Who lost the election... Trump, or the Republican Party?
Let’s face it – Donald Trump was never going to concede graciously, said E.J. Dionne Jr in The Washington Post. It’s not his style. The real question was always whether the Republican Party would go along with his attempt to challenge the election, or stand up for democratic norms. Alas, with a few honourable exceptions, Republican leaders have taken the first path. We shouldn’t be surprised. The GOP always paints Democratic victories as illegitimate. In 1992, when Bill Clinton beat George H.W. Bush, Republicans insisted he wasn’t a true winner because – owing to Ross Perot’s third-party run – he didn’t get an overall majority. In 2008, when Barack Obama thrashed John McCain, parts of the GOP again sought to discredit the result, by falsely claiming Obama was ineligible to be president because he hadn’t been born in the US. We should have known the Republican party would be “quite happy to be complicit in Trump’s subversion”.
Republican leaders have long felt uncomfortable with Trump’s excesses, said Jonah Goldberg in the Boston Herald. But they’ve put up with them because he delivered tax cuts and judicial appointments. Like many bad marriages, though, this one’s heading for a “messy divorce”. The election brought a “massive turnout of anti-Trump voting” – and a sizeable chunk of it was made up of alienated Republican-leaning voters. Trump’s extreme, bullying style probably cost the GOP the election.
On the contrary, said Peter Beinart in The New York Review of Books, it was the Republican leadership that sabotaged Trump’s chances. Four years ago, Trump campaigned as an economic populist. He promised to raise the minimum wage, end Wall Street tax perks and launch a huge infrastructure programme. That could have been a winning recipe. It was the GOP leaders who forced him to shelve those plans and to focus instead on their priority: a massive, regressive tax cut bill that has proved unpopular with all but the very rich. Just weeks before the election, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell stymied Trump’s attempt to agree a new stimulus bill backed by 70% of Americans. Little wonder that Trump, compared with the 2016 election, did better this time with the richest voters, but worse with the poorest ones. “Trump didn’t lose re-election because he changed the Republican Party too much. He lost because he changed it too little.”