Evening Standard - ES Magazine
ALL FIGHT ON THE RIGHT
Is the REPUBLICAN PARTY imploding?
Political parties are like families. Happy ones are all alike. Every unhappy one is unhappy in its own way. After a tumultuous few months, the US Republican Party is a very unhappy family. When Donald Trump refused to concede defeat, he pushed an outlandish lie about a stolen election. This divisive fantasy helped his party lose control of the Senate in two elections in Georgia and culminated in the violent desecration of the Capitol building on 6 January by a mob of the former president’s supporters. Those grim scenes led to Trump’s second impeachment trial in as many years. He would be acquitted but tarnished, with a record seven Republicans voting to convict a member of their own party. The upshot of this unfortunate series of events is a party out of power and at war with itself in a way that makes previous spats look tame.
One way of understanding these schisms is by considering two congresswomen who have found themselves at the heart of bitter intra-party rows in recent weeks. One was raised at the centre of the Republican establishment, whose failings Trump so skilfully exploited to take power. The other is a Trumpian outsider whose fringe, conspiratorial views represent what many see as the dark turn the Republicans have taken lately. The recent focus on these women has revealed the dividing lines that really matter on the American right today, and their respective fortunes in the coming years will demonstrate how dramatic — and how permanent — the transformation of the Republican Party under Trump has been.
In the establishment corner: Liz Cheney. The 54-year-old daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney, a ruthless political operator himself who will be forever remembered as the most full-throated advocate of the Iraq War. Cheney the Younger has quickly developed her own reputation for toughness. Elected in 2016, the Wyoming congresswoman has done what few Republicans have managed in recent years: succeed while keeping some distance between herself and Trump, rising through the ranks to become the third most powerful Republican in the House of Representatives while striking a balance between outright opposition and unquestioning support for the former president. One Republican colleague has compared her to Margaret Thatcher: ‘A woman who stands her ground in an otherwise male-dominated world.’
Since 6 January, Cheney has stood her ground against her own side for stating what she evidently sees as a simple fact: that Trump is to blame for the attack on the Capitol. ‘There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution,’ she said when she announced her intention to vote to impeach Trump. Doing so led to a resounding vote for her censure in her home state’s Republican Party. It also led to calls for her removal from the Republican House leadership team. But in a vote of Republican representatives, Cheney survived — in part thanks to the fact it was a secret ballot, meaning her colleagues were safe from the wrath of Trump supporters in their home districts. After harsh rebukes from fellow Republican politicians and voters, Cheney has not softened her criticism. The top-ranking Republican in the House and Trump loyalist, Kevin McCarthy, reportedly asked her to apologise for her impeachment vote. She refused.
While Cheney has been under fire for things she has done in Congress in recent weeks, Marjorie Taylor Greene finds herself in the spotlight for things she said before she was elected in November. Greene, 46, is a political outsider who used to own a CrossFit gym in suburban Atlanta. Now she represents a rural, deeply conservative part of northern Georgia and quickly became known as the member for QAnon, the conspiracy theory that claims Trump was secretly working to defeat a cabal of Satan-worshipping child abusers in senior government positions. Once a follower of ‘Q’, Greene says she ‘stopped
believing’ the theory in 2018. She has had to retract other claims, too, such as the idea that fatal school shootings were staged to boost the case for gun control, that no plane hit the Pentagon on 9/11, or that California wildfires were started by a space laser controlled by the Rothschilds. Adding to the pressure on Greene is footage of her haranguing a school shooting survivor and calling him a coward.
Democrats in the House, with the support of 11 Republicans, voted to strip her of her seat on the legislature’s committees. But Republican leaders resisted calls to kick Greene out of the party over her comments.
Publicly, the treatment of Cheney and Greene by their colleagues was remarkably similar: a mixture of criticism and solidarity. One of Cheney’s friends called any comparison between the two women ‘comical’. Cheney sees her job as public service whereas Greene is in it for hits and clicks, they tell me. On one level, they’re right. It seems absurd to compare Cheney with someone as outlandish as Greene. But many Republican voters see things differently. According to an AxiosMorning Consult survey, Greene has a net favourability rating among Republicans of +10 while Cheney is languishing on -27. An effective political influencer and creature of social media, Greene is a relentless combatant in the culture wars. There is no issue on which she won’t defend the Maga world view, with a fervour that makes the former president look restrained. And most importantly, she is now frequently a target of the Democratic Party.
‘It’s a bit like your younger brother,’ says Jason Shepherd, chairman of the Republican Party in Cobb County, Georgia. ‘It’s okay for you to be rude about him, but it’s also your job to protect him if other people start to bully him.’ Because the left disapproves of her, Shepherd is confident she will be re-elected.
Republican strategist Luke Thompson is blunt: ‘The people of north Georgia voted for her knowing she was a nut,’ he says. ‘And they deserve to get the outcome of their vote good and hard.’ It’s tempting to dismiss Greene’s views as representative of a lunatic fringe, but polling suggests otherwise. A recent American Enterprise Institute survey found that almost three in 10 Republican voters agreed with the central claim of the QAnon conspiracy theory. According to Quinnipiac, 76 per cent of Republicans think there was widespread fraud in November’s election.
Even after 6 January, Trump remains by some margin Republican voters’ favoured leader. And perhaps the lesson of Greene’s appeal is that siding with Trump is still a Republican politician’s best bet. But another lesson from the past election is that Trump enthusiasts aren’t a large enough group to win an election . They need moderates, too.
Where does that leave the likes of Cheney who, for all their robustly conservative views, have split with the former president? She and those like her will surely take heart from the strong showing of many Republicans who distanced themselves from Trump in last year’s election. Ben Sasse and Susan Collins, prominent Trump critics and Republican Senators from Nebraska and Maine respectively, both outperformed their party’s presidential candidate across their states.
Perhaps a more worrying question for Republicans is: how can a party function when the broad coalition of voters needed to win the next election can’t even agree who won the last one? Thompson doesn’t think that matters as much to voters as it does to political obsessives. ‘Nobody’s mortgage gets paid by that question,’ he says. ‘Nobody gets to buy a boat or sends their kids to college cheaply because of it. It does not matter.’
Republicans have the luxury of being in opposition — often a unifying time for even the most divided parties as they can focus on the shortcomings of the other side’s agenda rather than what they can agree on themselves. This, if nothing else, will probably be how the Grand Old Party avoids rupture.
And as Republicans make the case against Joe Biden and the Democrats, Greene won’t be the face of the party, nor will Cheney. Neither the Republican old guard nor the wild fringes of the party’s Trump wing are in full control. In fact, no one is. And perhaps the mistake is to think that one side of the party’s divide has to triumph definitively.
Republicans have been at each other’s throats since Trump descended his golden escalator and announced his presidential candidacy in 2015. His defeat has not changed that, and for better or for worse, today’s Republican Party is a tent big enough to include the old guard like Cheney and cranks like Greene. Whether that is the secret to its success or the beginning of its demise remains to be seen.