The former president deserves all the blame he receives and more. The Republican Party is swirling the toilet bowl and threatening to suck American democracy down with it. Supposed conservative principles vanished down that hole years ago. Donald Trump’s tenure exposed the party’s rot to sunlight, but he did not begin it. Nor did QAnon.
Much as I usually ignore Thomas Friedman’s pietist ramblings, his disquisition on Donald Trump’s Big Lie further emphasizes how commentators credit this damaged man-child’s Big Personality for it. As many hoped, the Big Lie has not faded with Trump’s dimming spotlight. It has metastasized, spreading from the Capitol to state and local parties, Friedman warns. Indeed, pledging allegiance to it has become a prerequisite for Republicans running for office in 2022.
Gautam Mukunda, host of Nasdaq’s “World Reimagined”podcast, suggests that the lie means “a Republican Party where you cannot rise without declaring that the sun sets in the East, a Republican Party where being willing to help steal an election is literally a job requirement.”
Friedman adds, “There is simply nothing more dangerous for a two-party democracy than to have one party declare that no election where it loses is legitimate, and, therefore, if it loses it will just lie about the results and change the rules.”
But one does not have to be Rick Perlstein to know this view did not begin with the former president. Trump simply gave the Republican Party and its base license to be loud and proud about their distrust of popular sovereignty. They don’t want to govern. They want to rule. So long as that was a given whether or not Republicans controlled all the levers of power, they gave grumbling assent to letting a majority of Americans decide every two years how many political levers each major party controlled.
“[V]iolent anti-democratic sentiment is rampant in the conservative movement,” Rick Perlstein and Edward H. Miller observed recently, citing polls. But it is not new. The movement is not reverting back to its pre-Buckley paranoid roots. Those have been there from Buckley to Reagan and beyond. The late Rush Limbaugh opened his daily show during the Clinton years with “America Held Hostage: Day (no. of days in Clinton’s term)”. One college friend went from hanging out in Rush Rooms around 1990 to full tricorn-hat T-party when Barack Obama entered the Oval Office. Thomas Hofeller, REDMAP and targeting “African-Americans with almost surgical precision” followed in 2010.
QAnon and Trump are latecomers. For Republicans, democratic trappings are like the red, white, and blue bunting it hangs at campaign events and conventions — a political decoration but not a declaration of deeply held principle. The Party of Trump simply declares publicly what it has believed privately for decades: “how you play the game” is for losers. Being willing to help steal an election is literally a job requirement. Be sure to loudly accuse opponents of doing it to set up an excuse for your doing it.
Democrats under Joe Biden, Friedman notes, “are putting forth real ideas to try to address the real challenges that an increasingly diverse 21st-century America needs to address to become a more perfect union.” And the G.O.P. is “trying to cling to power by leveraging a Big Lie into voter suppression laws that leverage the party back to power by appealing solely to a largely white 20th-century America. Trump’s G.O.P. is making no effort to offer conservative alternatives to the issues of the day. Its whole focus is on how to win without doing that.”
“Things are not OK,” Friedman closes. He gets well paid for such sage observations.
But our not-okayness did not start with Donald Trump. Trump did not create a party where up is down, black is white, in is out and wrong is right. He exploited one. He didn’t start the fire, like Billy Joel sings. But he and his will gladly burn down the house if they do not get to rule it.