Last Friday, The Washington Post published an article based on interviews with 20 Republican elected officials and congressional staffers who “expressed exasperation over over what they view as President Trump’s indefensible behavior, a sign that the president’s stranglehold on his party is starting to weaken as Congress hurtles toward a historic impeachment vote.” It’s reporting that directly addresses a central political question of our time: will Republicans representatives and senators ever turn on Trump? While the article suggests rumblings in Congress, there is tremendous ambiguity as to whether they’re seismic or merely hapless warning shots to the president that others in his party don’t appreciate the hard spot in which he’s put them, and would he please stop, sir, please?
Apart from a solitary representative, Francis Rooney of Florida, voicing openness to impeachment, the other criticism is focused less on the president’s bad acts and more on the “optics” of what he’s done. The article states that, “There’s now a growing sense among a quiet group of Republicans that the president is playing with fire, taking their loyalty for granted as they’re forced to ‘defend the indefensible,’ as a senior House Republican said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to talk frankly” — yet the article notes that only a few GOPers are actually saying that they’re hitting their limit. And the second attributed quote to this effect, from Representative Mike Simpson of Idaho, inspires little confidence in a break-out of patriotism: “‘I have no doubt that Doral is a really good place — I’ve been there, I know,’ says the congressman. But it is politically insensitive. They should have known what the kickback is going to be on this, that politically he’s doing it for his own benefit.” Absent is the sense that what the president is doing is actually corrupt, even impeachably so; instead, it’s all about making the GOP look bad.
So while this apparent inability to grasp obviously corrupt acts as corrupt hardly inspires confidence in the GOP’s moral vision, the article does raise a basic issue: even if elected officials don’t care about Trump’s inherent corruption, will they eventually care when it starts to threaten their re-election chances? Yet, looking at the Senate, a sufficient number of lawmakers hold safe red seats that it is hard to see an electoral threat ever emerging to make them change their minds. It seems to me a likelier scenario is that matters reach the point where individual representatives and senators, even if not personally threatened by the turning of the tide against the president, begin to see a real possibility of the GOP being reduced to a long-term minority status due to its continued alignment with Trump, and so begin to see their personal power threatened.
But this sort of speculation obscures a point that I’ve been hitting repeatedly over time, and that’s implicit in the inability of Republican lawmakers to oppose the president on the basis of his clearly evidenced multiple bad acts: we don’t just have a Trump problem, we have a GOP problem. The fact that the success or failure of the impeachment process, and arguably the survival of the U.S. as a democracy, depends on the votes of the very party members who have enabled the president’s corruption from day one, is a conundrum that is insufficiently discussed and analyzed. Nothing in this Post article suggests that a major break with the president is yet under way. Disturbingly, as has been pointed out by others long before our present crisis, the longer the president maintains the loyalty of the GOP base, and the longer GOP members stick by him, the more implicated they are in the president’s corrupt acts, and the more incentive they have to stick by him.
To deal with this conundrum of their own making, it would seem GOP elected officials have two options: keep doubling down as Trump essentially defies the rule of law, or at some point break with Trump in a way that seeks to cleanse their prior complicity in the beatific waters of saving the republic from the authoritarian clown in the White House. Again, though, evidence such as that presented in the Post backs the first possibility as much as, or even more than, the second: that the GOP will follow Trump into the authoritarian abyss, out of self-preservation, and also, chillingly, out of basic agreement with his anti-democratic means and ends. Stories like the one in the Post frame the story as if GOPers have a binary choice: either support the president and go down, or break with him and survive. But what if enough GOP representatives and senators see another way — stick with Trump even if it means upending the rule of law in our country, and setting the stage for further, escalated corrupt attacks on American democracy, such as a doubling-down on conscripting foreign governments to sway the 2020 elections in his (and the GOP’s) favor? It’s difficult to overstate the historical calamity the GOP faces: impeachment of a Republican president for unprecedented corruption that unites Trump’s personal venality with what can accurately be described as an attack on American democracy via collusion with foreign powers. This is an American nightmare, and we would not be where we are without the complicity of the GOP in supporting this president’s lawlessness since his inauguration, from his obstruction of justice during the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, through the party’s failure to police the bottomless graft of the president and his family as they’ve used the presidency to supercharge the Trump business empire. The public is not well-served by either the media or Democratic politicians eliding this dangerous perspective.