CNN’s ANDERSON COOPER described Donald Trump as an “obese turtle on his back flailing in the hot sun”. Many Americans, listening to their president claim that the 2020 presidential election was being stolen from him, would have reacted much less poetically. The immediate response of CNN’s pundits (after Cooper’s) was to wonder aloud when the senior members of the Republican Party would stage an intervention on behalf of American democracy.
It’s a fair question. Increasingly, Trump’s behaviour is being interpreted as unhinged. To openly declare an election fraudulent as the votes are being counted is unprecedented in American political history. Aside from the obvious threat posed to public order, it is – as the CNN pundits’ response confirms – raising serious questions about the moral status of the Republican Party itself.
At what point, for example, do they sever the rope that binds them to the president? When he calls openly for an uprising? When he makes it clear that he expects the Supreme Court to confirm his presidency even after Biden crests 270 votes in the Electoral College? These are serious questions. Exactly how close to the edge of the abyss of civil war do they propose to dance?
The most bizarre aspect of this increasingly outlandish situation is how unnecessary it has become for the Republican Party to go on propping the president up. Amid all the tensions arising out of the agonisingly slow vote count, it is easy to forget just how well this election has gone for the Republicans. They have held the Senate, picked up five House seats, and seen off multiple Democratic Party challengers at the state level. Against the odds: against the polls: the Right has had a great Election Night!
Joe Biden, a Democratic Party insider and fixer for nigh-on 40 years, was never likely to pose a serious threat to the status quo. And now, even if he underwent some sort of Road to Damascus transformation and started talking like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, he can’t. Every major Biden appointee (i.e. his Cabinet) has to be approved by Mitch McConnell’s Senate. In other words, a Biden Administration (if there is one) will end up being composed almost entirely of conservative Democrats – and maybe one or two even more conservative Republicans.
The Democrats’ failure to take the Senate also condemns their activists in the House of Representatives to something very close to budgetary impotence. The concurrence of both houses of Congress is necessary for a Federal Budget to take effect. AOC can advance her Green New Deal as many times as she likes; without the endorsement of the Senate her GND is DOA.
Exactly the same fate will overtake every other piece of “progressive” legislation passed by the Democratic Party-controlled House. When it reaches the Senate floor, the very best the House can hope for is to see its bill amended beyond recognition. In the worst case scenario, the Republican majority in the Senate will simply toss the bill back to the House in disgust.
It gets worse. The Supreme Court of the United States, thanks to Donald Trump, now has a 6-3 conservative majority. Primed by cases referred to it by Republican-controlled state legislatures, those six conservative justices are now poised to overturn a host of landmark SCOTUS rulings. The most obvious of these – Roe vs Wade – if repudiated by the present court, could see American women’s access to abortion shut off by judicial fiat. When the liberals scream “Foul!”, the conservatives will be able to point out, perfectly truthfully, that access to abortion was only made available by judicial fiat in the first place. What SCOTUS can give, SCOTUS can also take away.
With all this in mind, it is difficult to see why the Republicans would feel obliged to lift a finger to save Donald Trump. By letting him swing in the wind until the last vote is counted, and then accepting the reality of a Biden victory (if that is what the count throws up), the Republicans could begin the task of re-assembling a respectable conservative political party out of the wreckage of Trump’s populist interregnum.
The key consideration here, of course, is can the Republican Party survive the loss of its most outstanding political campaigner since Teddy Roosevelt? Just how formidable Trump is on the stump was revealed in the final ten days of the campaign. Criss-crossing the country in Air Force One, the President, almost single-handedly, prevented the Democratic Party surge from turning into the much-anticipated (at least by liberals) “Blue Wave”.
On this question, the Republican Party can afford to be even more cold and calculating than usual. The antiquated articles of the US Constitution confer something like a 6 percentage-point advantage upon the Republican Party vis-à-vis the Democrats. That’s an awful lot of ground for the latter to make up – just to draw level with their opponents!
With this electoral advantage safely banked, the Republicans can afford to ask themselves whether or not they are comfortable with the idea of remaining the party of the ordinary working American which Donald Trump proclaims it to be. As Eric Crampton, writing in the latest New Zealand Initiative newsletter, Insights (No. 42) points out, Trumpism comes at a cost to traditional conservatism:
“The Republican establishment quickly reoriented itself in a populist direction. What support the Republicans had for free markets, less government spending, free trade and rules-based international order evaporated.”
Those principles will not re-condense while Trump and his brood remain in command of the Republican Party. More importantly, a political movement driven by the ordinary working American will, at some point, have to deliver to the ordinary working American. Inevitably, the Country Club and the Sports Bar will end up arguing over the spoils of American capitalism. At that point, numbers will count. How will the Republican Party’s key donors react when the Trumpists, like Jeremy Corbyn, start reassuring their rapturous supporters: “Ye are many, they are few”?
Some have dubbed Donald Trump “The American Caesar”. But, if that’s true, then his ultimate victims, like the original Caesar’s, will be the entrenched ruling class of the republic. There’s a reason all those aristocratic senators stabbed Caesar to death in Pompey’s theatre. They knew exactly where this friend of the ordinary working Roman was leading them. As Shakespeare has Brutus say in Julius Caesar:
“As Caesar loved me, I weep for him. As he was fortunate, I rejoice at it. As he was valiant, I honour him. But, as he was ambitious, I slew him.”
Don’t be too surprised if Republican Senators end up doing something very similar to the President who, for the past four years, has bestrode the United States – and the world – “like a colossus”.