Trump still has iron grip on Republican Party

Lawmakers struggle to embrace rhetoric or be ousted by constituents

Locked out of Facebook, marooned in Mar-a-Lago and mocked for an amateurish new website, Donald Trump remained largely out of public sight this past week. Yet the Republican Party’s capitulation to the former president became clearer than ever, as did the damage to American politics he has caused with his lie that the election was stolen from him.

In Washington, Republicans moved to strip Rep. Liz Cheney of her House leadership position, a punishment for denouncing Trump’s false claims of voter fraud as a threat to democracy. Lawmakers in Florida and Texas advanced sweeping new measures that would curtail voting, echoing the fictional narrative from Trump and his allies that the electoral system was rigged against him. And in Arizona, the state Republican Party started a bizarre reexamination of the November election results that involved searching for traces of bamboo in last year’s ballots.

The churning dramas cast into sharp relief the extent to which the nation, six months after the election, is still struggling with the consequences of an unprecedented assault by a losing presidential candidate on a bedrock principle of American democracy: that the nation’s elections are legitimate.

They also provided stark evidence that the former president has not only managed to squelch any dissent within his party but has also persuaded most of the GOP to make a gigantic bet: that the surest way to regain power is to embrace his pugilistic style, racial divisiveness and beyondthe-pale conspiracy theories rather than to court the suburban swing voters who cost the party the White House and who might be looking for substantive policies on the pandemic, the economy, health care and other issues.

The loyalty to the former president persists despite his role in inciting his supporters ahead of the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, with his adherents either ignoring, redefining or in some cases tacitly accepting the deadly attack on Congress.

“We’ve just gotten so far afield from any sane construction,” said Barbara Comstock, a longtime party official who was swept out of her suburban Virginia congressional seat in the 2018 midterm backlash to Trump. “It’s a real sickness that is infecting the party at every level. We’re just going to say that black is white now.”