The question is what will?
McKay Coppins presents a gallery of Republican donors and operatives eager to see Donald Trump gone before he can do more harm to the Republican Party. What’s left of it anyway. They just lack the guts to take on Trump and his (proven violent) cult members frontally. Their strategy is to hope Trump, 76, just dies. As his mother did at at 88 and his father at 93. Plying him with hamburgers and fried chicken may be a sounder plan.
Former Michigan Republican congressman Peter Meijer “termed this strategy actuarial arbitrage.”
Other Republicans hope indictments will take Trump out of the picture. Not a good plan either (The Atlantic):
Michael Cohen, who served for years as Trump’s personal attorney and now hosts a podcast atoning for that sin titled Mea Culpa, grudgingly told me that his former boss would easily weaponize any criminal charges brought against him. The deep-state Democrats are at it again—the campaign emails write themselves. “Donald will use the indictment to continue his fundraising grift,” Cohen told me.
They are hoping for a deus ex machina to appear. “It’s like 2016 all over again, only more fatalistic,” said one consultant who requested anonymity.
Coppins writes:
The GOP’s defenestration of long-held conservative ideals in favor of an ad hoc personality cult left Republicans without a clear post-Trump identity. Combine that with what Meijer calls “the generalized cowardice of political figures writ large,” and you have a party in paralysis: “There’s no capacity [to say], ‘All right, let’s clean the slate and figure out what we stand for and build from there.’”
But since admitting failure (showing weakness) is the kiss of death on the right, that’s not likely to happen. The GOP is a nihilistic organization that rejects democracy, the bedrock principle behind the Constitution Republicans allegedly revere. Just as Trump cast off any dog-whistle pretense about the party’s racial animus, Republicans have loosed the rest of the demons from its closet. They won’t be put back easily.
Schadenfreude aside, the GOP’s problem is our problem. What Trump awakened, what the financial collapse and Great Recession awakened, what shifting demographics and the migrant and climate crises awakened, is a nascent fascist movement hungry for authoritarian strongmen to stop the changing world authoritarian followers want to get off. That hunger will not die with Trump, whenever that is. Because it is not just here in the United States. It is global.
We are in great danger.