The Painful Birth of The Party of Trump
In 2016, when Donald Trump descended the golden escalator into the lobby of Trump Tower in New York and announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination for president he was met with skepticism by the Republican party’s leaders. His claims that Mexico was going to pay for a wall he would build to stop it from exporting its murders, drug dealers and rapists to the United States were wholly outlandish. His history of failed marriages and bankrupt businesses made his candidacy seem all the more preposterous. In addition, at the very outset of his campaign he was confronted with numerous allegations of improper and illegal conduct. In addition to denying these allegations, in many cases (usually involving claims of sexual assault or harassment of women) he even threatened to sue his accusers.
In the primary debates he was denounced as a racist, bigot and misogynist, all with ample evidential support. Yet, his message that, as a Washington outsider and a successful business executive, he alone could cure the nation’s problems resonated with those Republican voters who knew first-hand that their dysfunctional federal government had been failing them.
As the presidential primaries proceeded Trump quickly secured more votes than the other more seasoned candidates, helped by the fact that the field started with 17 candidates making it difficult for any of the others to garner significant support. Throughout the primary season, Trump gave little indication of the actual policies he would pursue proclaiming that governmental policies are “boring.”
Trump fully understood that most voters pay little attention to the promises of politicians and cast their votes on their perceptions of the character of the competing candidates. Trump had spent his entire life trying to establish an image of a no-nonsense, tell-it-like-it-is, successful business executive who could get things done. On top of that, he would expose the “disastrous” trade and peace deals negotiated by liberal Democrats and the hypocrisy of the biased news organizations that supported them. In between his attacks on Democrats and the purveyors of fake news he never passed up an opportunity to demean the other candidates running against him. Trump’s unrelenting assaults on others led Jeb Bush to characterize Trump as the “Chaos Candidate.” It didn’t take long for the Republican presidential debates to quickly devolve into a series of verbal food fights which left little opportunity for the other candidates to explain how they proposed to govern the country.
As the primary season came to a close, Trump was significantly ahead of his nearest rivals such that only a concerted effort by the Party’s leaders could have prevented his nomination. Rather than thwart the choices of the millions of Republicans that had supported Trump in the primary elections, they decided to stand down and allow him to secure the party’s presidential nomination. Figuring heavily into their thinking was the fact that their party’s candidates had won the popular vote in only one of the last five presidential elections. This meant that it was critical for them to retain the votes of those Trump supporters that they had strung along during those years with empty promises of creating high-paying jobs through tax cuts and reductions in business regulations. In addition, the potential loss of these supporters was made more likely by Trump’s own refusal to support the party’s nominee if the nomination were awarded to another. This caused the party’s leaders to conclude that Trump had the best (and possibly the only) chance of enabling their party to win back the White House. They undoubtedly consoled themselves with the thought that Trump could be counted on to champion their tax and regulatory policies. In addition, with the help of the Federalist Society, he would also nominate judges supportive of their corporate donors. As such, he could serve as a “useful idiot” should he win the election which few thought would actually happen. To the surprise of everyone, Trump did squeak out a victory, losing the popular vote by over three million votes but narrowly winning the electoral votes in three key battleground states.
From its very beginning Trump’s presidency was tumultuous. His credibility again came under attack on the very first day of his administration when he proclaimed that the crowds at his inauguration were the largest in the nation’s history. The next morning the New York Times published side-by-side photographs of the Capitol Mall during the Trump and Obama inaugurations which wholly debunked Trump’s claim. Still, Trump had his press secretary repeat this claim at a handful of the daily White House news conferences. From that point on, Trump’s modus operandi for dealing with allegations of his having made false statements was simply to keep repeating them. Over the course of his presidency the Fact Checker website found that he made over 30,000 false or misleading statements.
