Trumpism without Trump?
by Professor John Kane
On 7 November, it seemed all over. The US election was called for Biden and a major part of humanity breathed a huge, collective sigh of relief. There was dancing in American streets and in hearts around the world. True, there had been no ‘blue wave’ such as polls had indicated, but there had been a wave ― of eligible people voting at the highest rate in 100 years. If the win was not as overwhelming as many had hoped, it was nevertheless a win.
Or so Democrats assumed.
Fears inevitably persisted about the defeated incumbent’s behaviour during the residue of his presidency. Would he be the lamest of lame ducks or a wounded, destructively rampaging wild boar? His quixotic challenges to the legal validity of the Biden-Harris victory were bound to come to nothing, but there was a danger that his persistent ‘we wuz robbed’ mantra might provoke a virulent, maybe violent, response from gullible hard-core Trumpites. One gun-owning white supremacist echoing Trump’s specious claims was arrested by the FBI on Staten Island for social media posts advocating the ‘extermination of anyone that claims to be democrat… as well as their family members.’
Trump’s obstinate denialism was hardly surprising. His clearly and frequently signalled strategy for winning (i.e. cheating) had blown up in his face. The plan was to hammer home the accusation that mail-in ballots were liable to Democratic fraud, to instruct followers to vote in person on election day, then capitalise on the ‘red mirage’ of early counting to declare a quick victory.
As it happened, the enthusiasm of his fanatical base in his last frantic week of rallies ― ‘the greatest in all of history’ (Nuremberg anyone?) ― seems to have convinced him he could not possibly lose, and that cheating would be unnecessary. But when the red tide started to turn after 3 November he fell back on the original strategy, which proved entirely unrealistic since vote counting could not simply be halted at a president’s command. To Trump’s fury, it proceeded inexorably and fatally as feeble legal challenges failed to keep up.
And when he lost, Trump declared the result fraudulent and himself the winner. If this was predictable it was nonetheless shocking. It was really an attempted coup, an act of treason, one outrage too far in a series of outrages so far unpunished.
Curiously enough, Trump’s charges of voting fraud provoked a strong reaction from conscientious election officials in the battleground states (including Republican Georgia) offended that their professionalism had been questioned. During the days of uncertainty, the nation was treated to a virtual masterclass on counting processes across the land. Then a week after the election, when the New York Times contacted Republican and Democratic officials in nearly every state, all claimed there were no irregularities that could affect the outcome. Ironically, a president often accused of undermining democratic norms had inadvertently revealed that one central institutional plank, electoral integrity, remained solid ― to his undoing.
And still Trump would not admit defeat. A few (very few) Republicans urged him for the sake of the nation to desist and accept reality. A few of his chief sycophants (Senators Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz, Representative Kevin McCarthy and, of course, Rudi Giuliani) roundly supported his delusional claims of fraud. The rest (including Mitch McConnell) either maintained a cowardly silence or indulged the errant president by issuing mealy-mouthed statements about his clear right to pursue any legal challenges he thought appropriate. Attorney-General William Barr eventually gave the green light to the Justice Department to investigate voting irregularities while carefully hedging with a proviso about ‘overwhelming evidence’ (which did not prevent his chief prosecutor of election crimes, Richard Pilger, from resigning in protest at such blatant politicisation).
If this was about anything more than gingerly managing a prolonged Trump tantrum, what was the long game for Republicans?
Some speculated that the intention was to suspend certainty about the outcome beyond the statutory dates for certification of the vote and then electoral college voting, thus throwing the decision up to Congress where Republicans held the numbers advantage. A variation was the idea that state Republican legislatures might, as the Constitution seems to permit, appoint their own slates of electors to rival those selected by vote, in the end again looking to Congress to resolve the issue. Such possibilities made Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s announcement that there would be a smooth transition to ‘a second Trump administration’ particularly chilling. Yet even if such unlikely plans could be carried through, they seemed insane, for surely they would provoke a revolution among the majority of Americans denied their democratic victory. They would almost certainly ensure the final demise of the obsolescent electoral college.
No doubt Trump, true to habit, sought merely to sow the seeds of doubt amongst his own so he could forever after claim he’d really won ― and polls in fact showed that 70% of Republicans already regarded the 2020 election as stolen. Trump also set up a Political Action Committee for which he solicited donations from his followers, ostensibly to pay for his legal challenges but more likely to sustain his political relevance going forward.
But why should Republicans indulge him at this late stage? After all, would a Biden presidency be so a bad for them? They might, in their deepest hearts, even welcome it. They would no longer be under the necessity of cynically defending the indefensible, reinterpreting everything Trump said to make it sound semi-respectable. They could bank what Trump had given them — judges, taxes — and settle down to the more comfortable and familiar role of blocking Democrats. The Trump family gone? Phew! Welcome Joe!
And political gridlock, though infuriating for most Americans, is surely preferable to the last four years. But gridlock depends on Republicans retaining control of the Senate, something in doubt because of two run-off elections in Georgia in January. Lindsey Graham let slip the hope that keeping Trump’s base riled up and mobilised might ensure Republican wins there. And perhaps also the Trump fear factor still rules. His rabid base, hostile to anyone who crosses their champion, might remain capable of determining primary selections and victories. After all, 71 million votes showed that this base had not shrunk but actually expanded in unexpected ways.
This thought raises the possibility that Trumpism might survive Trump and brings into stark relief the challenge now facing the Republican Party. To be sure, the Democratic Party too faces acute questions over its identity and future directions, but this hardly compares to the existential crisis confronting Republicanism.
Most Republicans have always despised Trump in their hearts while abasing themselves before him for power-political reasons. Trump had after all fulfilled the first imperative of political contest: he won. But now that he has lost, Republicans must decide whether to detach themselves from the negative but powerful political energies he tapped into and unleashed, or to exploit them further and make Trumpism, even without Trump, the essence of Republicanism.
The problem for Republicans is that Trump, both in the primary contests of 2015 and in his presidential tenure, glaringly exposed the hollowness and hypocrisy of their much-vaunted ‘values’ and ‘principles’. The title of a book by former Republican strategist Stuart Stevens says it clearly: ‘It Was All a Lie’. How the party of Lincoln descended over a century-and-a-half into the party of Trump is a long and depressing story that cannot be pursued here, but it is notable that son-in-law Jared Kushner, interviewed by Bob Woodward, described the Trumpian ascension as a ‘hostile takeover’ of the party. But only a party that was already a mere shell of its former self could have been so readily taken over.
The question now is whether Republicans can redefine and refine conservatism in a way that resists the currents of right-wing populism while presenting a real but respectable challenge to progressive forces on the left. The signs so far are not encouraging.
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).
