By Kyle Smith
Tuesday, January 19, 2021
Rand Paul would like you to know that while he “didn’t
agree with the [Capitol] fight that happened” January 6, he doesn’t believe
that President Trump — whose batty two-month crusade to convince his supporters
the election was stolen served as the proximate cause of the “fight” — should
be disqualified from holding office again in the future.
Language tends to be intemperate these days, but “I
didn’t agree with the fight” errs in the opposite direction: It’s far too tame
a response to the sickening display of January 6. This was no ordinary “fight.”
It was an attempt to violently disrupt the counting of electoral votes, and
hence the peaceful transfer of power to the next duly elected administration.
It stunned America and shamed us before the world. It made us look like a
banana republic. It resulted in several deaths and might have led to a physical
attack on, or even the murder of, the vice president as he was conducting the
most important business of his term. Trump’s actions may not have met the legal
definition of incitement, but he tossed a match on kindling he had carefully
placed and thoroughly soaked with kerosene. As Dan McLaughlin has
written, Trump must face consequences “sufficiently spectacular to deter
any repetition so long as our national memory endures.” But if Senator Paul has
his way, apparently, Trump will suffer no consequences whatsoever and
reenter private life as the heavy favorite to be the next Republican
presidential nominee.
This is madness.
Abraham Lincoln’s party was fine without Trump for 150
years and it will long survive him. The parties being largely ruled from the
ground up, it’s not feasible to eject Trump from a GOP he seized control of in
2015 and has since disgraced, but it is possible for 17 Republican senators to
convict and disqualify him from holding any future high office in the United
States. This is the right thing to do and it’s also the prudent thing to do, for
the sake of the party as well as the country. The GOP cannot afford to spend
the next four years trying to explain away Trump’s indefensible actions. It has
to move on, and there is only one way to do that.
Paul foresees a colossal schism in the party should Trump
be convicted and barred from future office-holding, warning that one-third of
the party will walk away from the GOP in that scenario. He’s wrong: One of the
curses (but also, sometimes, one of the blessings) of our culture is our
notoriously short collective memory. Should Trump be disqualified this winter,
the discussion will quickly move on to other topics. Who should be the new
party’s standard-bearer? Don Jr.? I very much doubt it. It’s unclear that even
Trump Sr. would be enthusiastic about that, having repeatedly ridiculed his
younger namesake as, among many other things, “not the sharpest knife in the
drawer.” For five years we’ve seen various other Republican politicians attempt
to ape Trump’s combination of posturing and populism, and it never works.
Senator Josh Hawley has spent two years reverse-mortgaging his reputation in an
attempt to extract equity out of the Trump bank, and it has gotten him nowhere.
A Politico/Morning Consult poll taken in November put him at 1
percent in the polls, and that was before his shameful performance on January
6. Though some of Trump’s ideas about trade and immigration may continue to
have sway in some parts of the party, Trumpism as a whole is too closely tied
up with one man to be handed off to a new leader. It would die with Trump’s
political career, and the party would move on.
A disqualified Trump would, of course, rain hellfire on
the senators who disqualified him, as well as any other perceived backstabbers.
But four years from now, when ten Republican senators face reelection, Trump’s
rage will be background noise at worst. Six years from now, when Ben Sasse,
Mitch McConnell, Susan Collins, and 17 of their Republican colleagues face the
voters, it won’t be any noise at all. Trump himself has a short attention span
and a fear of being boring; even he won’t be able to keep up the insults for
four years, much less six, on whatever cable-news perch from which he chooses
to harangue the nation. It is true that Trump is the only thing that
consistently fascinates Trump. But America does not love a sore loser, and his
victim act will begin to go stale by the next time voters go to the polls.
Gradually, even many of his most ardent supporters will begin to realize the
man is embarrassing.
Among those who persist in believing the fantasy that
Trump was robbed and that any lawmakers who voted against him are sworn
enemies, how will this play out at the ballot box? It won’t, because voting
will remain a binary choice. Trump, being disqualified, won’t be able to run as
a third-party candidate and divide the party. The primary motivating force for
voters will continue to be, as it has been for years, visceral dislike for one
party’s style and policies. Joe Biden has signaled in many ways that, far from
being a unifying president, he will consider it a core duty to focus on
punishing and antagonizing Trump supporters via appointments and policies
specifically designed to irritate them. Biden has watched Trump play the role
of Troll-in-Chief for the last four years and decided he wants in on the
action. Kamala Harris, should she become president, would be even more despised
by both conventional Republicans and Trumpists.
So never fear, Senator Paul: Post-Trump, Republicans will
close ranks quickly. The main thing the American Right stands for is hating
what Democrats do, and Democrats are preparing to embark on a presidency full
of policies that are easy to hate.
No comments:
Post a Comment