The Transition Blues
45 to 46
by Professor John Kane
“Dear Father,
Although I was at the wheel of your car last week, speeding down the highway in the wrong direction, I hereby deny any responsibility for the subsequent crash and unfortunate collateral casualties.
Your affectionate son,
Donald.”
Thus we might imagine, assuming present conduct mirrors past, a teenage Trump addressing his father Fred after wrecking his automobile. For surely no one was surprised when Donald, six days after his supporters violently assaulted the Capitol, emerged from a period of furious sulking to disclaim all responsibility. Reports suggested that he had spent an uncharacteristically silent week, not in regretful contemplation of the mayhem, destruction and death he had instigated, but in outrage that Twitter and other platforms had blocked his accounts.
Trump’s disclaimer resonated feebly except among his ever-faithful acolytes. Perhaps he did not quite realise that he (and his family) had finally overstepped a crucial line beyond which denial was well-nigh impossible. But Jared and Ivanka surely did. The conciliatory statement Trump issued a day after his first self-incriminatory response (‘I love you, go home now’), in which he promised an ‘orderly transition’ of power, was reportedly wrung from him by family members who feared he had made himself legally liable to charges of incitement to insurrection.
Of course, Trump, being Trump, soon undercut the appeasing message by reiterating that he had been cheated in a fraudulent election, the great and repeated lie that had convinced and enraged his gullible public in the first place. Perhaps at some level he himself believed the lie, though his history and professed philosophy suggested he was simply locked into a set of deeply habituated strategies ― never admit fault or weakness, when criticised attack and insult, lie until the lie is believed. He was a hammer always looking for a nail, and lacked the mental flexibility to alter responses that had, in the special circumstances of the presidency, become dangerously counterproductive for the nation and (a more important consideration to Trump) his own safety.
Predictably, Trump also labelled House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s threat to conduct a second impeachment trial ‘a witch hunt’ ― which seemed fair enough given there was an actual witch (or wiccan) to be hunted. Pelosi, convinced that the Capitol outrage required accountability and authoritative condemnation, dismissed recommendations to just sweat out the few remaining days of the Trump presidency, declaring Trump that remained ‘a clear and present danger’ even over that short period. She did not deign even to notice the breathtakingly hypocritical arguments of die-hard Republicans that impeachment would increase divisiveness in an already divided country. Given that Vice President Mike Pence had declined to invoke Section 4 of the 25th Amendment (a cumbersome, never-used procedure to remove a president from office that would need to be repurposed to cover the case at hand), Pelosi proceeded to charge Trump in the House of Representatives with “inciting violence against the government of the United States”. The vote passed by 232 votes to 197, ten Republicans having joined the Democrat majority. Trump thus acquired the honour of being the first president in history to be impeached twice.
Soon after the vote he broadcast an ‘unequivocal’ condemnation of the violence of the previous week which was, he said, ‘no part of our movement’. He also endeavoured to dissuade his followers from the further violence that the FBI informed him was being planned across the country in the coming days. This clearly scripted video was reportedly the result of heavy pressure from White House advisors, but it nevertheless raised the hope that realism and responsibility had arrived, belatedly but finally, at the White House.
But what were the likely next moves in this bizarre game?
Next moves?
Impeachment in the House is analogous to a criminal law indictment (or formal accusation) which leads to a trial. Impeachment is not a legal but a political process, though it also involves a trial which, under the US Constitution, is conducted in the Senate and presided over by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Condemnation and removal from office requires a vote of two-thirds of senators (67). Notoriously, in Trump’s first impeachment trial in January 2020, the solidly Republican majority of the Senate led by that redoubtable old obstructionist, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (the self-professed ‘grim reaper’), refused to admit evidence from new witnesses or to contemplate condemnation (excepting only Mitt Romney’s dissenting vote). But a year later, political circumstances have radically changed.