Even though Trump had promised to include in his administration only the best people (a claim he had previously made with respect to the then infamous Trump University), his administration was characterized by a seemingly unending parade of turnovers, beginning with Mike Flynn, his National Security Advisor, whom he had to fire just three weeks into his presidency. Other early departures included his Chief of Staff, his Press Secretary, his Secretary of State, his Attorney General, his Secretary of the Interior, his Secretary of Health & Human Services, his Secretary of Labor, his Secretary of Veterans Affairs and his Director of the FBI. These personnel changes revealed some troubling aspects of how Trump conducted his administration. Several cabinet officers, perhaps following Trump’s example, were discovered to have lavishly spent the taxpayers’ money on themselves; some were terminated because they were reported to have spoken of Trump in unflattering terms; and some were terminated because they insisted upon doing their job in accordance with the law. Equally disconcerting was his practice of hiring as replacements commentators he had heard on the Fox News Channel rather than individuals vetted by using a more deliberative screening process.
Another early problem that his administration had to confront arose out of the disinformation campaign that Russia had waged during the election because there was significant evidence of cooperation between the Trump Campaign and the Russians. Those interactions became the subject of an investigation by Robert Mueller who was appointed to serve as a Special Counsel. Trump blamed the Special Counsel’s investigation on Democrats determined to undermine the legitimacy of his election, even though it had been initiated by one of his own appointees and was being conducted by a life-long Republican. It soon became clear that with Trump the truth is anything he could make sound believable.
At the same time parallel investigations were initiated by the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. In the beginning, both committees were being run by Republicans and the White House worked closely with Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee to skew that Committee’s findings. When the Democrats won control of the House in 2018 and continued to pursue the matter, the Trump administration denounced their efforts and issued a blanket prohibition on any Executive Branch employee cooperating with the House Committee. While other presidents had resisted making some documents and testimony available to Congressional committees exercising their oversight authority, none had ever refused to cooperate altogether. This was an outright violation of the checks-and-balances approach embodied in the structure of the federal government as laid out in the Constitution. It was also a strong indication of Trump’s contempt for the legislative branch of the government.
Another troubling aspect of the manner in which Trump administered the government was the way he treated the nation’s allies and adversaries. He not only insulted our allies and was solicitous of our adversaries, but he totally abandoned the nation’s multilateral approach to foreign policy, pursuing a bilateral approach in all foreign policy matters. Making this approach even more troubling was his practice of frequently excluding his own associates from his meetings and conversations with other foreign leaders.
Trump’s unwillingness to be held accountable for his actions was also evident in his dealings within the Executive Branch. This first showed up in the spring of 2017 when he unceremoniously fired James Comey, the Director of the FBI who had refused Trump’s request to drop the Bureau’s investigation into the conduct of Michael Flynn. It became even more apparent later when he terminated no fewer than eleven Departmental Inspector Generals and replaced them with people considered to be loyal to him personally. To make clear his expectations of undivided loyalty, when removing an Inspector General he would premise his action on the terminated employee’s disclosures to the Congress even when those disclosures were mandated by law. In short, in his dealing with the Congress, employees of the Executive Branch and with foreign leaders he displayed a total unwillingness to be subjected to any form of oversight.
Although Trump managed to avoid being held responsible for the coordination between his campaign and the Russians or for his obstruction of the Mueller investigation, he soon got caught up in another debacle of his own making. He had held up Congressionally approved foreign aid to Ukraine in an effort to coerce that country into helping him undermine the integrity of Joe Biden who he anticipated would be his opponent in the 2020 election. When this effort was revealed by a whistleblower, it triggered an investigation which led to an impeachment proceeding culminating in a trial in the Senate. Trump weathered that challenge only through the concerted efforts of Senate Republicans who refused to even allow evidence to be introduced at the trial, much less considered. Rather than this incident curbing Trump’s penchant for abusing his authority, the Senate’s rejection of the House’s Articles of Impeachment seemed to only further embolden his reckless behavior.
Immediately following the Senate’s exoneration of Trump in the impeachment proceeding the nation was besieged by the coronavirus pandemic which Trump mishandled in too many ways to recount. Trump had hoped to win an easy re-election on the strength of the country’s economy which had been experiencing the longest uninterrupted period of expansion in the nation’s history. That expansion, however, was abruptly upended by the spread of the coronavirus. On top of that, the murder of George Floyd, a black man, by four white Minneapolis police officers precipitated civil rights protests in over 150 cities, many of them going on for months. Pouring gasoline onto that maelstrom, Trump tried to utilize federal law enforcement personnel to quell what were largely peaceful protests against an odious practice that had gone on for much too long. The trifecta of an out-of-control pandemic, an economy in a tailspin and widespread civil unrest led to a nine percentage point deficit in Trump’s re-election chances.
