2020 - The postwar world: An election's truth and consequences

THE PREVAILING wisdom in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election is that, by accident and on purpose, Donald John Trump remains the black-hole sun at the center of the Republican party universe. Within the GOP, there’s no credibility without him. And a large number of party loyalists – not just the 126 House Republicans who signed on to Trump’s fatal gambit to overturn the outcome of the election – are irreversibly subservient to the soon-to-be former president. Donald Trump is the isolationist, white-supremacist hill they will die on. 

And for a party whose identity was already in turmoil  – witness the desperation of leadership that helped make Trump the 2016 Republican nominee in the first place – the GOP’s fealty to Trump could be the sign of a party facing that next worst existential crisis: having no future at all.

Mainstream Republicans in Congress have been in lockstep with Trump, only sometimes reluctantly, for the last five years. He’s never been more politically vulnerable than now, and their window of opportunity – to stand up conclusively and decisively, on the behalf of the nation they represent – may never be this wide-open again. It’s time for Republicans in and out of office to take their party back from Donald Trump. 

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What a difference eight years didn’t make. It was in the sobering postmortem of the 2012 presidential election securing Barack Obama a second term, that then-Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal famously warned Republicans against turning into the deeply partisan, weaponized confederacy of dunces it has since become. 

In remarks to Politico within a few weeks of the 2012 election, and again in comments made at the Republican National Committee Winter Meeting in Charlotte, N.C. in January 2013, Jindal (at that time considered a contender for the 2016 nomination) was spot-on in an analysis of the GOP in 2012, and downright prescient about challenges to the party that were eminently superimposable on the events of 2020: 

“We’ve got to stop being the stupid party. I’m serious. It’s time for a new Republican Party that talks like adults. It’s time for us to articulate our plans and our vision for America in real terms. ... We’ve got to stop insulting the intelligence of voters. We need to trust the smarts of the American people.” 

 “We’ve got to make sure that we are not the party of big business, big banks, big Wall Street bailouts, big corporate loopholes, big anything,” Jindal said eight years ago. “We cannot be, we must not be, the party that simply protects the rich so they get to keep their toys.” 

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  IT IS NO secret we had a number of Republicans damage our brand this year with offensive, bizarre comments — enough of that,” Jindal said. “It’s not going to be the last time anyone says something stupid within our party, but it can’t be tolerated within our party. We’ve also had enough of this dumbed-down conservatism. We need to stop being simplistic, we need to trust the intelligence of the American people and we need to stop insulting the intelligence of the voters.”

“Simply being the anti-Obama party didn’t work,” he said. “You can’t beat something with nothing. The reality is, we have to be a party of solutions and not just bumper-sticker slogans but real detailed policy solutions.” 

There was game talk of a reinvention of the Republican brand; other GOP lawmakers paid at least lip service to the idea that the party of Lincoln was overdue for a retrofit. But the intervention never took hold. By 2014, the Republican identity had re-hardened around its more reliable partisan tendencies, as the Obama era began its natural, term-limited decline. 

By June 2015, the restive Republican spirit was again hungry for empire. The GOP, sensing an opportunity with the vacuum created by the absence of Obama on the ballot, let a thousand contenders for the nomination bloom. Everything was fair game, and that meant anything could happen. One man believed that, with outsize determination and a belly full of simmering correspondents’-dinner rage.

One man believed that on a day in June 2015, when he took an escalator ride into the Stygian underworld of American politics. And in November 2016, anything did happen: the ascension of Donald Trump, the crown jeweler of complaint, the greatest carnival barker in history, to the presidency of the United States. 

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Less than a year later, we’d learn how the Trump mindset would solidify in the rank and file — and how, to borrow the phrase, elections have consequences, the painfully unsettling kind. In October 2017, Jonathan Martin and Jeremy W. Peters of The New York Times reported, “the president’s brand of hard-edge nationalism — with its gut-level cultural appeals and hard lines on trade and immigration — is taking root within his adopted party, and those uneasy with grievance politics are either giving in or giving up the fight.” 

Fast forward to now, and not a damn thing’s changed. Or at least not enough. Since then, Trump’s incoherently pugnacious style of rule became deeply out of step with the popular opinion of him as president; the average of his favorable opinion-poll rankings was generally somewhere between 40 and 43 percent; that range has been more or less a statistical fixture of his administration. 

But even with the bedrock of The Base, polling like that couldn’t get him over the finish line on Election Day 2020. At long last, Trump had to face the consequences of being what he fights against body and soul, every day of his life: A Loser. The presidency of the United States may be the ultimate zero-sum-game event. Someone decidedly wins, someone else just as decidedly loses. The finality of that is something Trump and his noisy acolytes, acting the fool in the streets, are having a really hard time getting their heads around. 

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  BUT REPUBLICAN lawmakers and those who hope to be don’t have to march off that cliff. We’ve already seen the post-election emergence of relative senatorial pragmatists like Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Lamar Alexander. They and some others in the (for now) Republican-led Senate expressed a salutary if ultimately symbolic willingness to recognize Joe Biden as the 46th president. 

Others have followed suit, including that father of all holdouts, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. It was ultimately a pushback against Trump made not out of pique, or even out of purpose, but out of political practicality, an acknowledgement of knowing the difference between a look through the windshield and one through the rear-view mirror. 

From the perspective of POTUS 45, there will apparently be a lot of time for more of that jousting and parrying, that agreeing to disagree, in the months to come. That’s because the nearly-former president already has his mind set on remaining in the news and media spotlights as much as possible, through the launch of his own conservative media ecosystem a la Fox News ... or by fully following through on freshly-bruited plans to run for the White House in 2024. 

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Either way, the former president* has already committed himself to locking down the Republican party as his own personal property – the first successful hostile takeover of an American political party. Either as a media kingmaker or a candidate, Trump freezes the Republican field of presidential contenders in amber for the foreseeable future. Trump to GOP: Thou Shalt Have No Future Except Through Me. And that, that consequence of losing the 2020 election, should properly keep the GOP leadership awake and gnashing teeth for many nights to come. 

The reason why is obvious: The very, very last thing the Republican party wants or needs after a bruising election in the midst of a ruinous pandemic, a vicious consumer economy, and a corrosive racial climate is the announcement that the man responsible for some of those crippling events wants another chance to finish the hostage crisis he started, resuming his role as captor in chief. 

Now like at the end of World War II, a postwar world exists, one defined by the cessation of hostilities between belligerents, and the emergence of frictions between former allies. It presents itself as both a crisis and an opportunity. The crisis of the victory of former Obama president Joe Biden is the inescapable nightmare Republicans can’t get away from, something the Trump administration can’t help trying to make as awful as possible. 

So the need for reinvention, and the work needed to achieve it, falls largely to the Republicans, those everyday people everywhere on the ideological spectrum. Their party — a hollow, sclerotic shell of its former self; a captive of its own xenophobic impulses; a movement lashed to monochromatic identity and outdated demography; a body on the verge of willful irrelevance — needs all the help it can get.

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Dual Trumps: Reuters. Image credits: Trump and Melania descend: C-SPAN. Churchill, FDR and Stalin at Yalta, 1945: BBC.