The Guardian view on the return of Donald Trump:
plotting a hostile takeover
Editorial
Nationally, the former president is a vote loser. The
trouble for Republicans is his grip over the party rank and file
Mon 1 Mar
2021 19.13 GMT
In the
United States, the Republican party has been unmistakably corrupted by power.
Its leadership did not call out Donald Trump for his “high crimes and
misdemeanors”, his savage politics, his cruelty, his lies and his conspiracy
theories. Voters had to wait until Senate Republicans had refused to convict Mr
Trump of impeachable crimes before their leader, Mitch McConnell, would speak
truth to power. By then, the question was not whether there was a war over the
soul of the party but whether Republicans had a soul worth fighting for.
At the
weekend Mr Trump revealed that there would be payback for Mr McConnell and
other Republican lawmakers for their “disloyalty”. In a speech to the
Conservative Political Action Conference, Mr Trump flirted with running again
in 2024 and took swipes at the Biden White House. But he reserved his punches
for his own side – targeting “Republicans In Name Only” who voted to impeach
him and criticised his incitement of the mob that stormed Capitol Hill in
January.
Mr Trump
has radicalised the base of his party to a troubling degree by restricting and
distorting their view of the world, patterns of thinking and value systems. In
a forthcoming paper, Professor Gary Jacobson of the University of California
San Diego, writes that Republican politicians who humoured the former
president’s “seditious urgings put protection of their own futures within the
party above concern for that party’s collective future if devotion to Trump
remains its defining feature”.
Nationally,
Mr Trump’s a vote loser. There’s no question that Republicans would be better
off without him. Polls suggest a majority of Americans want him convicted and
barred from holding future office. But he has a vice-like grip over the party
rank and file. A recent survey by the American Enterprise Institute found that
79% of Republicans view Mr Trump favourably; two-thirds agreed with his
disproven belief that Joe Biden’s win was illegitimate; a majority “support the
use of force as a way to arrest the decline of the traditional American way of
life”; and almost a third sympathise with the QAnon conspiracy theory that
insists Mr Trump was fighting a global child sex-trafficking ring.
Mr Trump,
perhaps more than any other post-war US leader, has been helped by a rightwing
news media that trades in contrived alternatives to unwelcome truths. Governing
becomes almost impossible without adherence to norms such as truth-telling. Mr
Trump’s would-be successors peddle a populist narrative of fears and grievances
aimed at consolidating support in a predominantly white evangelical base. They
are building what appears to be an extreme rightwing political party in plain
sight.
The
Republican leadership has for decades given a monstrous politics a thin veneer
of respectability. But Mr Trump is a monster they could not contain. No doubt
some think that without his Twitter megaphone and facing lawsuits Mr Trump
might give up. Teasing the voters with a 2024 run suggests this is a forlorn
hope.
Republicans
may come to their senses. US demographics point to a more younger and diverse
population, while Trumpism festers in shrinking parts of the electorate.
Gerrymandering and voter suppression are not long-term strategies to win. Mr
Trump aims to be a force within the party. Republicans have a good chance at
retaking both the House and the Senate in 2022. Failure in two years’ time
might spell the end of the Trump insurgency. A victory might spark its rebirth.
However the Republican leadership responds, it reveals them – with consequences
not just for the US but the rest of the world.
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