Why the Republican party faces a grim future
CAMPAIGN SHOWS GULF BETWEEN TRUMP, GOP PRINCIPLES
Whatever hopes Republicans may have had of their candidate salvaging a vestige of respectability from the charred rubble of his presidential campaign, those are now gone.
In his third and final televised encounter with Democrat Hillary Clinton Wednesday, Donald Trump turned in a braying, scowling, often incoherent performance, which he capped, astonishingly, by declining to say he would accept the voters’ verdict Nov. 8.
Given the state of play, particularly in the populous swing states that have moved toward the Democrats in recent weeks, Trump needed to win over millions of the undecided, traditional Republicans and some Bernie Sanders Democrats unhappy about voting for Clinton.
He also needed to offset the collapse in his support among women across the political spectrum, brought about by multiple allegations of groping levelled at him since the release of a video of him bragging about sexually assaulting women. Trump did none of those things. Instead, the GOP candidate retreated further into his alt-right cocoon, while also, incidentally, riffing at length and incoherently about the war in Iraq and Syria, ignoring or misstating basic facts, such as whether the rebel-held city of Aleppo has fallen (Trump says it has; it hasn’t), and the identity of the main combatants.
Veering into self-parody, he suggested the current allied campaign to retake the Iraqi city of Mosul from Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant should have been staged as a sneak attack — something that is militarily impossible, given the terrain. He also asserted, mystifyingly, that Iran will be the principal strategic beneficiary of a coalition victory in the battle. It was a display of incompetence and ignorance to put all his previous forays to shame.
Clinton, for her part, was unflappable, solidly if grimly reiterating her main campaign themes and refusing repeatedly to be bowled over by her opponent’s interruptions.
Her best moment, and one of Trump’s worst, came in an exchange about Russia’s Vladimir Putin. The Russian strongman, said Trump, “from everything I see, has no respect for this person (Clinton).”
Not missing a beat, Clinton fired back: “Well, that’s because he’d rather have a puppet as president of the United States.” Trump was left sputtering, “no puppet. No puppet.”
Trump’s professed admiration for Putin has always sounded bizarre, particularly coming from a Republican, and is particularly damaging in light of evidence of Russian involvement in the hacking of Democratic Party emails. Clinton’s focus on Putin was in keeping with her long-standing strategy of appealing to national-security-minded Reagan and Bush Republicans for whom the idea of cosying up to a Russian dictator will be anathema.
And here we touch the heart of a core problem for Republicans (there are so many, one loses count), which has been eclipsed by a campaign that for weeks has focused on Trump’s behaviour: he is neither conservative nor Republican, in anything but name.
Indeed Clinton, as revealed again in their exchanges Wednesday, is by far the closer of the two to traditional Republicanism. Trump made this explicit when he said he “disagreed strongly” with Ronald Reagan (198088), a late 20th-century Republican icon, on trade.
Under Reagan and both Bushes, Republicans stood in principle for the two mutually supporting pillars of smaller government and a powerful military.
Beneath the umbrella of smaller government went lower taxes, less regulation, and liberal, globalized trade. Beneath the umbrella of a powerful military went a hawkish posture toward America’s strategic adversaries, including Russia and China, and projection of the Pax Americana through the undisputed primacy of the U.S. navy.
Reagan’s crowning achievement, economically, was the original Canada-U. S. bilateral free trade agreement, later expanded to include Mexico, which came into force in 1989.
Since then, cross-border trade between Canada and the U.S. has more than tripled. In 2015, that amounted to $2.4 billion a day in trade in goods and services. About 35 U.S. states have Canada as their largest export market — which, according to Canadian government estimates, supports nine million American jobs. Trump calls this the worst deal in the history of the world.
Reagan’s crowning achievement, strategically, was the defeat of the former Soviet Union, which he de facto forced into penury through its need to compete with his unprecedented arms buildup in the 1980s. George H.W. Bush continued Reagan’s policy of robust internationalism, with his ouster of Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991.
Even George W. Bush, the catastrophe of his 2003 invasion of Iraq notwithstanding, was a classical American internationalist, seeking to project power and stability in the Reagan mould.
With his isolationist ramblings, his repeated threats to tear up the North American Free Trade Agreement and withdraw American “protection” for allies in Europe and Asia, explicitly undermining the postwar international order, Trump sets himself against the Republican tradition going back to Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s.
And that is the ultimate takeaway from these three debates: The Republican party is truly doomed. The only candidate who comes close to upholding its principles, in 2016, is a Democrat.