The Fake GOP Reckoning is Over
It’s only been a week, but Republicans are (unsurprisingly) already back to doing Trump’s bidding.
It’s been less than two weeks since the New York Times reported that Mitch McConnell was pleased with the effort to impeach President Trump and may even vote to convict him. Corporate donors were fleeing from the Republican Party. Ten Republicans voted to impeach Trump in the House, the most bipartisan effort in history. It looked, for a moment, like Trump-by inciting a fascist mob to attack the U.S. Capitol-may have finally tore apart the Republican Party at the seams. Prediction markets pegged the chances of his conviction in the Senate at 44%.
As of this writing, it’s at 6%.
What changed? The main reason for the shift in opinion is that McConnell-along with all but five Republican senators-voted in favor of a resolution that would dismiss Trump’s impending impeachment trial entirely, signaling that there’s virtually no chance enough Republican senators will vote to convict Trump. But that’s really it. Nothing occurred to even remotely explain how McConnell-who apparently just days ago was considering a vote to convict- could come to believe that Trump should not even stand trial. The evidence, if anything, has only gotten far worse, with reports now indicating that Trump preemptively restricted the authority of the National Guard in a premeditated effort to protect the rioters. Alas.
In reality, nothing has changed at all, besides an entirely predictable regression to the mean. Following the Capitol riots, despite widespread speculation in the press that the party was done with Trump, Republicans made it crystal clear not only that Trump would not be held accountable, but that anyone who suggested otherwise would be punished. Post-coup polls show that just 8% of Republicans support impeachment, while a majority continue to believe Trump won the election. The Arizona Republican party passed a resolution censuring Governor Doug Ducey, who, against Trump’s wishes, certified Arizona’s 2020 election results. Meanwhile, Liz Cheney, one of the ten Republicans to back Trump’s impeachment in the House, is struggling to maintain her leadership position. As the New York Times reported following the vote to dismiss Trump’s impeachment trial:
[W]hatever window of possibility there had been for bipartisan condemnation of Mr. Trump … was closing fast, as Republicans were reminded once again of Mr. Trump’s remarkable hold on their party and the risks of crossing him.
The message was always clear, and it’s doubtful any elected Republican needed the reminder. Just three months ago, Trump garnered the most votes of any Republican presidential candidate in history. Even after the insurrection on the Capitol, Trump led hypothetical polls of the 2024 Republican nomination by a whopping 26 points. As Alex Shephard argued in The New Republic following the Georgia runoffs, Republicans in the coming years will be far more focused on how they can emulate Trump than on how they can distance themselves from him:
Marco Rubio’s post-November claim that the GOP was now a “multiethnic, multiracial, working class party” was always wrong, but it’s especially wrong now-the realignment did not materialize in Georgia, likely because Republicans ran two wildly corrupt, charisma-deficient candidates who couldn’t mimic Trump’s appeal.
So what was McConnell up to? Republicans find themselves in a crisis: they need Trump’s base to win elections, but embracing Trump too firmly risks losing establishment support and fundraising channels. Thus, McConnell came to the simple conclusion that voting to convict Trump was out of the question, but so too was appearing to reject any effort to hold him accountable. So he sought a middle ground: he would signal to the establishment that he was moving beyond Trump while simultaneously planning an off-ramp.
And that’s exactly what happened. After anonymously sharing with reporters that he wishes to “purge” Trump from the Republican Party, McConnell and other Republicans now take the ( completely bogus) position that Trump cannot even stand trial because he is no longer president. As bad faith as this route was, it was obvious from the start. Republicans can never, and will never, split with Trump-they owe their power to him, and they know it. The best they can do is hold everyone in suspense only to embrace a nonsensical theory as to why accountability is off the table.
These sort of bait-and-switch operations reveal the central fallacy at the heart of the Republican Party, but are also essential for holding the movement together. The modern Republican Party can only win by consolidating a scattered coalition ranging from white supremacist rioters to corporatist oligarchs. Holding those factions together requires an endless array of deception and outright fraud. It is a difficult task to satisfy conspiratorial fascists, on the one hand, and CEOs, on the other. But Republicans-by constantly lying, gaming the press and embracing intellectual gobbledygook -have made it work. No one is better at it than McConnell.
Going forward, it is critical that Democrats recognize this dynamic and refuse to indulge it. There is no reckoning on the horizon. Republicans will not revert to some principled party devoted to debt reduction or the institutional integrity of the courts. Rather, the singular thread holding together the Republican Party will remain, as it has been for the past several years, allegiance to Donald Trump and the fascist movement currently holding the party together.
If a literal coup did not change that, nothing will.
Originally published at https://packed.substack.com on January 27, 2021.