McConnell was reportedly ‘furious’ at the attack on the Capitol and declared that impeachment was warranted, with the implication — but not the promise — that he might advocate condemnation in a Senate trial. He had already incurred Trump’s enmity after the Electoral College’s certification of delegates on December 14, when he formally accepted that Joe Biden was officially president-elect. It was no doubt significant that McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, Trump’s transportation secretary, was the first of his cabinet to resign in protest at the January 6 riots. McConnell will not recall the Senate early, meaning that the trial of Trump will not occur till after Biden is inaugurated, but still the very possibility that he might direct fellow Republicans to condemn is remarkable. It would be a mistake, however, to understand McConnell’s conversion from Trump supporter to Trump opponent as the result of either personal pique or a sudden moral awakening. The hard-nosed old political operator, who will no longer be majority leader after January 20, was as always cannily strategising in his own and his party’s interests.
McConnell is not given to illusions and was under none regarding the danger confronting his party after four years of a Trump presidency that spectacularly imploded in the hallowed halls of Washington. McConnell had undoubtedly never warmed to Trump, but the latter had won office under the label ‘Republican’ and the Senate leader is an arch-realist who makes the most of every opportunity. Trump could and did deliver conservative federal judges, Supreme Court justices, and a massive tax cut to business (while McConnell could care less about his obsessions with his ‘wall’ or his cack-handed trade war). Yet Trump turned out to be more than just a ‘useful idiot’ who could be discarded when his usefulness was exhausted. No one quite foresaw that he would become the focus of a fanatical cult of followers devoted less to the party than to the man himself, followers capable of controlling primary elections to ensure that only extreme devotees succeeded.
Opportunism was thus supplemented by fear among congressional Republicans and fear eventually became the dominant factor. Such was the ferocity of a core of dedicated Trumpists that this turned into fear, not just of political loss, but of physical threat. As representative Peter Meijer, Republican of Michigan and an Iraq war veteran, said: “Our expectation is that somebody will try to kill us. That is the scenario that many of us are preparing for.” The nascent fascistic tendencies of Trumpism ― domination through violence rather than through law and democratic procedure ― were cast in glaring light in the January 6 incursions aimed at overthrowing the legitimate results of a democratic election to (re)install a quasi-dictatorial, personalistic leader.
At the rally preceding the riots, Don Jr. triumphantly proclaimed, “This is no longer the Republican Party, but the Trump Republican Party” (and indeed its members are now called by many ‘Trumplicans’). And McConnell was acutely aware that the future of any authentically and recognisably Republican party depended on its ability ― crucially on his ability ― to distance itself from the Trump cult while alienating as few of the party faithful as possible. As he himself put it, he would take the opportunity presented by the insurrection to ‘purge Trumpism’ from the party. It was a tall order. Trump had exposed and capitalised on an enduring, so-called populist, strain within Republicanism that had long been suppressed by ‘respectable’ Republicans. This exposure presented a temptation to certain ambitious Republicans ― viz. Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley who leant their support to the January 6 attempt to overthrow Biden’s electoral college majority ― to grasp the torch from Trump’s failing hand and ride the white nationalist wave he had generated to presidential office.
This was shamelessness and cynicism writ large, and it seemed unlikely to succeed in the long run. Yet it had exposed the dilemma that McConnell and the modern Republican Party had somehow to resolve on pain of a radical sundering that might mean its disappearance as a viable party. The fact is that Trump was not an aberration of Republican politics but rather (as some American commentators are now recognising) a logical and possibly fatal terminus of processes long underway. How the party of Lincoln declined over a century-and-a-half into the party of Trump is a long and dismal story that reveals much about American society and politics.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JOHN KANE
John Kane is Professor in the School of Government and International Relations and Researcher in Griffith’s Centre for Governance and Public Policy at Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia.
John attained his PhD at the London School of Economics and and teaches in political theory, political leadership and US foreign policy.
He has published widely, been awarded numerous research grants, and five times been Visiting Professor to Yale University. He is the author of The Politics of Moral Capital (Cambridge UP) and Between Virtue and Power: The Persistent Moral Dilemma of US Foreign Policy (Yale UP). He is also co-author (with Haig Patapan) of The Democratic Leader: How Democracy Defines, Empowers and Limits its Leaders (Oxford UP).
