The Republican Party gave gallons of gasoline and a box of matches to an unstable man in exchange for retaining power. Now they were shocked to see the flames and lost all control. The cost to them is enormous.
“The best trick the devil came up with was to convince the world that he didn’t exist,” Kevin Spacey quotes Charles Baudelaire in The Usual Suspects.
Hours before the seizure of the Capitol in Washington, the Republican Party sent operational text messages that, according to journalist Jake Tapper, looked like this: “It might be better to tacitly acknowledge that we have made a deal with him, rather than blame it. devil for four years ”.
Much of the Republican congressmen seem to be beginning to accept that they are responsible for the current crisis in the country. Remember, they knew from the start that things would get out of hand if they had a populist like Donald Trump come to the White House. “If we nominate Trump, we will be destroyed … and we will earn it,” Republican Senator Lindsey Graham wrote in May 2016.
But like Graham, dozens of Republicans preferred that one person, given gallons of gasoline and a box of matches, to set the nation on fire and for four years to try to destroy all institutions in exchange for power. However, this week’s coup attempt was just too much to record and now most want to distance themselves from everything that happened. So they suggest to their followers that they stick with the “good” of these years and “look to the future”: a new Republican Party that will be more like the old one. Clean and slate is what they expect.
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“(But) be proud of what we’ve gotten (Supreme Court judges, federal courts, tax reform and the end of neoconservatism and fiscal austerity) and let’s move on,” added the Republicans’ message this week. But now that everything has gotten out of hand, turning the page isn’t as easy as they suggest. And not only because responsibility for what happened must be shared and in the same way they should be punished such as losing their seat; in fact, several editorial boards and opinion leaders (including Republican voices) are asking for it.
First of all, that deal the Republican Party made with “the devil” was a bad thing for the first party. With Donald Trump at the helm, Republicans managed to reach the White House in 2016 and maintain control of the House and Senate. But in 2018 they lost control of the House and in 2020 they lost the White House, again the House, and now the Senate. They lost everything.
And yes, they’ve managed to put some ultra-conservative justices in the federal courts and the Supreme Court, but those appointments are in question. Some judges do not meet the requirements to be in office, so they face impeachment proceedings. And the next administration, which will already control the legislature, could take steps to diminish Trump’s legacy in the Supreme Court by promoting a reform so that those positions last for periods and not for life as before. What Trump left the Republicans was very small, and what he took from them was a lot; for this reason it will be difficult to turn the page.
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The greatest tragedy for the Republicans who supported Trump was losing control of his party after 167 years. The Republican Party is bankrupt: it is no longer Lincoln, Eisenhower or Reagan’s party. For many, this is Trump’s party. And some mainstream and veteran lawmakers, such as Mitt Romney and Lisa Murkowski, who became the first Republican senator to call for the president’s resignation for “ causing a lot of damage to the country ” after what happened in the capital, may want their party again. build up. bring it back to the old days of glory and self regulation, but they have many barriers along the way.
The first is that they don’t have Trump’s voter base, which is impressive – he got 74 million votes in the last election. That electoral loot prompted senators like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, two of the senators who backed Trump’s failed attempt to challenge the election results in Congress this week, to continue backing the president.
Within the party, there will be a major battle to see who and how Trump’s voters get, if he ever gets out of the way. And here mainstream Republicans like Romney and his company have a downside: Trump, his family, and some of the few remaining allies on his side convinced the Trumpists that anyone who didn’t support the president was traitors, including Romney. And they believed that fantastic story. If anything should be noted about Trump’s manipulative prowess, it was the fact that he blamed the Vice President, Mike Pence, and the Republican leaders for what had happened, even though it was he who directly ordered his followers to invade the Capitol. Trump could convince the world that he never existed.
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For mainstream Republicans, it will be a challenge to get back the voters Donald Trump appropriated by facing the same members of his party to get it. In addition to the six senators who objected to the election results and knelt before Trump, it should be remembered that 121 Republican representatives in the House this week supported the president’s plan and were able to stay by his side. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the fanatical representative of QAnon’s conspiracy theories, is just the most visible face of this pro-Trump resistance. Mary Miller, another Trump representative, even quoted Adolf Hitler this week: “(he) was right. Those who have the youth will have the future ”. Will the future of the party be just as extreme?
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Donald Trump Jr. was already anticipating what would come before the takeover: he pledged to beat every “traitor” in the polls. From now on, and for the next three years, any primary, whether it be a governorship or a mayor, a seat in the Senate or the House, will be above all a struggle for the heart and soul of the Republican Party. Every office, no matter how small, is important for Republicans like Romney to take control and rebuild “Republican values”. Meanwhile, the rest will be in awe of the live self-destruction of what was once Lincoln’s party.