It was dubious when it started a few weeks ago, but I think we can all now safely laugh away any references to a “civil war” within the Republican Party between those who continue to embrace Trump and Trumpism, and those who want to break from the former president and his racist, plutocratic politics and persona. This CNN article by Stephen Collinson gives an excellent overview of the many ways in which whatever resistance to keeping Trump front and center in GOP politics has now melted away to insignificant pockets.
The most striking evidence of the triumph of Trump’s will was the decision by 45 GOP senators to essentially vote against proceeding with an impeachment trial of the former president, accompanied by a forceful campaign to paint any effort to hold the president accountable as a deranged, leftist, divisive plot by Democrats to shirk the nation’s real business. Given that the accountability Democrats are seeking is for Trump’s incitement of an attempted violent insurrection against the U.S. government, most GOP senators (as well as the overwhelming number of representatives who voted against impeachment) have now given their tacit approval to violence as a means for Republican politicians to gain and maintain power. The GOP’s comfort with violence as a political tool can likewise be gauged by congressional Republicans’ acceptance of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert into the House caucus, even though both have engaged in violent rhetoric towards political opponents.
More ominously, in continuing to accept President Trump’s Big Lie that the election was stolen from him, GOP elected officials are continuing to incite insurrection by far-right groups who equate a stolen election with a call to battle (not to mention poisoning the minds of millions of rank-and-file GOP voters with hatred of the Democrats, and helping radicalize some untold number of these voters to join the ranks of the violent insurrectionists). Yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security released a bulletin “to alert the public about a growing risk of attacks by ‘ideologically-motivated violent extremists’ agitated about President Biden’s inauguration and ‘perceived grievances fueled by false narratives.’” In fact, these “false narratives” and “perceived grievances” are being promulgated by the congressional GOP, making the party responsible for inciting white nationalist terrorists. This should be the top story in American politics right now.
As I wrote a couple days ago, faced with an opposition party that, in refusing to accept the results of elections and approving of violence as a mean to achieve political ends, the Democrats can no longer behave as if the GOP is a normal, democratic political party. In failing to protect the republic from a treasonous president, and propagating lies that inspire that president’s most violent supporters while radicalizing many others, the GOP has robbed itself of democratic legitimacy — and the Democrats should en masse start talking, and acting, this way.
First and foremost, the Democrats must insist that there will be no “moving on” from the horrors of January 6 without full accountability for all the perpetrators, including the president, the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol - and those in Congress who refuse to take responsibility for their role in inciting the events of that day (not to mention not forcefully opposing, or in some cases, openly supporting, Trump’s various other machinations to overturn the election results). As has been widely reported by now, the nation came very close to seeing members of Congress assassinated, and the peaceful transition of power not just interrupted but broken. While the attack was underway, President Trump watched with apparent glee, for hours unwilling to authorize the deployment of forces necessary to drive back the rioters, acting for all intents and purposes not as the commander-in-chief of the United States, but as the leader of a treasonous rebellion against our country. So, no, the United States will not “give the man a break,” as the hapless Nicki Haley pleaded yesterday.
But more than this, the Democrats should not give the Republican Party a break, not for one second, so long as the GOP continues to embrace and promote Trumpist conspiracies, and to wink at political violence as long as it’s done in the name of Republicans. Not only should the Democrats convert the impeachment trial into an exposé on the complicity of congressional Republicans in the assault on the Capitol, they should also make sure it covers GOP complicity in the Big Lie that the election was stolen, and in the president’s multi-pronged efforts to get the election results thrown out prior to the violent attempt to get his way.
Longer term, so long as the GOP continues to embrace Trump’s legacy of white supremacism, violence, cronyism, and xenophobia, the Democrats should make clear to the American people, as much as possible, the full, deranged meaning of this dark commitment. Jeet Heer describes how this could work:
Instead of calling on Republicans to move past Trump, the Democrats could tar the GOP for its continued Trumpism. With Congress under Democratic control, continued investigations into Trump’s misdeeds are a priority. Trump’s corruption could be kept in public view and Republicans could be forced to defend it.
Trump will almost certainly remain a power in the GOP, either as a kingmaker or, quite possibly, as the 2024 presidential nominee. Given this possibility, the best move for the Democrats is to hammer away at the fact that the GOP is the party of Trump. Trump remains massively unpopular with the general public and there is no reason not to use that unpopularity as a political weapon.
The CNN article I noted above makes the crucial point that Republican politicians’ desire to keep Trump-loyal voters energized and within the party fold is a huge element in why they are choosing to hew closely to Trump even though he’s out of office. But the number of Trump voters will not be growing over time, only shrinking; whites continues to decrease as a proportion of the population, and it is highly likely that Democrats can win back a good number of those Latino and African-American voters who voted for Trump and the GOP in the last election (particularly if the Democrats are unafraid to foreground the GOP’s basic identity as a white supremacist party). From this perspective, the idea of “tar[ring] the GOP for its continued Trumpism,” as Heer puts it, becomes a way of energizing all those millions of Americans who don’t fit within the GOP’s twisted idea of who “real” Americans are.
This, in turn, helps address the concern among some Democrats that turning away from an emphasis on bipartisanship, and opening themselves to GOP accusations of divisiveness, will end up exciting the GOP base into even greater opposition. The fact of the matter is that the GOP base is already riled up; the point now is to rile up a larger, Democratic base that can overwhelm the numbers and enthusiasm of the Republicans. This is how democracy works, particularly in our fraught time, when there are fewer and fewer independent voters, local politics reflects national divisions, and ticket splitting is increasingly rare. As an example of this blunt talk, look no further than this recent appearance by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Chris Hayes’ show, in which she said, “Republican members of Congress don’t want consequences for white supremacy or insurrection against the United States because their political strategy is to embrace white supremacists and the scepter of the Confederacy to get power in the first place.” Imagine if all elected Democrats took up this unsparing line of attack, and collectively offered the GOP no respite from its alliance with such malevolent figures and currents of American history.
The clincher is that talking about the GOP’s turn to white supremacist, Trumpian politics also segues easily into talking about all the things that the GOP refuses to do, but that the Democrats have placed at the center of their politics: reducing economic inequality, advancing equal rights for all Americans, securing health care for Americans, protecting the environment, and keeping Americans safe from threats like violent white nationalists.