By John Daniel Davidson
Monday, July 18, 2016
CLEVELAND — The Republican Party will nominate Donald
Trump as its candidate for president at the national convention here this week,
which means the RNC will serve as a kind of ceremonial marker for a rather
unusual political purge: a purge in reverse.
The Republican leaders who show up to the convention and
climb aboard the Trump train will be purged from whatever comes after the GOP.
The ones left standing will be the ones who stayed away—or, like, Sen. Ted
Cruz, showed up, but not to endorse Trump.
Make no mistake, the GOP as we know it is over. It will
not survive Trump’s nomination and his almost certain defeat in November. A
number of high-ranking Republicans seem to sense this, and they’re shunning the
convention.
In fact, the 2016 RNC is almost more notable for who’s not coming than for who
is. In addition to the raft of GOP senators off mowing their lawns and fly
fishing this week, not a single living GOP nominee or former president will
attend. That means George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, George W. Bush, John McCain, and
Mitt Romney will not be in Cleveland. Jeb Bush won’t be there either, nor will
erstwhile Republican presidential candidates Lindsay Graham and Carly Fiorina.
Ohio Gov. John Kasich, although he’ll be in Cleveland
overseeing the logistics of a huge convention—and even making some
appearances—has no plans to speak at the convention and as of this writing had
not endorsed Trump. Trump’s other chief primary rival, Cruz, has agreed to
speak but still hasn’t endorsed Trump or given any indication he plans to do
so.
Convention attendees will at least be treated to remarks
by national luminaries such as Scott Baio, noted star of hit television sitcoms
“Happy Days” and “Charles in Charge,” soap opera star Antonio Sabàto Jr. (“The
Bold and the Beautiful” and “General Hospital”), and Willie Robertson of “Duck
Dynasty” fame.
It’s unclear what purpose these celebrities will serve
other than chintzing up the convention and turning what should have been a
venue for negotiating peace between the warring factions and establishing the
new direction of the GOP into a real-life State of Union Address of President
Camacho.
On the bright side, Sarah Palin isn’t speaking. Alaska,
we’re told, is just too far away.
The Future Does
Not Belong to Trump
Joking aside, Republican leaders and principled
conservatives now have a duty to break from the GOP, or at least this version
of the GOP, and form a new party—or a new movement within the party, to take it
back and transform it.
To do that, they need to purge the ranks of the emerging
Trump GOP. All those who have thrown in their lot with an anti-free-trade,
lifelong Democrat with no apparent understanding of the Constitution should not
have a future in the party. Everyone who proved they were more interested in
power than principle should be exiled.
The convention, then, is a kind of litmus test. We now
know where most everybody stands. The VP fiasco served a similar purpose for
the small group of career strivers vying to get the invitation. It turns out
Gov. Mike Pence is exactly who we thought he was. If reports that Gov. Chris
Christie was “livid” upon hearing he wouldn’t get the VP nod are true, then
surely he’s the saddest Trump clown of them all.
The tragic figure in all this is House Speaker Paul Ryan.
He can hardly stand on the sidelines, nor can he reasonably be expected to
withhold his endorsement of the Republican Party’s nominee. Ryan himself noted
he’s “the highest-ranking Republican in the country,” a post that comes with
“certain duties and responsibilities.” Caught in the middle, Ryan has the
unenviable task of trying to cajole Trump into supporting Ryan’s fairly
well-articulated—if awkwardly named—reform agenda, “A Better Way.”
But trying to get Trump interested in serious policy
reform is like trying to get Vladimir Putin interested in free and fair
elections: he has no use for them. That’s why Republican leaders who are
willing to jettison their erstwhile conservative principles must go. Even if
Trump wins in November, conservatives would be faced with a GOP unmoored from
any coherent governing philosophy—and a president who is uninterested in one.
Purges happen. Turkey had one over the weekend. Theirs
was a bizarre coup d’état that might
well turn out to be a false flag designed to rid the country of secularism and
give President Tayyip Erdogan a free hand at authoritarian rule. It will be
ruinous for him and his people, however it ends.
In actual democracies like ours, we don’t need actual
putsches. But political parties must sometimes go through refining fires. Now
comes the fire for the GOP. May it burn as long and as hot as it must. The
country depends on it.
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