, and who already using power in self-serving and damaging ways – and conclude, “A lying bully is just the kind of guy who should be wielding the powers of the Presidency.”
It was the base whose fervent support enabled Trump to intimidate Republican leaders into being his servants, despite their distaste for him. And it is the base that – in the contest for the 2024 nomination -- may enable Trump to wage a major war against the Party that wants to expel him.
But now there appear signs that much of that base may be ready to move on.
A poll just done of some battleground states with early primaries seems to show that (Flordia Governor) DeSantis is preferred to Trump by a majority of Republican voters. That might mean that a majority in the base that will soon participate in the squeezing of Donald Trump out of the American power system.
And, if Trump’s grip on the base is loosening, that might signify the breaking of the fever— signify that, ultimately, the flagrancy and craziness of Trump’s brokenness would have elicited just too much of an immune response from the American body politic.
But more likely, this will prove merely a stage in his eventual expulsion. Trump likely will retain enough of his following to win the Republican nomination for 2024 (assuming that, as in 2016, his competitors divide a non-Trump majority of Republican voters among them).
After winning the nomination, Trump would likely lose again – more emphatically -- in the general election.
If -- even then -- the GOP can’t disgorge this toxic presence, the party itself might fall apart (like the Whig Party in the 1850s), with a new conservative party eventually rising to take its place.