It’s the voters stupid…
This piece by David Corn is absolutely right:
Please stop. Enough with this talk of whether the Republican Party will finally rid itself of Donald Trump. Drop this speculation that the GOP, due to its poor performance in the midterm elections or Trump’s latest outrage (dining with a Nazi, calling for the “termination” of the US Constitution, or whatever), will pull the plug on him. You can call on Republicans to take a courageous stand of principle against Dear Leader—and, of course, they should—but don’t do so expecting that will have any impact on Trump’s standing and his future prospects. The party cannot de-Trumpify by decree. Rep. Kevin McCarthy cannot lead it out of the Trump nightmare. That’s because there is no governing power within the GOP that can push a button and execute a no-Trump reboot. There is no central committee that can make such a decision. It’s up to Republican voters, and many of them remain crazed for Trump. Hey, this is a democracy.
I’ll pursue this point further in a moment. First let me say that I almost—almost!—feel sorry for those conservatives who these days are exhorting the Republican Party to get over Trump. A few days ago, Charles C.W. Cooke, a senior writer for the conservative National Review, reacting to Trump’s phony claim that he had not truly called for tearing up the Constitution, penned a plea titled “Aren’t You All Tired of This Crap?” It seemed to address conservatives and Republicans who have stood by Trump. He wrote:
[F]or some reason, the American Right has decided to spend an inordinate amount of it defending a man who is now serving nothing except for his own boredom and his own ego. At some point, conservative-leaning voters are going to notice that all Trump cares about now is the pretense that he won the election of 2020, and that, in order to push that idea, he will happily destroy anything and everything that gets in his way. Until then, I must ask: Are you not tired of this crap?
In his newsletter, conservative commentator Erick Erickson beseeched Republicans and fellow rightists, “Can we move forward, please?” His advice: “You want to win? Move on from an angry old man with nothing left but a knockoff Twitter feed.”
Trump is a wannabe-autocrat who is a menace—to the nation and to the Republican Party. He has now led the GOP to three lousy elections, in which he lost the House, the Senate, and the White House. (The Rs barely won back the House last month in a historical underperformance.) And while he has generated political failure, he has further caused the party problems by hobnobbing with hate-spreading extremists, embracing QAnon nuttery, and vowing to pardon January 6 rioters (that is, excusing political violence). There’s plenty of cause for party leaders and prominent right-wingers to turn against The Former Guy, including realpolitik calculations.
Yet doing so will not rescue the party—not in and of itself. In the olden days, the party establishment might have been able to gather in a smoke-filled room and bounce a candidate they deemed unpalatable. That was largely because Republican voters, more often than not, followed the lead of the party poohbahs. They tended to vote as the party’s elders wanted. There weren’t too many surprises in presidential primaries. George H.W. Bush won when it was his turn in 1988, ditto Bob Dole (1996), George W. Bush (2000), John McCain (2008), and Mitt Romney (2012).
Trump broke that streak in 2016. This came after the party’s electorate had been radicalized by years of hateful rhetoric that demonized Democrats and liberals from Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Fox News, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and the Tea Party. Having been fed a steady diet of red meat, grievance, and conspiracy theories, Republican voters gave their own party the finger in 2016, rejecting all its mainstream candidates (even far-right contenders like Ted Cruz) and anointed Trump Mr. Republican. They took the wheel.
And they haven’t given it back.
In GOP primary contests throughout 2022, Republican voters picked Trump-endorsed extremists and election deniers over sane and better-bet candidates. In recent days, Trump has deservedly received criticism for having pushed lousy candidates, including Dr. Mehmet Oz and Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania, Don Bolduc in New Hampshire, Blake Masters and Kari Lake in Arizona, and—drumroll, please—Herschel Walker in Georgia. But it was Republican voters who voted for these wingnuts and (eventual) losers. In Wyoming, they sent diehard conservative Liz Cheney packing. Trump foisted, but the base embraced. Just as the party’s leaders could not keep these aspirants off the train, they can’t toss Trump from the locomotive.
Were Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to take to the well of the Senate and deliver a powerful speech denouncing Trump and urging the party to cast him on to the ash heap of history—were he to be joined in that endeavor by dozens of other elected Republicans—that would not guarantee the defenestration of Trump. Trump would respond with a Defcon-1 political attack on these RINOs and apostates and urge millions of Republicans to stand with him against these establishment sellouts. And the voters would get to decide. (Meanwhile, Trump presumably would maintain a lock on many of the low-dollar donors the party continually hits up for money. Breaking with Trump could cost the GOP a lot of cash.)
Though Walker lost and the House Republicans fared less well than expected—largely because some suburban GOP-ish voters have soured on the party—there are no signs that the GOP base, which supported Walker and the other Trumpish candidates, has had a change in heart. That base is not big enough to elect the most extreme candidates in statewide elections. But it can still call the shots in defining the party and in picking its banner carriers.
The conservative movement and the GOP have done too good a job stoking the fears, paranoia, resentments, and hatreds of the Republican electorate. They have generally not pushed back against election denialism nor decried the Trumpian threat to democracy. They have signaled to Republican voters that Trump’s baseless claims are legitimate, that advocating such allegations is not a disqualification for Republican candidates, and that the January 6 insurrection Trump incited was no big deal. (They opposed Trump’s impeachment.) They have bolstered (or not actively challenged) the irrationality and animosity that fuels many Republican voters, and they are stuck with these voters.
Heartfelt pleas—Aren’t you tired of this? Can’t we move on from Trump?—are unlikely to cut it. For the past six years, the party and the right wing have characterized all criticisms of Trump as unpatriotic attacks on America and hoaxes cooked up by a diabolical cabal of liberals, the media, and the Deep State. Stealing documents, tax fraud, conspiring to commit election fraud—it’s all a setup, a partisan attack. Now they expect their voters to believe otherwise? Just because of a few lost elections? Good luck with that.
It’s possible GOP voters might tire of Trump or reach the conclusion he’s too damaged (too indicted?) to win in 2024 and, during the primaries, turn toward another Trumpish choice. That is, if any Republican with a chance chooses to challenge Trump. (I’m not talking Cheney or Larry Hogan.) But GOP insiders and elected leaders are unlikely to mount any rebellion against Trump. Even if a gutsy Republican leader—or a band of Republicans—took a stab at defying Trump and steering the party away from Trumpism, the odds of success would be small. The GOP is now dependent on Americans who have been convinced by the right—including folks like Erickson and writers at National Review, even those who are anti-Trump—that liberals and Democrats are an evil and existential threat to the nation and that Trump’s lies and his assaults on democracy are no big whoop. Many of these grievance-fueled people—who still believe Joe Biden is not the legitimate president, that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, and that Democrats are woke pedophiles plotting to destroy the nation—are not asking to be liberated from Trump. The harsh reality for Republicans—and the rest of us—is that you can’t save a party if its voters do not want to be saved.
They definitely do not want to be saved … they are cult members.