Leaving Mitch in the ditch: Trump loyalty may prove too potent a force in the GOP for McConnell to handle
It took a little longer for the inevitable post-election Republican implosion than might have been expected. Perhaps they were exhausted from all the excitement of witnessing a historic violent insurrection or maybe they are just aimless without former President Donald Trump's Twitter feed to guide them. It's possible they were a little bit gun-shy since people are being investigated for committing sedition all over the country after their assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6th. Whatever the reason, the normally voluble Republicans went uncharacteristically quiet for a few days during Joe Biden's Inauguration week. That silence ended over the weekend after two state Republican parties decided it was time to deal with the traitors in their midst.
In Arizona, the party reelected Kelli Ward — a Trump fanatic who lost her bid for the GOP nomination to the Senate in 2018— as the state chairman and her first order of business was to offer a censure motion against a raft of prominent Republicans, including former Senator Jeff Flake, Cindy McCain, the wife of former Senator John McCain and sitting Governor Steve Ducey, all for the crime of failing to be properly loyal to Donald Trump. The first two are vocal critics and didn't vote for Trump, but Gov. Ducey has been a loyal minion whose only crime was refusing to break the law and somehow give Donald Trump more votes in the election.
Meanwhile, the Republican State Central Committee of Kentucky met on Saturday to vote on a resolution demanding that Minority Leader Mitch McConnell support former President Donald Trump and condemn his second impeachment. The resolution failed on procedural grounds but the people who brought it up say they plan to bring another motion demanding McConnell's resignation. There is no chance that will pass either. Mitch McConnell is the most powerful Republican in the federal government and the Kentucky political establishment knows that. But both of these events reveal that Trump loyalty remains a potent force in the party.
It also illustrates the bind that Mitch McConnell finds himself in.
Polling shows that a large majority of Republicans are still in thrall to Trump to be sure, but somewhere between one-fifth and one-fourth of the party has fallen away. A Pew poll taken after the insurrection found that more than 30% of Republicans disapprove of Trump. That may not seem like much but it is enough to make it impossible for Republicans to win nationally if those people fall away from the GOP permanently. As the Atlantic's Ron Brownstein put it, "if Biden could lastingly attract even a significant fraction of the Republican voters dismayed over the riot, it would constitute a seismic change in the political balance of power."
Nobody knows that better than Mitch McConnell who just lost four Senate seats in Arizona and Georgia, states that were solid red not long ago. Those kind of wins are predictable in purple states like Colorado (which the Republicans also lost) but losing four seats in Arizona and Georga is a harbinger of big problems for the GOP in metro and suburban areas around the country. And after what happened on Jan. 6th, Trump and his agitated, radical following are very likely to make things even worse. In that Pew Poll, 43% of Republicans said they do not want Trump to remain a major political figure.
It has long been obvious that Mitch McConnell doesn't care for Donald Trump. He's a big pain in the neck if nothing else and McConnell understands that a leader who can never get above 50% approval is not someone they can count on to deliver for the party. In fact, Trump never did. He barely pulled out an electoral college win in 2016, lost in 2020 and lost both the House and the Senate during his only term. It's not a good record.
McConnell gave a strong speech condemning the move to object to the electoral votes before the riot started on Jan. 6th, even making the point that the election was "not unusually close." And after the attack, he floated several trial balloons in the mainstream press to test out the appetite for convicting Trump in a second impeachment trial. He's made it clear that his senators are free to vote their conscience and even gave a speech on the floor saying "the mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the President and other powerful people."
But before we get too excited about this born again, patriotic Mitch McConnell, let's not forget that he declined to step up and say that the election was decided until very late in the game and then held back from his criticism until the Georgia runoff elections were over, just in case he got to keep the majority. He, along with all the other GOP leaders, allowed Trump's Big Lie to spread and metastasize into a massive conspiracy theory that led hundreds of people to storm the Capitol. And for four years, knowing what Trump was didn't stop McConnell from using the power he had while he had it. Just because Trump was driving the party into the ditch was no reason not to confirm a whole bunch of right-wing judges and pass some huge tax cuts, am I right? He even went out of his way to make sure that Trump stayed in office when the Democrats conveniently offered him a way to get rid of him and replace him with good old, reliable right-wing Mike Pence. McConnell made that deal with the devil and he's scrambling to figure out what to do about old Beelzebub now that he's on the outside looking in.
McConnell isn't the only member of the GOP leadership who is dancing as fast as he can either.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, one of the most verbally incontinent politicians in Washington, doesn't know which way to turn either. At first, he said Trump won the election and he voted to overturn the electoral college, then turned around and said Trump bears some responsibility for the insurrection, then reversed himself and said Trump didn't provoke it and finally laid the blame at the feet of all Americans.
The 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump are being threatened including Liz Cheney who is in danger of losing her leadership role in the caucus. The House Republicans are all at McCarthy's, and each other's, throats.
And nobody knows what they're going to do about the Senate impeachment trial. Some Republicans would like to draw it out and make it a Trumpian spectacle, while McConnell would prefer not to have Trump back in the spotlight. And now there may even be some jockeying for power within the Senate leadership:
Interesting. @LeaderMcConnell says Trump committed impeachable offenses. @JohnCornyn clearly disagrees. Is Cornyn p… https://t.co/2SFEaDabrb— stuart stevens (@stuart stevens)1611523123.0
McConnell has plenty of tricks up his sleeves and it's unlikely Cornyn is actually maneuvering. But it's been years since they had this much tension within their caucus and he may not be able to control his fractious bunch of Trumpish radicals like Josh Hawley, R-Mo, Ted Cruz, R-Tx, and Lindsey Graham, R-SC, who is strangely obsessed with defending Trump far beyond what is politically useful. I hope the Democrats are prepared to battle a party that's in disarray. It may not be as easy as it seems.
