The massively corrupt Texas GOP AG Ken Paxton was acquitted in his impeachment trial today. They just can’t quit him. But the Texas GOP is at each others’ throats and it’s going to be a bloodbath.
But that’s not unusual. The inmates are running the asylum everywhere and even the power brokers and the money men seem to be impotent in the face of it.
Even among those Party leaders who cast their lot with Trump in the lead-up to the 2020 election, very few are still with him: NBC News surveyed forty-four of Trump’s former Cabinet members and found that just four supported his reëlection. Trump’s own Attorney General Bill Barr has been making the rounds this summer calling his former boss’s arguments about January 6th “nauseating” and “despicable,” and insisting that “someone who engaged in that kind of bullying about a process that is fundamental to our system shouldn’t be anywhere near the Oval Office.” Mick Mulvaney, a former Trump chief of staff, has said, “I’m working hard to make sure someone else is the nominee.”
This dissent belongs to the same pattern as the Koch and Club for Growth efforts, and to the motivated reasoning that powered the early support for DeSantis. For a decade, the central drama of Trumpism has concerned the Republican élites who continued to support him—the story has been about their malignity, or opportunism, or willful moral blindness. Now it may be about their ineffectiveness. The elected officials who long stuck with Trump—Mike Pence, Chris Christie—have found that their loyalty earned them no sway with his base when they finally turned on him. They might as well have been John Kasich.
It has been striking, this summer, to notice how important January 6th has been to the Stop Trump faction—especially to figures like Barr and Mulvaney. And yet that insurrection never features in the ads designed to persuade voters to break with Trump. On policy, too, it is hard to detect an establishment imprint: much of the conversation among Trump’s opponents on the trail has concerned various crazy-sounding plans to use the military to attack Mexico, theoretically to target drug cartels, a plan cooked up by a new maga think tank. Every party, at every time, has some tension between its élites and its base. But it’s hard to think of a more spectacular divide than the one defining the G.O.P. right now.
Why do I believe that they’ll come around when it comes right down to it? Could it be because that’s what they always do?