Postpone the election? Even fellow Republicans cannot defend Trump this time
Too late to salvage their electoral prospects, but perhaps not too late to salvage their honour, America’s Republicans have remembered what they are supposed to stand for. Donald Trump’s suggestion that the November election be postponed was too much for even the most obedient of his Congressional supporters. One after another, they lined up to distance themselves from the President’s outrageous Tweet.
They took their time. Over the past four years, American conservatives have performed some wrenching contortions. Foreign policy hawks have forgiven the President’s closeness to Vladimir Putin. Evangelical Christians have found themselves arguing that it is fine to pay off a porn star and then lie about it provided there is no technical violation of campaign finance rules. Fiscal conservatives went along with a pre-coronavirus deficit of a trillion dollars. Republicans who extolled the importance of character defended one needy, blustering, dishonest pronouncement after another.
To some extent, their attitude was transactional. As long as Trump was cutting taxes and regulations and appointing judges who believed in the Constitution, conservatives were prepared to overlook his character flaws. There was also, in a few cases, a fear of getting on the wrong side of the party’s base in advance of the primaries. In any case, human beings are tribal. Once we pick our side, we exaggerate its virtues and minimise its faults. Not that Trump was interested in qualified support. He wanted to be adored on his own account, and expected Republicans to change their positions when he changed his. He demanded loud flattery from his party – and, to an extraordinary degree, he got it.
Until now. The big-r Republican party prides itself on upholding small-r republican virtues: selfreliance, self-control and, not least, self-government. Electing the head of state under rules that stand above party and faction is arguably the supreme republican principle.
Whether Trump was seeking to undermine the legitimacy of an election he expects to lose, or whether he simply wanted to shift the conversation away from bad economic news, he was playing with fire. Civil wars happen, not when people can’t agree on what to do, but when they can’t agree on who constitutes the legitimate government.
The American republic has lasted for two and a half centuries – longer than many countries which think of themselves as older – precisely because it has been, in the phrase of John Adams, its second president, “a government of laws, not of men”.
So why this late parting of ways? Partly because Republican legislators have a sense of decency. Their party has traditionally sought to constrain executive power, and Trump represents precisely the kind of “Caesarism” that the Founders warned against – the belief, in other words, that the ends justify the means, and that the ruler is bigger than the rules. Trump’s latest idiocy – not even during the world wars did anyone cancel a presidential election – was too much.
Perhaps more significantly, they can see a post-Trump GOP coming into view. If, as now seems likely, the Donald is dumped in November, there will be a power struggle between his autocratic admirers and those mainstream Republicans who believe in free trade, low spending and limited government.
Those are not easy precepts to extol when, as now, the world is in an authoritarian spasm. But if traditional conservatives miss this chance, they won’t get another.