Will GOP pretend Trump never happened?

“This never happened. It will how much it never happened.”

This is a Don Draper line from “Mad Men,” delivered as advice he earned the hard way, when he stole another man’s identity and left his own behind.

It’s also the way that many Republican senators hope to deal with the memory of the Donald Trump era, assuming that they wake up on Nov. 4 (or whenever the ballot counting ends) and discover that the president has not been reelected.

Acting as if Trumpism “never happened” doesn’t just mean they want to blot out their memories of Trump himself, his Twitter feed, their unwilling ring-kissing, all the rest. It means that many of them believe that Trump’s election was essentially an accident, a fluke, a temporary hiatus from the kind of conservative politics they’re comfortable practicing, and so if he loses there’s no reason the Republican Party can’t go back to the way things used to be.

One of the last times I was in Washington, in days when it was still normal to hop a plane to our nation’s capital, a smart Republican staffer remarked to me that out of his entire caucus, only a small group of senators thought the GOP had something significant to learn from Trump’s ascent.

The rest were ready for the Draper

you method.

You can see that readiness at work already in the internal Republican debates about the latest round of coronavirus relief. These debates are somewhat mystifying if you believe that the party has been remade in Trump’s populist image, or alternatively if you just believe that the GOP is full of cynics who attack deficits under Democrats but happily spend whatever it takes to stay in power. Neither theory explains the Republican determination to dramatically underbid the Democrats on relief spending three months before an election, nor the emergence of a faction within the Senate Republicans that doesn’t want to spend more money on relief at all.

But these developments are easier to understand if you see the Republican Senate, in what feels like the twilight of the Trump presidency, instinctively returning to its pre-Trump battle lines. The anti-relief faction, with its sudden warnings about deficits, is eager to revive the Tea Party spirit, and its would-be leaders are ur-Tea Partyers like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz. The faction that wants to spend less than the Democrats but ultimately wants to strike a deal is playing the same beleaguered-establishmentarian role that John Boehner and Mitch McConnell played in the pre-Trump party — and of course McConnell is still leading it. And the fact that neither approach seems responsive to the actual crisis unfolding in America right now doesn’t matter: The old Tea Party-establishment battle — a battle over

more than —is still the Republican comfort zone, and the opportunity to slip back into that groove is just too tempting to resist.

It’s not clear that self-interest rightly understood would incline an ambitious Republican to bring back the old Tea Party spirit. After all, the lesson of 2016 was that Ted Cruz didn’t win, and instead True Conservatism as defined by the right’s ideological enforcers got thrashed by a real-estate mogul who promised a whole bunch of things that it turned out Republican voters favored even if their party’s activists did not. So if running the Tea Party play again reflects cynicism, then it’s a highly motivated cynicism — with the motivation being the palpable desire of most Republican senators to look back on the Trump experience and recite the Draper catechism:

Most, but not all: There is also that group my staffer friend mentioned, the senators who accept that Trumpism really happened, and who envision a different party on the other side.

You can identify the members of this group both by their willingness to spend money in the current crisis and by their interest in how it might be spent. That means Marco Rubio spearheading the small business relief bill. It means Tom Cotton defending crisis spending against Cruz’s attack.

It means Mitt Romney leading a push to put more of the federal stimulus payments in the hands of families with kids.

Notably, all of these figures have had differing approaches to Trump the man: Romney famously in opposition, Cotton fully on-side, Rubio somewhere in between.

So Republican divisions over Trump himself are somewhat different from Republican divisions over what to learn from Trumpism. A figure like Romney is antiTrump, but he might be friendlier to postTrump populism, while Cruz and Paul have ended up pro-Trump but will probably revert to their libertarian roots once he’s gone.

Or, I should say, if he ever goes. Because the trouble with both the Draper method and the “this happened, let’s learn from it” approaches to the Trump experience is that they assume not only that Trump will lose (a strong bet but of course not a certain one) but also that in defeat he will recede sufficiently to be willfully forgotten.

Will he? I don’t know. But nobody should be surprised if the desires that are so palpable among Republican senators right now will have to contend, across a Biden presidency, with an alternative embodied either by a scion or by the man himself: the dream of a Trump Restoration.