A Long Goodbye to Trump

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, August 25, 2022

 

Unlike Tennyson’s star-crossed Light Brigade, those among us who hope that the Republican Party does not renominate Donald Trump in 2024 possess a great deal of agency over our fates. Ours is, indeed, to “make reply.” Ours is, indeed, to “reason why.”

 

In what manner? Ay, there’s the rub.

 

Seven years ago, it was forgivable to shout “Forward! Charge for the guns!” when trying to prevent Trump from becoming the nominee. Today, such a blunder would represent a refusal to survey the field; a refusal to recognize that American politics, like politics everywhere else in the world, is grubby and unkempt and complex; and a refusal to grasp that, if the GOP’s Trump era is to be brought to an irrefutable close, it will be because the architects of his removal choose to embrace the same amoral political reality that Trump has used to his advantage, and thereby to meet the dissenters on their own terms.

 

Perhaps, in an ideal world, American politics would not be grubby and unkempt and complex. Perhaps, in an ideal world, American politics would instead be clean and tidy and simple. But we do not live in such a world, and, if one’s aim is to change that world, one is obliged to acknowledge as much at the outset. There is nothing “unconservative” about doing so. To remain moral, conservatism must, indeed, care about what should be. To remain vital, however, it must also care about what is. And what American politics is, I’m afraid, is grubby and unkempt and complex. The project to remove Donald Trump from his position at the head of the Republican Party is no exception to this rule.

 

As a writer who is able to say precisely what he thinks without reference to a constituency or to elections or to the limits of pragmatic politics, I fully comprehend the desire that many feel for the arrival of a single cathartic moment, in which, by virtue of an impeachment or a conviction or a mass awakening of the Republican electorate, Donald Trump is peremptorily confined to the sidelines. As a citizen who lives in the real world, though, I am aware that this is never going to happen — and, worse still, I am aware that attempts to force such a moment may well end up having the opposite effect of the one intended.

 

No, if Trump is to be toppled, it will be bit by bit, day by day, cut by cut, sigh by sigh. It will be achieved by a rich combination of criticism, indifference, self-interest, exhaustion, avoidable mistakes, and the ineluctable march of time. It will take the Liz Cheneys, who castigate him; it will take the Mitch McConnells, who discount him; it will take the Ron DeSantises, who play heir but not acolyte; and, as important yet, it will take the growing number of former fans who still love the man but are nevertheless interested in moving on. There will be no golden-hour ten-gun salute, no discrete passing of the baton. The process will be an evolution rather than a revolution; a battle of attrition, not a glorious charge; a question of erosion instead of jackhammers. It will, in short, be a grind, with the most important work of all being performed by those who fall short of explicit repudiation.

 

Or, to put it another way: There is no path to a post-Trump Republican Party that goes around, rather than through, Donald Trump.

 

This may appall, but it shouldn’t surprise. Historically, when political parties have gotten themselves into difficult situations, they have extricated themselves not by staging truth-and-reconciliation commissions, or by engaging in relentless self-flagellation, or by deciding in unison that a new epoch had begun, but by simply muddling on until the zeitgeist changed and a majority was prepared to quietly accept their mistake. It has been said that humor represents tragedy plus time. A similar equation obtains in politics. Ronald Reagan did not transform the post-Nixon Republican Party by relentlessly repudiating the 37th president; he transformed the post-Nixon Republican Party by standing hopefully atop the rubble and casting himself as the future. Gerald Ford did not draw a line under Watergate by prosecuting Richard Nixon once he was out of office; he drew a line under Watergate by pardoning him. Hubert Humphrey chose not to lambast LBJ, the president he served as VP, for the ongoing disaster in Vietnam. Likewise, Al Gore elected to ignore, rather than to condemn, Bill Clinton’s terrible behavior with Monica Lewinsky. The 2010 Tea Party movement may have privately seen George W. Bush as a reckless spender and a failure of a president, but it declined to talk much about him in public anyhow.

 

Ultimately, voters who want to rid the GOP of Donald Trump need to decide whether we truly mean it when we say that he is uniquely unsuited to office, and to tease out what that means in practice. If Trump runs in 2024, there will be just a handful of candidates who can plausibly beat him to the Republican nomination, and, in one way or another, all of those candidates will be flawed. Some — perhaps all — of them will be deeply interwoven with the Republican Party as it exists, and will thus have praised or helped or defended Trump at some point in the past or present. Some — perhaps all — of them will have directly appealed to Trump’s core voters while in office. Some — perhaps all — of them will have voted for policies of which certain factions within the movement disapprove. Some — perhaps all — of them will be reluctant to acquiesce to invitations to criticize Trump, or to endorse narratives that are typically advanced by the Republican Party’s opponents. Some — perhaps all — of them will pay tribute to Trump while they are running against him.

 

What should we do in response to this inevitability? My answer is simple: We should pick one of those alternative candidates — the one who is closest to one’s own views and who has a reasonable chance of winning — and vote for him. If there is a tension between our preferences and how things are unfolding on the ground, we should acquiesce to how things are unfolding on the ground. If, as in 2016, the field is crowded and split, we should help to uncrowd it by coalescing around the non-Trump candidate who seems to have the best shot. And if we don’t like the alternatives other than as a means by which to beat Trump, we should make our peace with that in pursuit of the lesser of two evils. In some quarters of the American Right, I have observed a tendency toward what might best be described as “De-Ba’athification” — that is, toward the purist, almost epidemiological desire to reject any political candidate who can in any sense be contact-traced back to Donald Trump or to his presidency. As it was with Iraq, this approach is profoundly mistaken, for the most likely alternative to the Republicans who coexisted with Donald Trump is not some slate of immaculately conceived neophytes; it is more Donald Trump.

 

In the more immediate term, conservatives who wish to see Trump retired in 2024 ought to stop talking about him all the time, in favor of building up other politicians who are engaged in active controversies right now; they ought to think more seriously than they have about why Trump rose to prominence in the first place; they ought to explore what Trump failed to do with his time in office, and how someone else might improve upon it; they ought to get into the habit of talking to their neighbors, friends, and co-ideologues about why a third nomination would be a terrible idea; and, above all, they ought to concentrate on the issues that conservatives care about — inflation, wages, education policy, abortion, zoning, the courts, energy production, immigration, and the scourge of race-and-gender-obsessed identity politics — and make clear that they care dearly about them, too.

 

Much of Donald Trump’s appeal is personal; regrettably, he had a point when he suggested that he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone without losing much support. If the Republican electorate can eventually be persuaded to hand over the keys to Someone Else, it will be because it trusts that that Someone Else will be willing, and able, to advance its agenda. But personality does not explain all of Trump’s allure, and if the Republican electorate can eventually be persuaded to hand over the keys to Someone Else, it will be because it trusts that that Someone Else will be willing, and able, to advance its agenda, and to do so without all the nonsense that went along with the last guy.

 

Finding and promoting those Someone Else — yes, at the expense of those who have chosen to combine their anti-Trumpism with a rejection of traditional conservatism, with a newfound distaste for the Republican Party in general, or with a summary abandonment of the issues that had motivated them for decades prior to Trump’s arrival on the scene — is imperative. If they play it right, Trump’s opponents will be able to muddle through, and, in fits and starts, by trial and error, tinkering and nudging as they go, make a persuasive case for change — half a league onward, but no more besides.