The GOP Has a Mess on Its Hands
Will Republicans give away two Senate seats in Georgia by suppressing their own vote?
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“How do we get out of this?”
That’s the question preoccupying the right these days. The specific “this” varies, but what unites all the concerns is the mess Donald Trump has made.
For Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the “this” is the embarrassing mess in Georgia, where many gettable Republican voters believe there’s no point in returning to the polls for the Senate runoff next month.
Hence one of the great ironies of 2020: For two years, Democrats falsely claimed Republicans had stolen the governor’s race from Stacey Abrams with “voter suppression.” Now, because of the president’s tantrum, Republicans are poised to give away two Senate seats—and control of the Senate—by actually suppressing their own vote with equally false claims of fraud. Even Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, the Trump loyalist who defeated Abrams, is now said to be in on a conspiracy to hand the state to Joe Biden.
For the Republicans who’d like to be president, the “this” they’re trying to extricate themselves from is Trump’s captivity of the party.
In 2016, the GOP was trapped in a game-theory version of the parable—often attributed to Aesop—of belling the cat. It’s in the collective interest of all the mice to put a bell on the cat, but it’s not in the self-interest of any individual mouse to be the one to do it. Each Republican presidential candidate wanted Trump out of the race, but none wanted to volunteer for the political suicide mission to get rid of him—at least not until it was too late. By threatening to run again in 2024, Trump has put the presidential hopefuls in the same predicament they faced in 2016.
Even if Mike Pence, Ted Cruz, Nikki Haley, Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley and the rest actually believe the fawning things they say about Trump, none believe them so strongly that they would like to see him maintain his hold on the party and block their paths. But none of them want bell duty because Trump’s ability to slaughter mice is far greater than it was in 2016. They helped build a better mousetrap and now have no idea how to dismantle it.
But “this” doesn’t end there. As Trump and his apparatchiks pull the party down around them, they’re lashing out not just at the democratic system, but at the right itself. Fox News (where I am a contributor) is now a hive of villainy in Trump’s eyes for not reading from the approved script. The thinking seems to be that what America and the right need most in the years ahead is a right-of-center media fully committed to a definition of conservatism that begins and ends as a Trump cult of personality, eagerly trafficking in the conspiratorial phantasms that sustain the soon-to-be-former president.
Over the weekend, on Fox News no less, Trump lashed out at the FBI and Attorney General William Barr’s Justice Department for possibly being in on the conspiracy to “rig the election” and for being “missing in action” in the effort to expose the crime.
And because Trump was dealt his biggest legal defeat by a Pennsylvania federal judge who, despite being an Obama appointee, is a member of the conservative Federalist Society, there’s a growing murmur that the Federalist Society must be in on it, too. Of course, most of Trump’s court picks are also Federalist Society members.
You can be sure that if Trump gets his wish in the form of a hearing before the Supreme Court—or a refusal by the court to give him one—the murmurs will become a crescendo.
Among many conservatives, Trump’s destructive response to his defeat is seen as the problem. That is certainly a problem. But it’s downstream of the original sin of embracing Trump in the first place. To borrow again from Aesop, it was clear he was a scorpion from the outset.
“Progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be,” C.S. Lewis observed. “And if you have taken a wrong turn, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.”
The best solution to the right’s predicament is to turn around and head back in the right direction they skipped in 2016. But politics is the art of getting the crowd to follow you. And the people who followed Trump down this path understandably fear that if they turn around now, nobody will follow them.
Photo by Tia Dufour/The White House via Getty Images.
As a life-long Georgian and ex-GOP activist, I find the current state of affairs down here sickening.
The Ga SOS spokesperson Gabriel Sterling gave the speech every elected official needs to give, condemning threats of violence and upholding free and fair elections. (Check it out if you haven't seen it--a real stem-winder.) Of course, Trump responded by doubling down with his typical BS:
"Rigged Election. Show signatures and envelopes. Expose the massive voter fraud in Georgia. What is Secretary of State and @BrianKempGA afraid of. They know what we’ll find!!!"
I don't want the Democrats to control both the WH and Congress but for the love of all things decent I don't see how I can possibly vote for Perdue and Loeffler while they cower at the feet of Donald Trump and his outrageous post-election behavior.
Republicans picked an utterly repulsive, evil man to lead their party. An evil man who does not care about *anything* but himself and his trophies. Trump's regard for the Republican party is the same as his regard for the Democratic party: zero. To Trump, the GOP is another mark in his scam.
If you are in business for any number of years, you occasionally run across a character like Trump. This is somebody who will promise to make you money if you join them (partner, invest, buy their product, whatever) and they will brag that you will make a profit **because they are going to screw over everybody (except you of course, they say)**.
You learn (hopefully not the hard way) that this character is what psychologists call a "psychopath": somebody whose brain is literally, physically different than a normal person's wherein they are missing the portion that creates *empathy*. The book* cited below talks about people who can drive by the scene of a car accident with a fatality on the ground and feel nothing. These people are more common than most think and most don't wind up actual criminals.
Psychopaths are very hard for normal people to understand. Trump is a great example, whom is misunderstood by even his most ardent political opponents when they begin their accusation with, "Trump doesn't understand" or, "Trump believes". When Trump does something destructive to others, a normal person would conclude that you would never do such a thing unless you were mistaken. But of course Trump *does* understand, he does *not* believe in QAnon, voter fraud, or any of the other things he says he believes which currently includes the Republican party platform.
But people's continued failure to comprehend a psychopath is what gives them their power: people often *feel sorry* for the person because they... "don't understand"... so many things.
And make no mistake, Trump's schtick is a catchy one: most Trump supporters would rather be thought a dupe than evil. They would rather tell people that they believe in QAnon rather than telling them they knowingly support a man who is destructive to our country because they want their stock portfolio to go up in value. They may not be psychopaths themselves, but they've been introduced to the benefits.
* https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004XFYWC0/