The GOP: Facing a post-Trump schism
The Capitol riot “will go down as the day that broke the Republican Party as we know it,” said Burgess Everett in Politico.com. After rampaging Trump supporters sent frightened legislators into hiding, the GOP faced its “ultimate reckoning with Trumpism.” Confronted with the damage wrought by Trump’s anti-democratic authoritarianism—and the loss of the presidency, the House, and now the Senate—“the party must decide whether to continue embracing the ousted president or finally move on.” How this “war for the soul” of the GOP will resolve is “the central question now hovering over America’s political landscape,” said Michael Scherer in The Washington Post. At stake is whether the GOP will become “an extension of QAnon” or “can emerge from the Trump era as a potential governing coalition built around ideas and some shared agreement on facts.”
Every Republican appalled by “Trump’s attempted coup” must face a harsh reality, said Jonathan Last in TheBulwark.com: Many of their colleagues cheered it on. Despite no evidence of significant fraud, about half the GOP’s congressional delegation voted to overturn the presidential election—“even after the sacking of the U.S.
Capitol.” A large faction of the party is “literally in favor of authoritarianism.” The old GOP “is gone forever,” said John Daniel Davidson in TheFederalist.com. Trump’s 2016 win marked a profound shift in the Republican electorate—a populist uprising by rank-and-file voters “fed up with an entrenched establishment beholden to a donor class” that paid only “lip service” to their priorities: safe borders, protecting workers from globalization, an end to foreign wars. By channeling their frustrations, Trump “offered the party new life and a new direction,” and that populist genie is not going back into the bottle.
The GOP “could really collapse,” said Ross Douthat in The New York Times. The “implicit bargain of the Trump era” required traditional Republicans to swallow a measure of insanity in exchange for a hold on power. But an increasingly unhinged GOP dominated by fantasies of a Trump revival in some form “could become genuinely untenable” for moderate suburbanites, corporate executives, and center-right Republicans like Sen. Mitt Romney, and force them to “jump ship.” Many a prediction of “the crack-up of American conservatism” has come to naught. “But breaking points do come.”