What would Donald Trump have to do for Republicans to disown him? Stand for a third term in 2028? Close down Congress? Expel a couple of states from the Union because they had crossed him?
It’s a serious question. In 2016, Republicans swallowed their doubts and went along with a fantasist who had come late and malevolently to their party. They did not much care for him, but they could plausibly tell themselves that he represented an aberration, an interruption in normal service. Most likely, he would lose the presidential election; but, if he somehow won, so much the better. Anyone would be better than Hillary.
This time, no one can pretend that he is a blip. Trump and Trumpery have conquered every outpost of the GOP. His margin of victory in Iowa was 24%, smashing Bob Dole’s previous record of 12%. The idea that the constitutionalists, Reaganites, and Straussian conservatives who care about character might somehow rally behind an alternative candidate has been exposed as wishful thinking. Even if you somehow lumped them all together, those good people would be outnumbered by the MAGA loudmouths.
It takes a real effort to remember the pre-Trump Republican Party. But recall that, in 2016, Trump lost Iowa to Ted Cruz. “He stole it,” said Trump in defeat, in a display of the petulant neediness that, to my continuing bewilderment, does nothing to put off his supporters. “The State of Iowa should disqualify Ted Cruz from the most recent election on the basis that he cheated — a total fraud!”
In 2016, Republicans were defending a vulgarian interloper from daytime TV. This time, they are defending a felon and an insurrectionist. In 2016, they were able to tell themselves that Trump would be housetrained when he was in office. This time, they know they are dealing with someone who regards himself as bigger than the office he occupies, who makes no distinction between public duties and private interests, and who is a proven electoral liability.
This last quality is the most under-explored. Those of my friends backed Trump after having opposed him in the 2016 primaries — I am not talking of his protectionist and nativist cheerleaders, but of those who swallowed their earlier doubts — often explain their conversion with reference to his supposed electability. But that claim does not withstand analysis. Trump was a drag on the ticket in 2016 and 2020, being outpolled by most senatorial and gubernatorial Republicans and losing the popular vote both times to unpopular Democrats. All the polls tell the same story this time. Trump might or might not edge the embalmed Soviet corpse of an incumbent. Any other Republican would walk it.
Obviously, not everything Trump did was bad. Voting is always, in part, a question of balance, of pros and cons. If your No. 1 issue was, say, moving the United States Embassy to Jerusalem or appointing an opponent of Roe v. Wade to the Supreme Court, fine, I get it. But now that we have seen the whole package, I have to ask — how high a price are you prepared to pay?
Even as a non-American, I understand the dilemma. From a narrowly British point of view, Trump is preferable to Biden. He is pro-Brexit and tried to offer us a decent trade deal; and, unlike Biden, he does not see it as his job to damage relations between Northern Ireland and the rest of the U.K. But what are these gains worth if he gives up, not just on the Western alliance, but on the values it came into existence to defend — values like the peaceful transfer of power and the notion that no one is above the law?
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This is not about Trump anymore. It is not even about the Republican enablers who abase themselves before himself in the most humiliating way and get nothing in return. Chris Christie was the first to learn this lesson. Vivek Ramaswamy is the latest, being dismissed as “sly” and “deceitful” even as he pulled out of the race. No, it is about America.
The country that was founded as an antidote to arbitrary power has fallen for a personality cult. The city on the hill is set, this time knowingly, to make a liar and petty crook its first citizen. The things that elevated and ennobled America — optimism, political pluralism, the ability to disagree with civility, respect for the law, respect for the ballot box — are scorned by those who claim to be patriots. God help them. God help the rest of us.