Realizing his re-election was in jeopardy, Trump embarked upon a campaign to discredit mail balloting which had been expanded in many states as a way of proceeding with the election during a rapidly spreading pandemic. There was no historical justification for his charge that mail ballots were inherently prone to fraud as a handful of states had universally employed them and several others, including Florida where Trump voted, used them without limitation. Trump coupled his attack on mail ballots with assertions that the election was being stolen from him. It was not just Trump’s hyper-competitive nature that was driving him, he was faced with the likelihood that he would be pursued both criminally and civilly as soon as he ceased to be the president. Although Joe Biden won the election by more than 7 million votes, the results were relatively close in five battleground states in which Biden had won largely on the basis of high voting turnouts in major metropolitan areas.
Trump’s first response to his loss was to call for recounts of the ballots which resulted in little or no change in the vote tabulations. Trump next initiated no fewer than 60 lawsuits claiming that the election had been stolen from him based upon mail ballots and fraudulent ballots cast in those major metropolitan areas. With the exception of one case decided on a procedural issue, all of these cases were dismissed, at least some of which were decided by judges that Trump had appointed. While some of these dismissals were made on the basis of procedural infirmities, most cases were rejected due to a complete lack of supporting evidence. As a third line of defense, Trump tried to get state governors and legislators to ignore the vote counts and appoint representatives to the Electoral College who would support his election. Although he applied a lot of pressure on the Republican election officials and legislators, none were willing to alter the election results in their states. Consequently, the Electoral College determined that Biden had won the election with a 306 to 232 victory. That finding was sent to the U.S. Congress on January 6th for certification, a generally perfunctory process provided for in the Constitution. Trump then pressured his Republican colleagues in the House and Senate to contest the finding of the Electoral College, but even their efforts seemed unlikely to prevent the Congress from declaring Biden to be the nation’s next president.
As a final effort, Trump called for a “Stop the Steal” rally to be held in front of the White House on the same morning the Congress was to receive the findings of the Electoral College. At that rally, Trump, his two adult sons, his attorney and two Republican Congressmen fired up the crowd of 40,000 supporters with allegations that the election was being stolen and exhorted them to march on the Capitol and stop the Congress from allowing this to happen. His attorney even said that the election would have to be “decided by battle.” What followed was a siege of the Capitol building disrupting the proceedings of both the House and the Senate and causing the legislators to abandon their respective chambers and go into hiding. They were wholly justified in taking flight as the marauding crowd was shouting threats of physical harm to the Vice President, the Speaker of the House and some of the more vilified Democratic legislators. During the ensuing melee one police officer was killed, one of the rioters was shot while trying to breach the door into the House chamber, four others participating in the siege died and 140 police officers were injured. It could not have come as a surprise to Trump that those who attended his rally would lay siege to the Capitol as members of his immediate family and his closest advisers (including Mike Flynn and Corey Lewandowski) are reported to have attended a meeting in November during which the attack on the Capitol was planned.
Although there were a number of pleas emanating from high-level Democrats and Republicans trapped within the Capitol to have Trump to call off the rioters, he took no action for at least three hours during which time he sat in the White House watching the assault of the Capitol on television. Even efforts to call in reinforcements for the quickly overwhelmed Capitol Police went ignored during that same period. After the Capitol was finally cleared, the Congress re-convened and accepted the findings of the Electoral College over the objections of eleven Senate Republicans and approximately 160 Republican members of the House of Representatives. This was a particularly ominous sign as the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security as well as the election officials in each of the battleground states and a host of state and federal judges were already on record as having found no evidence that the elections had been tainted by fraud.
The Democrats in the House of Representatives wasted no time in drawing up and adopting a single Article of Impeachment accusing Trump of having incited the Capitol insurrection. Although Chuck Schumer tried to get Mitch McConnell to call the Senate back into session to consider the House’s charge, McConnell refused, thereby delaying consideration of the Impeachment Article until at least January 19th (the day before Biden’s inauguration) when the Senate was scheduled to reconvene. In the interim, Schumer and McConnell agreed that the impeachment trial would be further delayed until February 9th ostensibly to give the President ample time to prepare his defense and the Senate time to confirm Biden’s long list of administration appointees. A possible additional motive was to give McConnell time to persuade members of his caucus to support the impeachment effort.
