Jamil Smith over at Rolling Stone closes in on one explanation for Republicans’ willingness to kowtow to their God-king that I never quite put together:
This is about Republicans maintaining the ability to manipulate elections here at home. Trump, so desperate to win his election the first time, welcomed foreign interference along with the traditional domestic voter suppression his party offered. Pandora’s Box has been opened more widely than the president and the Republicans probably ever anticipated, and now they are willing to argue that Trump has the powers of an autocrat all so that they can maintain this ability to reach out to whomever they need to in order to win elections.
This is how reckless Republicans are with America, willing to give untold amounts of power to a man whom they still don’t fully understand in a frantic attempt to maintain their own grip on advantage in a country that has already elected a black president once and whose demographics are quickly turning against them.
I don’t know if Republicans really expected Donald Trump to win in 2016. Hillary Clinton’s campaign surely misread the tea leaves and her campaign was overconfident. She won the popular vote, yes, just not in the right places. That, after all, is how the electoral college game is played.
Trump’s campaign of white grievance won the presidency with two percent fewer votes than Clinton. When it became clear he won with help both from foreign interference and stateside voter suppression, the jostled pinball machines in GOP strategists’ heads lit up. Trump’s election wasn’t just dumb luck. It was proof of concept.
With demographics “turning against them,” Republicans have desperately sought means by which to maintain power as a minority party. Voter fraud vigilantes have been at that effort for decades. But since the late 1990s, with Fox News and social media helping to “catapult the propaganda,” they’ve built public support for and expanded the reach of photo ID laws. A smorgasbord of other suppression tactics has made voting harder even as voting rights activists struggle to fight back and work to expand the voting pool. Computers allowed the GOP to perfect gerrymandering techniques that allowed them to “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.” The Trump administration has tried to rig the census to stick an even heavier thumb on the scales of democracy.
But what Trump’s ascendancy demonstrated was that his party could drop the dog whistles and campaign openly on preserving its white base’s position atop the social pecking order in a browning America. They could even request foreign help in doing it with seeming impunity. After Trump’s expected acquittal vote in the Senate today, we can strike the “seeming.”
Supposed Republican leaders dissolve into a gelatinous mass around Trump. The wannabe alpha dogs whimper and grovel in the presence of Trump’s unrefined id. I have argued for years that their vaunted principles are a mile wide and an inch deep. Their submission to Trump confirms it. To suite his need, White House counsel Pat Cipollone stood in the well of the Senate Wednesday night making up principles out of whole cloth.
What Trump offers Republicans is not a path out of the electoral wilderness, but a means to avoid exile there in the first place. That Trump’s way involves lying, stealing, and cheating matters not. That Trump’s way means setting alight our “government of laws and not of men” matters less than preserving the primacy of their shrinking fraction of the electorate. Trump’s way involves, in effect, paying protection (in immortal souls) to a local crime boss.
God Himself gave Trump’s followers this country and they mean to keep it. Or else burn it to the ground so no one else can have it. Where Jesus himself says otherwise, well, “sometimes Jesus is just plain wrong.” That’s not simply the reasoning of Trump’s evangelical base. It is the standard of argument offered by Trump’s legal defense and among his Republican defenders.
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