By Noah Rothman
Thursday, October 14, 2021
On Tuesday night, Donald Trump made explicit what had
previously only been implied: Republicans are his hostages. Or at least,
Republican voters are his to command. If the GOP has any hope of electoral
success, its members will have to bend to his demands—more, somehow, than they
already have.
“If we don’t solve the Presidential Election Fraud of
2020 (which we have thoroughly and conclusively determined),” the former
president said in an October 13 statement, “Republicans will not be voting in
’22 or ’24.” It’s not clear what Trump wants Republican officeholders to do,
and maybe that’s the point. The directive may be vague, but the sentiment is
plain: Make of me a godhead or suffer at the polls. But in making the threat
explicit, Trump has made two mistakes that he and his allies could come to
regret.
First, the tactic he is adopting undoes months of work
that his indefatigable apologists did on his behalf following the Republican
Party’s surprise losses in two runoff elections for U.S. Senate in Georgia.
Trump’s threat is toothless without the implication that he can discourage
Republican voters from heading to the polls—something he and his supporters
insisted for weeks after the Georgia races that Trump did not do.
When Democrats retook the U.S. Senate, Trump’s
allies contended that the president’s endless pronouncements that the
2020 vote was “rigged” and elections in the United States have been corrupted
by a cabal of shadowy bureaucrats did not have a depressive effect on the
Republican electorate. After all, even as he was indicting Republican election
officials in Georgia, alleging that they were actively sabotaging Republican
prospects, he also halfheartedly urged Georgians to vote.
It could not be that Trump contributed to these
candidates’ underperformance—an unusual circumstance given the GOP’s historic
overperformance in Georgia runoffs. It must be that the GOP only overperforms
when Trump is also on the ballot, that David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler were bad
candidates, and that Mitch McConnell erred when he refused to write Trump’s
demand for individual stimulus checks into a COVID relief bill at the very last
minute. Everything was thrown against the wall to absolve Trump of blame for
the abject state in which he left the Republican Party after his presidency.
With Trump’s latest admission, all that work is out the
window (demonstrating once again why lending your credibility to bolster
Trump’s arguments only mortgages your credibility). With this ultimatum, Trump
has admitted that he is responsible for the GOP’s minority status and, thus,
all the Democratic Party’s legislative successes this year. He did it. What’s
more, he can do it again. And that’s his second mistake.
In this brief but explicit hostage letter, Trump claims
that his command over Republican voters is such that he can make or break the
Republican Party in the upcoming midterm elections. But he cannot. Barring a
historic reversal of fortune that upends everything we know about political
dynamics, Republicans will gain seats in Congress next
November. Trump has not narrowed his focus to a set of bellwether races. He’s
saying plainly that Republican voters will stay home. But they
won’t. And when Republicans win despite Trump’s subversion, it will only help
the GOP see through the unnavigable fog that descended over the party when
Trump glided down the escalator.
Now, whatever the outcome of the 2022 elections, Trump
and his fans will surely insist that the Republicans could have done better.
But that is an unfalsifiable assertion. The demonstrable contention will be
that Trump’s exhortations did not stop Republicans from winning seats.
Moreover, given the Democrats’ narrow margin in the House, they may well be
able to say that Trump’s hectoring didn’t even prevent Republicans from
becoming the majority party in the House. That’s a strong
argument to present to Republican voters who insist that winning is all that
matters and winning is what Trump and Trump alone can deliver.
Now, Republicans could accede to the
president’s demands, but it’s not at all clear how. The GOP’s most prominent
members have already succumbed to Stockholm Syndrome. Right-wing populist
activists are already leading the Republican Party into a moral cul-de-sac in
which the events that followed Trump’s election loss were either no big deal or
somehow righteous. The January 6 riot was just “one day in January,” according
to Mike Pence. That day was either unremarkable or near-sacred, depending on the audience to which Republicans
are appealing. Ashli Babbitt, a rioter at the head of a mob who was shot
climbing through a broken window into a secure section of the Capitol, was
a martyr for a noble cause. Trump is the de facto leader of
the party, according to just about any GOP officeholder willing to talk about
the former president on the record. What more does Trump want?
That’s simple. He wants revenge. And the target of his
ire is the party that would not break the country to salve his wounded ego. He
will not stop until this sleight and all who participated in it are punished.
He’s now pushing all his chips in on the claim that he can destroy the party’s
political prospects if its members don’t turn back the clock. Neither of those
two unrealizable requests will be satisfied.
The Republican Party’s electoral prospects in the
upcoming midterm will be determined not by the former president but by the
current one and his party. Trump isn’t a determining factor. If Republicans
manage to retake one or both chambers of Congress next November, that is going
to become incredibly important to GOP voters. Those Republican lawmakers will
serve as an indispensable bulwark against Joe Biden’s agenda. Trump’s relevance
to that dynamic will be nebulous to the point of meaninglessness. By
desperately inserting himself into that milieu, Trump is setting himself up for
failure.
Republicans who have any interest in extricating
themselves from the corner into which they’re painted should make the most of
this opportunity.
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