Trump’s GOP faces a historic correction

As the Donald Trump parenthesis in the Republic’s history closes, he is opening the sluices on his reservoir of invectives and self-pity.

A practitioner of crybaby conservatism — no one, he thinks, has suffered so much since Job lost his camels and acquired boils — and ever a weakling, Trump will end his presidency as he began it: whining.

His first day cloaked in presidential dignity he spent disputing photographic proof that his inauguration crowd was substantially smaller than his immediate predecessor’s. His presidency that began with a wallow in selfpity probably will end in ignominy when he slinks away pouting, trailing clouds of recriminations, without a trace of John McCain’s graciousness on election night 2008:

“Sen. Obama has achieved a great thing for himself and for his country. I applaud him for it, and offer my sincere sympathy that his beloved grandmother did not live to see this day — though our faith assures us she is at rest in the presence of her Creator and so very proud of the good man she helped raise. … And my heart is filled with nothing but gratitude … to the American people for giving me a fair hearing before deciding that Sen. Obama and my old friend, Sen. Joe Biden, should have the honor of leading us for the next four years.”

Just 12 years separate the nation from this tradition of political competition bounded by banisters of good manners. Subsequently, the Republican Party has eagerly surrendered its self-respect. And having hitched its wagon to a plummeting cinder, the party is about to have a rendezvous with a surly electorate wielding a truncheon.

The party picked a bad year to invite a mugging, a year ending in zero: Approximately 80% of state legislative seats will be filled this year, and next year the occupants, many of them Democrats wafted into office by a wave election, will redraw congressional districts based on the 2020 census.

After Democrats controlled the House for 40 years (19541994), control of it changed under four presidents (Bill Clinton in 1994, George W. Bush in 2006, Barack Obama in 2010, Trump in 2018). Trump’s legacy might include a decade of Democratic control of the House.

Political prophecy is an optional folly, but occasionally, as now, it might be useful by encouraging eligible voters to take the trouble to participate in a historic correction. It is not yet probable, but is not highly improbable, that Joe Biden can become the first candidate in 32 years to capture more than 400 electoral votes (George H.W. Bush, 426 in 1988). He can do this by carrying some Trump 2016 states.

The GOP’s desire — demonstrated in myriad measures in many states — for low voter turnout is prudent: As the nation becomes more urban, suburban, diverse and secular, the Republican Party becomes more fixated on rural and small-town white voters. Now the rural population, 60 million, is about what it was in 1945. Since then, the urban population has almost tripled.

Analyst Charlie Cook asks: “In 2016, 87% of Trump’s vote came from whites. For congressional Republicans in the 2018 midterms, it was 86%. Is this sustainable?”

You have to admire Republicans’ jaunty, if suicidal, wager that it is.