Like a lot of other folks, Jamelle Bouie at Slate has come to the conclusion that the main institutional hope for putting the brakes on Donald Trump’s slide into lawlessness is for the Republican Party to finally lay down some lines the president must not cross without risking the loss of GOP support and/or impeachment; as loyal readers may recall, The Hot Screen just this weekend tried to argue for the urgency of the Democrats forcing Republicans to do just this. But Bouie also very neatly lays out how fellow Republicans have benefitted from the Trump presidency and how their actions up to now are hardly reassuring. What really got my attention, though, is how Bouie sharply sketches out the ways in which Trump fits a pattern of Republican disregard for political norms that stretches back at least to 1994, writing:
If we are facing a kind of constitutional crisis, where an ultrapolarized, hyperpartisan Republican Party is short-circuiting the mechanisms for accountability, what we’re seeing may be the acute manifestation of trends that stretch back to the “Republican Revolution” of 1994 and the advent of a no-compromise form of political warfare that disdained norms, attacked institutions, and cultivated white racial and cultural resentment.
Bouie notes the GOP’s blocking of Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court and debt ceiling showdowns as examples of such extremism during the Obama administration. Recently, the Hot Screen has been fired up about pointing up the GOP’s complicity with Trump’s rule-breaking: but I think Bouie is onto something absolutely critical when he suggests, without quite saying directly, that Donald Trump might be seen as merely continuing anti-democratic methods that the GOP has been engineering for at least the past 20 years, though on Trump Tower-sized steroids. This includes not only direct GOP assaults on democracy itself, through activities like gerrymandering and voter suppression, but also of course on our institutional norms. Anti-government beliefs, it turns out, end up being anti-democratic when the government you’re so opposed to is a democracy.
It seems incredibly important that the story of the GOP’s transformation into an anti-democratic wrecking ball needs to be told in a way that's accessible to as many people as possible, especially those who don't normally follow politics in depth; in its absence, we’re left without major context for how Trump came to be, and why his presidency endures despite an unfitness for office that’s clear to at least half the voting population.
I wonder if we are facing the dangerous convergence of a Republican party rife with anti-democratic tendencies in the name of serving the interests of the rich and powerful, and a GOP base with increasingly anti-democratic tendencies because they believe democracy itself has failed them. For the GOP, Donald Trump could begin to seem like the solution to the fact that they're likely never to win the popular vote again for the presidency — a leader willing to do the national-scale dirty work of knocking millions of "illegal" voters off the rolls to tip future elections in the GOP's favor. For the GOP base, someone like Donald Trump has obviously already begun to seem like the solution to their problems — a strong man who serves the interests of them alone, not the nation as a whole.
