HOW TRUMP PUSHED HIS PARTY ONE STEP TOO FAR
Republicans were willing to ignore all his faults until he talked about postponing the election
TOO late to salvage their electoral prospects, but perhaps not too late to salvage their honour, America’s Republicans have remembered what they are supposed to stand for. Donald Trump’s suggestion that the November election be postponed was too much for even the most obedient of his Congressional supporters. One after another, they lined up to distance themselves from the US president’s outrageous tweet.
They took their time. Over the past four years, American conservatives have performed some wrenching contortions. Foreign policy hawks have forgiven the president’s closeness to Vladimir Putin. Evangelical Christians have found themselves arguing that it is fine to pay off a porn star and then lie about it provided there is no technical violation of campaign finance rules. Fiscal conservatives went along with a pre-coronavirus deficit of a trillion dollars. Republicans who extolled the importance of character defended one needy, blustering, dishonest pronouncement after another.
To some extent, their attitude was transactional. As long as Trump was cutting taxes and regulations and appointing judges who believed in the constitution, conservatives were prepared to overlook his character flaws. There was also, in a few cases, a fear of getting on the wrong side of the party’s base in advance of the primaries. In any case, human beings are tribal. Once we pick our side, we exaggerate its virtues and minimise its faults. Not that Trump was interested in qualified support. He wanted to be adored on his own account, and expected Republicans to change their positions when he changed his. He demanded loud flattery from his party — and, to an extraordinary degree, he got it.
Until now. The ‘big-R’ Republican party prides itself on upholding ‘small-r’ republican virtues: self-reliance, self-control and, not least, self-government. Electing the head of state under rules that stand above party and faction is arguably the supreme republican principle.
Whether Trump was seeking to undermine the legitimacy of an election he expects to lose, or whether he simply wanted to shift the conversation away from bad economic news, he was playing with fire. Civil wars happen, not when people can’t agree on what to do, but when they can’t agree on who constitutes the legitimate government.
The American republic has lasted for two-and-ahalf centuries — longer than many countries which think of themselves as older — precisely because it has been, in the phrase of John Adams, its second president, “a government of laws, not of men”.
So why this late parting of ways? Partly because Republican legislators have a sense of decency. Their party has traditionally sought to constrain executive power, and Trump represents precisely the kind of “Caesarism” that the founders warned against — the belief,
in other words, that the ends justify the means, and that the ruler is bigger than the rules. Trump’s latest idiocy — not even during the world wars did anyone cancel a presidential election — was too much.
Perhaps more significantly, they can see a post-Trump GOP coming into view. If, as now seems likely, the Donald is dumped in November, there will be a power struggle between his autocratic admirers and those mainstream Republicans who believe in free trade, low spending and limited government.
Those are not easy precepts to extol when, as now, the world is in an authoritarian spasm. But if traditional conservatives miss this chance, they won’t get another.
The top Democrats in Congress are “not close yet” to reaching a deal with the White House to pump more money into the US economy to ease the coronavirus’s heavy toll, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters yesterday, after an essential lifeline for millions of unemployed Americans expired.
“This was the longest meeting we had and it was more productive than the other meetings,” Schumer said. “There are many issues that are still very much outstanding.”
Schumer made the remarks after he and US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi concluded a three-hour meeting with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows at the Capitol yesterday.
Congress for the past several months has been unable to reach an accord for a next round of economic relief from a pandemic that has killed more than 150,000 Americans and triggered the sharpest economic collapse since the Great Depression.
In a meeting on Thursday night between top White House officials and congressional Democratic leaders, negotiations focused on an extension of the $600 (€510) per week in federal unemployment benefits, which Americans who lost jobs because of the health crisis have been receiving in addition to state jobless payments.
The House in May passed a $3tn deal that addressed a wide range of coronavirus responses, including more money for testing, for elections and support to financially strapped state and local governments.
Trump said he will take action immediately to ban TikTok, a popular Chinese-owned video app that has been a source of national security and censorship concerns.
Trump’s comments came after published reports that the administration is planning to order China’s ByteDance to sell TikTok.
There were also reports last Friday that software giant Microsoft is in talks to buy the app. Microsoft declined to comment.
“As far as TikTok is concerned, we’re banning them from the United States,” Trump told reporters on Friday on Air Force One as he returned from Florida.
Trump said he could use emergency economic powers or an executive order to enforce the action, insisting, “I have that authority.”
TikTok posted a short video from its US general manager Vanessa Pappas on TikTok and Twitter yesterday, saying that “We’re not planning on going anywhere”.
ByteDance launched TikTok in 2017, then bought Musical.ly, a video service popular with teens in the US and Europe, and combined the two.
TikTok’s fun, goofy videos and ease of use has made it immensely popular, and US tech giants like Facebook and Snapchat see it as a competitive threat. It has said it has tens of millions of US users and hundreds of millions globally.
But its Chinese ownership has raised concerns about the censorship of videos, including those critical of the Chinese government, and the potential for sharing user data with Chinese officials.
TikTok has maintained it does not censor videos based on topics sensitive to
China.