Behold the GOP somersaults for Trump
The House of Savoy on the Italian Peninsula was a dynasty so fickle across the centuries that critics said it never finished a war on the side on which it started, unless the war lasted long enough for Savoy to change sides twice. Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., fascinates not because she is the House of Savoy in human form, although she is, but because she exemplifies a phenomenon that has rarely been less rare — consistently inconstant politicians.
Mace became a congresswoman on Jan. 3, 2021, three days before President Donald Trump incited the assault on the Capitol. On Jan. 7, she said, Trump’s “entire legacy was wiped out yesterday” when he, as she later said, “put all of our lives at risk.” Asked in the days after the attack if she thought he had a future in the Republican Party, she said: “I do not.” He noticed.
She trod a sinuous path back toward obeisance, but Trump, unmollified, this month endorsed Mace’s Republican primary opponent. The next day, Mace stood in front of Manhattan’s Trump Tower and made a 104-second video. It was a grovel akin to Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV standing barefoot in the snow for three days outside the castle of Pope Gregory VII, hoping to have his excommunication reversed. (It was, but Gregory, who had a Savoyesque knack for changing his mind, later excommunicated Henry again.) In her video, Mace says she was one of Trump’s earliest supporters, worked for him in seven states in 2016 and thinks he made America, freedom and democracy “stronger all around the world.”
Her Savoy-like somersault is less acrobatic than J.D. Vance’s in his attempt to win Ohio Republicans’ U.S. Senate nomination. He has deleted his October 2016 tweet endorsing independent presidential candidate Evan McMullin. Vance has called Trump “noxious,” “offensive,” “reprehensible,” “cultural heroin” and “an idiot.” He has said “I can’t stomach Trump” and “I’m a Never Trump guy.”
Never, however, came and went, and Vance went to Mar-aLago seeking absolution. Vance is trailing Josh Mandel, who knows how to be emollient to Trump. Mandel says he decided to run for the Senate a third time because impeaching Trump was unfair. In his Mara-Lago audition, Mandel told Trump that he, Mandel, is a “killer” and a “balls to the wall” fighter. As a senator, he will fight, among other things, “atheism” and Washington “cocktail parties.”
Although polarization is rampant, the doctrine of Savoyism — flexibility in defense of incumbency is no vice — has bipartisan adherents. For example, many Democrats persistently say that climate change is not just a serious problem; it is an “existential” threat that, unless promptly and uncompromisingly fought, will extinguish life on Earth. But first things first. The national average price of a gallon of gasoline is $3.48, which in inflationadjusted terms is about 57 cents more than it was 60 years ago.
Many Democrats, although green as all get-out, think the federal gasoline tax (about 18 cents a gallon) should be suspended, for eternity or until after the November elections, whichever comes first. This is today’s existentialism. It bears a resemblance to the mid-20thcentury intellectual fad with that name. It was (according to people who were not enthralled by it) the belief that because life is absurd, philosophy should be, too.
Meanwhile, the climate warrior in chief, President Joe Biden, has inscribed his name on the ever-lengthening list of presidents who, to produce microscopic and evanescent downward pressure on gasoline prices, have tapped the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Biden released 50 million barrels, which is about what Americans consume every 66 hours. The SPR exists to cushion the nation in an emergency. Today’s emergency is the threat — existential, of course; is there another kind? — that disgruntled motorists pose to elected incumbents. The planet’s supposed emergency is secondary.
In 2019, the year after Robert Francis (a.k.a. Beto) O’Rourke failed to win a Senate seat from Texas, he said this while failing to become president: “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47.” Today, O’Rourke, who might become a has-been without ever having been, is running for governor and saying: “I’m not interested in taking anything from anyone. What I want to make sure we do is defend the Second Amendment.” The Book of Genesis on O’Rourke, and others: “Unstable as water, thou shall not excel.”
Contemporary politics, which is simultaneously sinister and silly, can leave you in tears or in stitches. Considering the amount of nonsense spoken, it is consoling that so many people mean so little of what they say.