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The future of Trumpism: How the right's fallen hero could become yet another embarrassing regret
One version of conventional wisdom holds that if the Republican establishment had tried harder to control Donald Trump, his supporters might have started to question him and he would have lost his stranglehold on the Republican base. We fondly recall those Republican leaders, led by the right-wing senator and former presidential nominee Barry Goldwater, going up to the White House to tell Richard Nixon it was over, or the Senate's vote to censure red-baiting Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy, as events that broke the fever and brought their rabid followers back to reality.
As far as Nixon is concerned, I don't think any of us should be soothed by that example. It was only six years later that the conservative movement that had been turbocharged by Goldwater's 1964 defeat reached the pinnacle of national power with the election of Ronald Reagan. The fever didn't break. It got stronger.
And according to an article in the Washington Post by Yale historian Beverly Gage, we might recall McCarthy as the most hated man in America, but he maintained the support of a third of the country even after he was driven out of politics in disgrace. I wrote last week about the GOP's reluctance to confront McCarthy (and Trump), out of both fear and opportunism. But Gage points out that out of that ignominious defeat, a new generation of right-wing activists was born. And she adds, ominously:
We don't often hear, she observes, about "the counter narrative that began to build among McCarthy's grass-roots supporters during those years, in which the sheer volume of criticism aimed at the senator became proof that he was right all along: that the country was, indeed, run by a menacing but elusive liberal-communist conspiracy aimed at taking down right-thinking, God-fearing Americans."
That certainly sounds familiar. Gage also notes that this began the construction of right-wing institutions that took advantage of the conspiratorial thinking that sprang from that era. Over the years they dropped poor old McCarthy from their list of mentors, replacing him with more respectable names like Goldwater and Reagan. But McCarthyism was the genesis of what came to be defined as the conservative movement.
Gage continues:
Trump held a rally in Georgia over the weekend, ostensibly to support the two Republican senators campaigning for the runoff election in January and gave his interpretation:
If you wanted a plain and simple definition of Trumpism, McCarthyism or any other version of the conspiracy-addled conservative mindset, there it is. This sense of grievance has been there for many decades now.
I don't know whether this will have legs, though. Trump's supporters are up in arms about what they've been told is a stolen election. They believe their leader when he tells them that he has proof and that his forces will prevail. It's hard to predict what they will do when confronted with the hard cold fact that Trump is no longer going to be president. This Tuesday marks the "safe harbor" deadline for the resolution of all electoral disputes, and the members of the Electoral College will cast their votes next Monday, Dec. 14. Trump's fans may enjoy playing victims, but when it comes to their leaders, they don't like losers.
As we consider whether Trump will retain his popularity with this base, I would just remind people that we've just recently seen a Republican president topple from dizzying heights of popularity that Trump has never come close to seeing. I'm speaking of George W. Bush, who entered the White House having lost the popular vote and won in the Electoral College, thanks to machinations in a state that was governed by his brother, along with an overtly partisan Supreme Court decision. He nonetheless entered office with a 57% approval rating, which soared to 90% after 9/11. Bush soon fell out of favor with Democrats after he launched the Iraq war, but Republicans adored him as fervently as they love Trump.
Bush flew high for years. The mainstream media extolled him as the second coming of Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln rolled into one. His cocksure declaration that the terrorists would "hear from us real soon" at the World Trade Center site had pundits swooning as if he had delivered FDR's "a day that will live in infamy" speech. He was perceived as a cowboy who liked to clear brush on his faux ranch in Texas, but also a guy but with a great arm who could "throw a strike" over the plate in the first Yankee game after the terrorist attack. A year or so later, he was seen as a fighter-pilot president who landed on the deck of an aircraft carrier, evoking hours of stomach-churning, sycophantic media coverage. Here's one of the most egregious examples from that day, a so-called commentary from Chris Matthews:
If you think Trump's rallies are filled with ecstatic followers, you don't remember the Bush events in 2004 in which he would land on the field on Marine One to the thundering strains of "The Natural" theme. By the way, Bush actually won his re-election campaign, unlike Donald Trump. And guess what happened after that? Within three years, his war was a train wreck, the economy was in free fall and he had bungled the horrific disaster of Hurricane Katrina. Then the global economy imploded and Bush became monumentally unpopular, seeing his approval rating sink as low as 25% by October 2008, just before the election of Barack Obama.
Will Trump's followers go the way the Bush-loving base once went? I don't know, but it's certainly possible. As I said, for all their grievances and feelings of victimization, Republicans don't like losers. And Donald Trump is most definitely a colossal, historic failure, whose pathetic attempts to pretend otherwise have sealed his legacy as the sorest loser in recent human history.
Unfortunately, whether they call themselves the conservative movement, the Reagan Revolution, proud patriots, the Tea Party, MAGA, Trumpism or something else, that rabid base will still be with us. They love to worship their leaders, but when they get tired of them they toss them out like yesterday's papers and start looking for the next one. But Wingnut Nation will live on, Trump or no Trump.