Republicans may put the hapless in haphazard, but it would be a mistake to underestimate haplessness. Just yesterday, a friend observed how many mediocrities advance through the Democratic Party’s ranks on familiarity rather than accomplishment.
“I don’t get it. When a consultant on the Republican side loses, we take them out and shoot them. You guys — keep hiring them.”
— Nationally prominent Republican official“Crashing the Gate,” by Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zúniga (2006)
Still. “Anyone who thinks the Republican Party is some kind of well-oiled juggernaut ready to steamroll Democrats in November might want to check out what’s happening in Georgia, where the GOP is busy trying to steamroll itself,” writes Eugene Robinson.
Donald Trump steamrolled the GOP once already this year when he depressed turnout in Georgia for the Senate elections on January 5th that cost his party two Senate seats.
The Trump-fueled steamrolling continues there. Seeking revenge against yet another apostate, Trump is backing former senator David Perdue’s bid to oust Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) in the gubernatorial primary next year. The internecine fight could weaken whichever Republican wins the GOP primary and help Democrat Stacey Abrams emerge Georgia’s governor next November. If so, Trump’s covid-infected hand will be to blame. Blame he will never own, of course.
Trump is also backing a primary challenge to a second apostate. Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, refused Trump’s entreaty to “find 11,780 votes” so Trump could secure the state’s electoral votes in 2020. Trump may not be good at much but he’s hell at settling scores. And in enlisting others to settle them for him.
“And all of this reflects the GOP’s devolution into a cult of personality devoted to former president Donald Trump,” as Robinson sees it.
The GOP had the chance to make a definitive break with Trump after the Capitol insurrection in January. The party decided to stick with him — and now it’s stuck with him.
That’s the thing about Faustian bargains. They rarely end well.
No, they don’t. But knowing that is little comfort to the victims. Cults of personality have a rather deadly if not enduring track record over the last century: in Italy, in Germany, in Russia, in China and elsewhere.
Robinson is a sharp analyst, but this is another church-of-the-savvy take that downplays the existential threat to the republic posed by Trump and his blundering band of anti-democracy brigands.
Major Strasser:
You give him credit for too much cleverness. My impression was that he’s just another blundering American.Captain Renault:
We musn’t underestimate American blundering. I was with them when they blundered into Berlin in 1918.
The January 6th insurrection may have failed to overthrow the government, but The Atlantic‘s Barton Gellman finds no solace in that. A failed coup that goes unpunished is just a dress rehearsal for the next. Columns reinforcing the haplessness of the first attempt undermine the urgency of preparing to fend off the next.
Gellman writes:
Donald Trump came closer than anyone thought he could to toppling a free election a year ago. He is preparing in plain view to do it again, and his position is growing stronger. Republican acolytes have identified the weak points in our electoral apparatus and are methodically exploiting them. They have set loose and now are driven by the animus of tens of millions of aggrieved Trump supporters who are prone to conspiracy thinking, embrace violence, and reject democratic defeat. Those supporters, Robert Pape’s “committed insurrectionists,” are armed and single-minded and will know what to do the next time Trump calls upon them to act.
Democracy will be on trial in 2024. A strong and clear-eyed president, faced with such a test, would devote his presidency to meeting it. Biden knows better than I do what it looks like when a president fully marshals his power and resources to face a challenge. It doesn’t look like this.
Few mistake Donald Trump for some genius strategist. But novels are filled with tales of evil men with unquenchable thirsts for revenge. It’s what Trump drinks instead of alcohol.