Are ‘Never Trumpers’ the future of the GOP?
Denouncing the $900 billion COVID-19 relief bill as a parsimonious “disgrace” and hinting at an Alamo-style finish on Jan. 6, when Congress votes to declare Joe Biden the next president, Donald Trump is not going to go quietly.
The anti-Trumpers and “Never Trumpers” celebrating at Christmas 2020, in this “dark winter” of Joe Biden’s depiction, are assuring each other that Trumpism and Trump are dead and gone for good in four weeks.
The future of the GOP, they suggest, belongs to the Republicans who resisted and renounced Trump through the last five years of his candidacy and presidency.
As for those cowards and collaborators who stood by Trump and refused to repudiate him, they will, in turn, be repudiated by history and the American electorate alike.
The wish, here, is very much the father to the thought.
For if the past is any guide, not only are the reports of the death of Trumpism premature, the probability is that Trumpism has put down roots in our national politics that are not soon, if ever, going to be pulled up.
For those of us of a certain age, a comparable situation arose at Christmas 1964. Barry Goldwater had just been crushed in a 44state landslide, winning the votes of only 27 million Americans. The senator had carried only five states of the Deep South and his home state of Arizona.
The establishment saw in the crushing of Goldwater the defeat and rout of the “extremist” movement that had produced him. “The Party That Lost Its Head” was the title of a widely hailed post-election book by two Ripon Society Republicans.
The establishment consensus was that Govs. Nelson Rockefeller of New York, William Scranton of Pennsylvania and George Romney of Michigan were the future of the party, if it was to have a future.
What followed?
Richard Nixon, who had stood by Goldwater when the party’s liberal elite abandoned him, would lead the GOP to recapture
And Bill Clinton, after leaving the White House, flew there in 2009 on a plane owned by movie producer Steve Bing. His mission: to pick up American TV journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee, imprisoned after wading across the Tumen River from the Chinese side to the North Korean side filming a documentary.
The highlight of Clinton’s one-day sortie was a three-hour lunch with Kim Il-sung’s son, Kim Jong-il, who died two years later, leaving the throne to son Kim Jongun.
Of course, while the coronavirus pandemic rages, it’s a little early to expect Kim to be ready to receive the Trumpster in his country, now more tightly closed than ever, but in this continuing drama nothing is impossible.
The transition in Korea in 2017 from the conservative Park Geun-hye to the liberal Moon Jae-in was nothing like what’s going on in the United States. The Candlelight Revolution was full of drama, but Park was in prison when Moon got elected. In Washington, Trump goes on challenging the American democratic system while opposing crowds keep shouting “Stop the Steal” and “Black Lives Matter.”
Now we have to look forward to Jan. 6 when
the Congress meets to certify the Electoral College results. Moves by Trump allies to block the process won’t get anywhere, but what if Trump clings to his desk in the Oval Office?
Images of Secret Service officers hauling him across the White
House lawn would be perfect after a year of pandemic and protest.