These events set the stage for what appears will be the final battle for the control of the Republican Party. Trump has already begun to prepare to run for president again in 2024 and is now working with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy for retribution against those Republican House members who did not object to the Electoral College findings. In the eyes of Mitch McConnell and the business faction of the Party that would result in another disaster. Trump’s actions over the past four years have not only demonstrated his authoritarian and reckless nature, but have also shown him to be totally incompetent at running the country. On top of that, Trump motivates Democrats to go to the polls and vote in numbers that far surpass those recorded in all past elections. In short, with Trump leading the Republican Party, the White House will remain out of reach and down-ballot races will be placed in jeopardy.
That battle will take place when the Senate takes up the House’s Article of Impeachment. The evidence is unequivocal that the January 6th siege of the Capitol was an act of insurrection designed to overturn the results of a popular election. In addition, there is ample evidence that Trump’s continuous efforts over the preceding two-month period to spread misinformation that the election had been stolen was the principal motivation for that attack. It was this same message that Trump used at his rally to fire up his supporters, many of whom later admitted that was what had motivated them to participate in the siege. This was also recognized by Mitch McConnell shortly after the attack on the Capitol in a highly unusual statement made on the floor of the Senate.
In an effort to head off this showdown, Rand Paul made a motion in the Senate this past week asserting that impeachment of a president no longer in office would be unconstitutional. Even though that assertion is contrary to past precedents, it nevertheless received the votes of 45 Republican Senators. While it was clear from the outset that Senator Paul’s motion was never going to be adopted, its real purpose was to demonstrate that the pending Article of Impeachment would not receive the necessary the 67 votes. At this point it should be appreciated that legislators will frequently vote along party lines on preliminary or procedural issues, but vote their conscience when the substantive issue is called for a vote. Still, Senator McConnell voted in favor of Senator Paul’s motion notwithstanding his prior statement about Trump’s culpability in instigating the Capitol siege. That would appear to telegraph that he has not been able to muster enough Republican votes needed to sustain a finding of guilty on the Article of Impeachment. This would be a major victory for Trump in his quest to wrest control of his party from Mitch McConnell even though he will surely face other challenges as criminal charges are pressed against him by the Department of Justice and the attorney generals of the States of New York and Georgia.
If Trump is so toxic as to have driven 81 million Democrats to the polls in the November election and so anti-democratic as to try to overturn by any and all means (including threats of physical violence) an election deemed free of fraud by his own Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, why are Republican legislators being so protective of him? The answer seems to be that his grip on their supporters is much greater now than it was when he ran for president in 2016. A variety of polls conducted over the last two months reveal that approximately 70% of Republican voters believe that Biden won the election through fraudulent means. Equally astounding, a majority of Republican voters blame Biden for the January 6th attack on the Capitol. On top of that, some Republicans who voted to accept the findings of the Electoral College are reported to have received threats of violence to themselves and their family members. Even so, perhaps uppermost in their minds is that the penalty for not supporting Trump will be a primary challenge supported by Trump when they run for re-election. This likely explains why Ohio Senator Rob Portman recently announced that he would not run for re-election in 2022.
A more important question is what this means for the way Republicans will conduct themselves in the months to come. From my perspective, it’s not going to make a pretty picture. By casting their lot with Trump, Republican politicians will lose at least a portion of their already dwindling voter base and will not be in a position to appeal to independent voters. This means they will have to double down on their tried-and-true practices of gerrymandering electoral districts, suppressing the vote of citizens who normally vote for Democratic candidates and using every available means to oppose the efforts of Democrats to make life better for Americans. They will also step up their disinformation campaigns in an effort to excite their own voters and to sow divisions among Democratic voters. In short, try as he may, President Biden is not likely to receive any support from Republican legislators for his agenda and will be forced to rely on the budget reconciliation process to achieve any legislative victories. All of his other achievements will have to come through executive actions.
When Donald Trump first announced he was running for president in 2016 he promised to change the way the nation’s federal government was being run. What he has done has been to make the nation more polarized and its government more dysfunctional.