Oy, what a thought. But it’s important to at least consider what Never Trumper J.V. Last is saying here:
Over the past year I’ve been insisting that Trump is Forever.
TL;DR is Trump won’t leave politics and the Republican party won’t be able to move on from him because its voters are bound to him.
The counterargument to this—often expressed by Republican friends who hated Trump, but went along with things—went something like this:
Voters hate losers. After Biden crushes Trump, the GOP will turn its back on him and move on. This is the cycle of defeat and renewal which is constant in American politics. Five years from now, you won’t be able to find a single Republican who admits to having voted for him.
This wasn’t a crazy argument, but I think we can now say with rough certainty that it was incorrect.
And yet I think it’s an interesting lens through which to view the last five weeks.
Everyone laughs at how stupid the Trump lawsuits are. Can you believe these morons? They lose everywhere! Even Republican judges keep slapping them down! How embarrassing for Trump!
But that’s the wrong way to think about Trump’s actions since November 3. Because his goal hasn’t been to keep the office of the president. It’s been to keep the Republican party.
On the morning of November 4, Donald Trump faced two problems. The first was that he was going to lose the power of the presidency. The second was that this loss endangered his ownership of the GOP.
Now, owning a major political party isn’t as useful as being president. But it’s not nothing, either. In a two-party system, you can exert a great deal of power by being the head of a party. You have businesses and foreign governments that will pay tribute to you. You have capos spread across the country, ready to do your bidding. You have an audience of something like 40 million partisans who can be mined for contributions and mobilized as a flash mob whenever you need them.
A political party is, to paraphrase El Blago, a valuable forking thing. Why would anyone willingly let go of it?
So for Trump, the lawsuits, the posturing, the couping—yes, it would be nice if he wound up as president on January 21. But that’s the secondary objective. The primary objective was to stop the Republican party from leaving him and, if possible, tighten his grasp on it.
And while everyone laughs at how incompetent Trump’s Elite Strike Force has been as a matter of law, they miss how effective it’s been as a matter of politics.
Mission: Accomplished.
How does a party move on from a defeated leader? It’s a routine process that occurs after a choreographed series of steps from the stakeholders.
The defeated leader concedes and steps away from public view.
The base voters melt back into the countryside for a short period—usually a few months—until they reemerge to begin fighting against the opposing party’s new regime.
The partisan media immediately start a fight over What Went Wrong, as the various factions try to blame each other in order to gain advantage in the bid to find a new leader.
Ambitious elected officials begin to put themselves forward as the face of the opposition in the hopes of eventually taking over the top position in the headless party.
Trump’s post-election fight has been designed to short-circuit each of these steps.Trump will not leave the public eye.
His insistence that he won increased the activation of the Republican base.
The base’s acceptance of his claim forced the partisan media to toe his line and even created demand for more partisan options when Fox wavered in its willingness to deny reality. (The explosion of Newsmax and OAN as they went full-2020 Truther can only force Fox further away from the mainstream and into outright propaganda.)
This entire dynamic has stopped cold any questions of blame assigning or intra-party fighting.
Consider: It is the Democrats—who won a large victory!—who are engaged in recriminations and the re-thinking of their electoral pitch. There has been absolutely none of this—zero—on the Republican side. You can’t ask “what went wrong” when you’re not allowed to admit that you lost.
The next generation of ambitious elected Republicans isn’t just frozen in place. They’re subjugated. They’ve looked at the voters and realized that the best path forward is demonstrating absolute fealty to Trump. Which means that their incentive is to outbid their peers in expressing support for Trump’s claim of victory.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: For anyone who wants a future in Republican politics, the price of admission is not admitting that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. You have to either skirt this reality, or outright deny it.
But this isn’t just a question of a fact, it’s a mindset. Because it means that the minimum ante for Republican politics is now support for an insane conspiracy theory.
And once you’re embracing “The guy who lost by 7 million votes actually won in a landslide, because Deep State,” then “Hey those QAnons have some interesting ideas” is only the next step. And not a very big one.
The election is over. Trump lost.
But the battle for the soul of the Republican party is over, too.
And Trump won.
I have no warm feelings for the GOP. I’ll let the Never Trumpers mourn its passing. But the fact is that whatever you want to call it,something is leveraging the institutional power of what we used to think of as the Republican party and it is very, very dangerous.