Ten years ago, a statement by a major politician calling for the termination of the Constitution would have been greeted with incredulity, condemnation, and contempt by virtually every member of the Democratic and Republican parties, with permanent excommunication of that politician from American life. Flash forward a decade, though, and Donald Trump’s treasonous social media message last weekend calling for just such an overthrow of the constitutional order has operated as an X-ray on both the brokenness of the GOP and the ongoing reluctance of the Democratic Party to accept once and for all that the Republican Party poses an acute threat to democracy, and to act accordingly.
Rather than spur a firestorm on the right, Trump’s comments have so far provoked at best a Fourth of July sparkler level of dissent from his party. Some GOP senators have condemned his remarks, but most of them are either departing the Senate or declined to actually identify the president by name. More damningly, even when a high-profile Republican like Mitch McConnell spoke out, he still — incredibly — refused to rule out supporting Donald Trump in 2024. The inability of the GOP to clearly and definitively separate itself from a bonkers statement designed to appeal to the extreme right and their insurrectionist ilk demonstrates both the party’s continuing subjugation to Donald Trump, and its divorce from the basic principles that grant legitimacy to a political party in the first place — among others, respect for the Constitution, the rule of law, and free and fair elections. If the GOP can’t respect these baseline principles, why should any American respect the GOP?
Though Democrats hit hard at the president’s remarks — a White House spokesman said that Trump’s assertion “anathema to the soul of our nation, and should be universally condemned” — what we haven’t seen is a wholesale effort to use Trump’s insane remarks to paint the GOP with the same brush of authoritarianism, insurrection, and, frankly, insanity. Such comments by a former GOP president are a priceless gift to Democrats, if indeed one of their highest priorities is to defend our democracy and our constitution. That Donald Trump could essentially declare war on America and not get kicked out of the GOP is the real story here, and the Democrats should run with it. It is difficult to overemphasize how very much like a loser the Republican Party now appears, unable to separate itself from a man who doesn’t even believe in America. The party is weak, cowardly, and anti-American, and a day shouldn’t go by that the Democrats don’t broadcast these facts.
But this latest outrage from Donald Trump shouldn’t have been necessary to catalyze a more robust Democratic response to the GOP’s embrace of lawlessness, violence, and authoritarianism. Part of the disconcerting nature of this episode is how Trump’s remarks have been treated as somehow something new, when in fact they are simply a distillation of what he’s already said and done. After all, what was Donald Trump’s attempted coup on January 6 but an attempt to “terminate” the Constitution? And what was the GOP’s subsequent embrace of Trump but a retroactive endorsement of his termination attempt? This time around, the former president didn’t say anything we didn’t already know, although he may have been more explicit than ever.
It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that Trump’s stated wish to throw out the very foundation of the rule of law comes at the same time that the rule of law is starting to close in on him. Just days after his tweet, the Trump Organization was found guilty of criminal tax fraud, while recent reports indicate that the various Justice Department investigations of Trump are proceeding apace under the leadership of special counsel Jack Smith. And coming so soon after the dinner involving Trump, anti-semite Kanye West, and white nationalist Nick Fuentes, it’s hard not to see the links between calls for lawlessness and a social and political order in which white people reign supreme.
This is all to say that Democratic hesitance to connect the dots and sharpen their indictment of a GOP still besotted by Donald Trump feels cautious to the point of masochistic. Even if, as some recent stories suggest, there is true and growing disenchantment with Donald Trump in the wake of the Republican Party’s relatively poor showing in the midterms, it is entirely in the Democrats’ interest to continue insisting their really is no daylight between the GOP and Donald Trump, because at bottom the loyalty is not due to the man but to the hideous ideas he has been shameless enough to say out loud. The Democrats can’t let the GOP wriggle out of this trap of its own making by letting the party simply scapegoat Donald Trump and pretend it’s a mainstream political party again.