Why anti-Trump Republicans make me swear
And why they'll end up sticking their heads in the sand
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So I have to admit that when I read the following few paragraphs in The Hill, I swore very loudly:
Senate Republicans who are concerned about former President Trump’s viability in a general election now see Nikki Haley as the last, best chance of denying Trump the GOP presidential nomination and averting what they see as a potential general election disaster.
GOP senators who don’t support Trump acknowledge he could win the presidency, given President Biden’s weak job approval ratings, but they view Haley as much more electable because she does not alienate independent and suburban women voters like Trump does.
They are worried that if Trump is the GOP nominee, it could still lead to a disastrous result for their party.
Why did I swear? Because I feel like I’m rewatching a very bad movie which was first released in 2016.
When Donald Trump first launched his hostile takeover of the Republican Party in that year, the response of the establishment GOP was a mixture of fecklessness and selfishness. The selfishness came from the fact that they perceived Donald Trump not primarily as a threat to the country but rather as a threat to their party. Many Republicans believed that if Trump was their candidate come November, the party faced probable wipe-out, and it was in this context that they wanted someone else to run in his place. After the Access Hollywood tape was released - the one on which Trump admitted to sexual assault - RNC chair Reince Prebius told Trump that “either you’ll lose in the biggest landslide in history, or you can get out of the race and let somebody else run who can win”.
The fecklessness was evident in two ways. Firstly, despite this supposed mortal threat to their chances, the party’s establishment and its so-called moderates never banded together to make a serious attempt to remove Trump from the ticket. Secondly, they never confronted the real question that their supposed belief raised: if Trump was really that bad, what would happen if he actually became president?
In fact, I’ve come to see this entire discourse as a way of deflecting attention away from that question, and to allow Republicans to avoid actually doing anything. “Trump is so bad he’s going to lose!” is, in a way, a comforting message: it might suck for the Republican Party to lose an election, but it’s not going to plunge America into authoritarianism or anarchy. If you want to stop Trump winning the primary because you think he’s going to lose the general, then you have to convince Republican primary voters not to vote for him. But that’s very hard, and so it’s best just to do nothing except wait for the inevitable defeat come November.
Unfortunately, though, “Trump is so bad he’s going to lose!” is not at all true. Modern American elections are decided by razor-thin margins in just a few states, and it is perfectly possible that some quirk of the Electoral College or of public opinion could hand Trump the keys to the White House. After all, it happened in 2016. And while the GOP primary electorate is the most rabidly pro-Trump slice of the public and are unlikely to care what Senator Susan Collins or Rep. Steve Womack think, the swing voters who decide the election might.
But in order to have some chance of swaying the result and stopping the election of a man who is basically running on a platform of ending American democracy, Republicans would have to actually have the guts to come out - preferably en masse - and make the case to the electorate at large that electing him would be a mistake. In doing so, they would have to accept that for all of their disagreements with him, Joe Biden is at least a normal politician who will do normal politician things that they dislike rather than someone whose own ego and stupidity might drag the American republic into its greatest crisis since the Civil War.
But they won’t do that. They’ll just sit back and watch the cataclysm unfold, telling themselves and anyone who listen that it’s never going to happen. And that’s why I swear loudly whenever I hear a Republican lamenting that Trump will lead their party to disaster, as if that was the worst possible thing he could do.