Divorcing Donald (Part I)
The combination of Donald Trump’s defeat and his disgraceful response to it provides Republicans with an opportunity to repair the damage he has inflicted upon their party.
We knew Trump wouldn’t go quietly, but the ugly way he is now departing should remove any doubts even among his most cultish followers that go he must — if fraud did the trick, as he claims, then it might be time to praise fraud.
Broadly considered, last month’s outcome was probably the best that could be hoped for the GOP’s long-term prospects
(and thus the long-term prospects of the nation as well, which needs an institutional counterweight to the increasingly radical-left Democrats). Although the presidency was lost due to Trump’s deplorable behavior and character, the Senate is likely to be kept (barring upsets in Georgia), the edge in governors’ mansions and state legislatures was slightly enhanced and, most surprising of all, there was a dozen-seat pickup in the House.
There wasn’t the anticipated “blue wave,” but more of a “red ripple.” Instruction should be taken from this; the only major loser was the guy at the top of the ticket. As Trump himself put it in a remarkable but typical display of obliviousness, “All these other Republicans, all over the country, they all win their races. And I’m the only guy that loses?”
The 2020 presidential outcome was indeed all about Trump, and the one clear message was rejection of him, not of the GOP. In the end, whatever policy successes he could legitimately claim (and there were many), too many people simply couldn’t stomach the idea of four more years of vulgar behavior, daily chaos and flouting of long-standing norms associated with our highest office.
Trump is making noise about running again in 2024, and the “stolen election” narrative is being put in place to justify such a would-be revenge tour. But it is up to the Republican Party to belatedly now do what it so conspicuously failed to do five years ago — unite to send Trump packing and begin to build a Trump-free party for a post-Trump world.
Trump won the GOP nomination in 2016 because none of the “establishment” candidates took him seriously until it was too late. The “dump Trump” movement at the convention then foundered because of the threat that he would go third-party and hand the election to the despised Hillary Clinton. Ironically, it was Trump’s complete lack of loyalty to the GOP that allowed him to hold it hostage.
When Trump went on to upset Clinton, the argument was also made that only he could have pulled it off, that his populist appeal was a better vote-getter than stodgy Republican establishmentarianism.
That claim was always dubious because it ignored the fact that he improbably drew an opponent every bit as unappealing and incompetent as he was (and even then still lost the popular vote by more than two percentage points). Rather than being in awe of Trump the dragon-slayer, all concerned should have recognized an 88,000-vote fluke when they saw it.
More specifically, the idea of Trump as political juggernaut ignores not just the flaws of his 2016 opponent and her dismal campaign, but two interesting sets of numbers: that Barack Obama won reelection to the presidency in 2012, defeating Mitt Romney in the popular vote 51.147.2 percent, and that Obama’s former vice president, Joe Biden, won the presidency this year by beating Trump in the popular vote by exactly the same margin 51.1-47.2 percent (according to the latest results).
Which means that the ineffectual “loser” (in Trump’s words) Romney did precisely as well against the most talented politician of our age as Trump did against an opponent so feeble he was hardly able to make it onto the campaign trail and who was stuck with such an unpopular radical-left platform that he spent what little time he did spend campaigning avoiding talking about any of it.
Republicans should take note that it takes a historically awful candidate to lose the popular vote in back-to-back elections by solid margins to the likes of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, but Trump somehow managed it. It beggars belief to claim that any other reasonable Republican (including even the much-disparaged Romney) wouldn’t have done better.
Grover Cleveland is the only president who served two terms with a different president in between, and no major American political party has renominated a candidate who lost last time around since the Democrats went with Adlai Stevenson in 1956 (who then proceeded to lose by a bigger margin than in 1952, permanently discouraging such rematches).
Nixon’s comeback from the political dead aside, tradition dictates that those who lose presidential elections find something else to occupy their time thereafter; that their party moves on without them, retooled and with something of a clean slate.
It would be a catastrophe for the GOP if it failed to stick to this tradition for the sake of a man who has never cared a whit about the GOP.
There is a difference between a political party and a personality cult. Let’s now see if “the stupid party” can figure out what that difference is.