Opinion
Will Trump Force Principled Conservatives to
Start Their Own Party? I Hope So
American politics will be shaped by the influence of
the monarch of Mar-a-Lago.
Thomas L.
Friedman
By Thomas
L. Friedman
Opinion
Columnist
Dec. 22,
2020
As the
Trump presidency heads into the sunset, kicking and screaming, one of the most
important questions that will shape American politics at the local, state and
national levels is this: Can Donald Trump maintain his iron grip over the
Republican Party when he is out of office?
This is
what we know for sure: He damn well intends to try and is amassing a pile of
cash to do so. And here is what I predict: If Trump keeps delegitimizing Joe
Biden’s presidency and demanding loyalty for his extreme behavior, the G.O.P.
could fully fracture — splitting between principled Republicans and
unprincipled Republicans. Trump then might have done America the greatest favor
possible: stimulating the birth of a new principled conservative party.
Santa, if
you’re listening, that’s what I want for Christmas!
Wishful thinking?
Maybe. But here’s why it’s not entirely fanciful: If Trump refuses to ever
acknowledge Biden’s victory and keeps roasting those Republicans who do — and
who “collaborate” with the new administration — something is going to crack.
There will
be increasing pressure on the principled Republicans — people like Mitt Romney,
Lisa Murkowski and the judges, election officials and state legislators who put
country before party and refused to buckle under Trump’s demands — to break
away and start their own conservative party.
If that
happens, the unprincipled Trump Republicans — like the 126 House members who
joined with the Texas attorney general in a shameful Supreme Court case to
nullify Biden’s victory — could have a harder time winning office. That would
be a good thing in its own right.
More
important, even if just a few principled conservatives came together and
created a kind of third party in Congress, they could be kingmakers. With the
Senate so finely balanced, moderates on each side have significant leverage.
We just saw
that with the relief bill negotiations, which Trump, on cue, is now threatening
to undo. It was the bipartisan House Problem Solvers Caucus — coalesced by the
centrist movement No Labels — and an informal bipartisan group of senators that
produced the deal from the bottom up.
Imagine
Biden’s center-left Democrats and principled center-right conservatives working
together on fixes for infrastructure, immigration, Obamacare or climate —
without Trump around to disrupt any progress.
Wishful
thinking? Maybe. But one thing I learned covering the Middle East is that there
is only one reliable thing about extremists — they don’t know when to stop. So,
in the end, they almost always go over the cliff, taking a lot of people with
them.
Donald
Trump is a political extremist. He does not stop at red lights. He does not
abide by norms, ethics or the truth. As a result, his huge disinformation
campaign against Biden’s election, and his attacks on Republican officeholders
and right-wing media that won’t parrot his lies and conspiracy theories, is
already fracturing the party at the state level in places like Georgia and
Arizona.
It’s
drawing a sharp distinction between principled Republicans who chose to put
their constitutional obligations before Trump’s interests and the unprincipled
ones who either are too cowardly to speak up or eagerly hopped into the Trump
clown car to secure his blessings for their next election.
Think of
two recent images. The first is of the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy,
on Dec. 15 briskly walking past a CNN reporter who was asking him a simple
question: Would he acknowledge that Joe Biden was the president-elect? McCarthy
was too cowardly or too unprincipled to answer.
If you’re a
Republican lawmaker, do you really want to spend the next four years running
away from CNN every time you’re asked to opine about the latest demented thing
Donald Trump has said or done — because you’re afraid that he’ll launch a
primary attack against you with his devoted base if you show integrity?
The
contrasting image is of Arizona’s Republican governor, Doug Ducey. It’s Dec. 1
and Ducey is literally signing the papers certifying his state’s election results
and officially awarding Biden its 11 electors — ignoring Trump’s baseless
claims of voter fraud in Arizona.
Ducey’s
cellphone rings, but it is no ordinary ringtone. It is “Hail to the Chief,” a
ringtone Ducey installed in July so that he would never miss a call from Trump.
But this time Ducey simply takes the phone out of his pocket, silences it, puts
it aside and goes on signing the papers.
According
to a report in The Hill, “Trump later called into a hearing with state
Republicans that was happening during the certification” and “tore into Ducey,”
declaring, “Arizona will not forget what Ducey just did.” Trump was right, but
not in the way he predicted.
On
Saturday, CNN described the civil war that has broken out in Arizona: “G.O.P.
party leaders and elected officials who’ve gone all-in for Trump, backed by
right-wing media, have relentlessly attacked those who can’t bring themselves
to go along with the lame-duck president’s refusal to concede. To be sure,
similar splits exist across the G.O.P. nationwide. But the infighting in
Arizona offers a clear picture of why some Republicans fear that if Trump
continues stirring up and directing his followers once he’s out of office, the
party may cripple itself at the state and local level.”
The story
added: “‘Some Republicans have decided to file for divorce from reality, facts
be damned,’ said Barrett Marson, a publicist who worked for Arizona Gov. Doug
Ducey’s political action committee. … Perhaps most notable in the subsequent
salvos was a tweet from the governor’s chief of staff, Daniel Scarpinato, to
‘Freedom Caucus’ chair Rep. Andy Biggs calling him nuts and ending, ‘Enjoy your
time as a permanent resident of Crazytown.’”
To be sure,
calling Ducey a “principled Republican” is a low bar, considering that he had
no problem backing Trump all the way until now. Unlike other Trump-friendly
Republicans, though, he was ready to draw a constitutional redline he would not
cross.
But every
day that goes by Trump shows us that as his power decreases, he surrounds
himself with more and more unprincipled crackpots, who fan his delusions and
propose more and more extreme actions, like Michael Flynn’s neofascist
suggestion of declaring martial law and rerunning the election in some states
Trump lost.
Therefore,
the stress that Trump creates will surely get only worse after he leaves the
White House, when, to stay relevant, he’ll need to say ever more extreme things
that keep his base — now fully marinated in his conspiracy theories — energized
and ready to attack any principled Republican who deviates from Trump. Also,
all those Fox News commentators who prostituted themselves to Trump (and their
ratings), helping to make his extreme base even more extreme, can’t stop now.
They’ll lose their audience.
They’re all
extremists who can’t stop, and principled conservatives understand that. Listen
to Evan McMullin, the former C.I.A. operations officer and later chief policy
director for the House Republican Conference, who resigned in 2016 to run for
president as an independent:
“Even
though Mr. Trump has been defeated, there is still no home for Republicans
committed to representative government, truth and the rule of law, nor is one
likely to emerge anytime soon,” wrote McMullin in this newspaper. “So what’s
next for Republicans who reject their party’s attempts to incinerate the
Constitution in the service of one man’s authoritarian power grabs? … The
answer is that we must further develop an intellectual and political home, for
now, outside of any party. From there, we can continue working with other
Americans to defeat Mr. Trump’s heirs, help offer unifying leadership to the
country and, if the Republican Party continues on its current path, launch a
party to challenge it directly.”
Call me
mad, but my gut tells me that when Trump is just the monarch of Mar-a-Lago —
just spewing venom — some Republicans will say “enough.” Somewhere in there a
new party of principled conservatives might just get born.
Wishful
thinking? Maybe. But what a blessing that would be for America.
Thomas L.
Friedman is the foreign affairs Op-Ed columnist. He joined the paper in 1981,
and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including
“From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the National Book Award. @tomfriedman
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