OPINION
ROSS
DOUTHAT
How Strong Is Trump’s Grip on the G.O.P.?
July 31,
2021
Ross
Douthat
By Ross
Douthat
Opinion
Columnist
This was a
week of setbacks for Donald Trump in his attempt to maintain a firm hold on the
Republican Party till 2024 and beyond.
In Texas,
one of his endorsed candidates lost a special election runoff to a rival
Republican. At about the same time, Trump came out against the bipartisan
infrastructure bill currently moving through the Senate, and almost nobody
seemed to care: There was no sense that Republican senators feared his wrath,
no expectation that Trump supporters would crowd town halls in protest.
Among
conservatives who would prefer not to have the G.O.P. controlled by Trump for
the remainder of his natural life, these indicators were greeted with some
optimism. “If Trump endorsements don’t equal victory,” the former Republican
consultant Tucker Martin tweeted, “then maybe you can actually be yourself,”
without “worrying about the ego of the host of ‘The Apprentice.’ Imagine that
world.”
I’m happy
to imagine it, but I fear it’s not that simple. The weakness Trump showed this
week is real, but it isn’t new. His power over the G.O.P. has always been
limited: As president he often found himself balked on policy by congressional
Republicans, and his impressive endorsement record reflects a lot of cautious
winner-picking, not aggressive movement-building.
Certainly
he has never forged a clear Trumpist faction within the G.O.P. The Republicans
with the Trumpiest styles, figures like Matt Gaetz or Marjorie Taylor-Greene,
have been opportunists, not Trump mentees. And the Republicans trying to create
a lasting populism, from sitting senators like Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton to
Senate candidates like J.D. Vance and Blake Masters, are doing so from outside
Trumpworld, rather than as extensions of his will.
Limits on
his power, however, are not the same things as limits on his support. The rule
in the Trump era is that you can oppose Trump indirectly or win without his
endorsement — but save for a few unusual cases, you can’t challenge him
personally and expect to have Republican voters on your side. In areas that
involve the details of policy or the machinery of governance, Trump can be
defeated. In any referendum on the question “Should Donald Trump be our leader
in the battle against liberalism?” his winning record is unmatched.
This point
is important for thinking about the longstanding argument about the
authoritarian perils of his presidency. Christopher Caldwell wrote an essay
recently in The Times, about the aftermath of the 2020 election, in which he dismissed
fears of a real Trump coup on the grounds of Trumpian incapacity: He “ended his
presidency as unfamiliar with its powers as with its responsibilities.” To
which Matthew Yglesias retorted that he was “over” these “Trump is too dumb to
do anything pernicious takes. He has managed to very effectively wield
influence within Republican Party politics for many years now!”
But two
things can both be true at once: Trump has a certain kind of political genius
and a strong personal bond with the Republican base, and Trump’s influence ebbs
the further you get from the world of rhetoric and personal identification. So
Trump could shift official party priorities on entitlements or infrastructure,
but he couldn’t actually get a health care or infrastructure bill passed. Trump
could force Republicans to make excuses for his corruption, but he couldn’t get
Mitch McConnell to endorse withdrawal from Afghanistan, or get his generals to
do it.
And Trump
could encourage a widespread belief that he was the victim of massive voter
fraud, inspiring his most ardent fans to storm the Capitol — but he couldn’t
get Republican state legislatures or Republican-appointed judges or his own
Justice Department to begin to go along with his election-overturning efforts.
This
suggests that if you are worried about 2020 being replayed in a Trump revival
in 2024, but this time with Republican state legislatures actually acting to
overturn results, you should be looking for signs that Trump has found a way to
fuse, in advance, support for himself with support for that specific move. To
overcome his manifold weaknesses as an inside-game player, he would need not
just sympathy for his inevitable voter-fraud allegations but also an understood
rule, among G.O.P. statehouse leaders in Michigan, Pennsylvania or Arizona and
their voters, that to support Trump simply is to support legislatures choosing
presidents, with no daylight in between.
I think
that rule will be very hard to impose. But the same analysis of Trump’s power
suggests that the nomination itself will remain within his grasp (and an
analysis of his character suggests that he will want it), no matter how many
bipartisan bills pass over his objections or how many of his endorsements flop.
That’s
because nobody imagines that an infrastructure vote or a random House election
is really a referendum on Trump himself. But for a presidential primary
candidate to convince Republicans that a vote for them is not a vote against
Trump, even though Trump himself is on the ballot? That would require a truly
special kind of political genius, which not even Ron DeSantis can be expected
to possess.
Ross
Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is the
author of several books, most recently, “The Decadent Society.” @DouthatNYT
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