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This could have been the week Republicans started distancing their party from the political disaster that was Donald Trump and ridding it of his most dangerous, violent supporters. But virtually no one in America actually expects them to do that.
Even though Trump is gone and for the moment silenced by the social media platforms he used to spread his inflammatory lies, the overwhelming majority of elected Republicans still live in fear of alienating Trump’s most hateful, angry supporters. Their greatest fear used to be losing office in a Republican primary. After Trump inspired his threatening mob’s attack on the Capitol shouting “Hang Mike Pence!” many actually fear losing their lives.
There’s still more media talk than evidence of a political split within the Republican Party. Very few elected Republicans have ever worked up the courage to openly oppose Trump’s incompetent, anti-American presidency. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy flips around like a fish in a boat trying to take every pro-Trump and anti-Trump side on party issues. Democrats finally forced a head count of House Republicans on punishing outrageous Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, Trump’s most racist, anti-Semitic promoter of crazy conspiracies who endorsed assassinating House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Only 11 Republicans voted with Democrats to strip Greene of her committee assignments with 199 supporting Greene.
McCarthy tried to pretend the embarrassing vote proved the Republican Party was a big tent embracing a wide variety of political viewpoints. Just the opposite. The Republican tent is getting smaller all the time. Instead of worrying about losing the votes of the violent white supremacists who support Trump, Republicans should worry about losing all the decent Americans who are being repelled by their party. After Trump’s Capitol insurrection in January, more than 12,400 Republicans dropped their party registrations in Pennsylvania and 9,300 more in Arizona. Nearly 8,000 did the same in North Carolina.
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Crucial Test
The crucial test vote for Republicans will be the verdict in the U.S. Senate at the conclusion of Trump’s second impeachment trial starting tomorrow. The most powerful Republican to recognize the danger Trump presents to the survival of the Republican Party is Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. McConnell dared to suggest he’d strongly consider impeaching Trump for sending that rampaging mob to shut down a joint session of Congress to prevent it from certifying President Biden’s election. McConnell denounced Trump for endangering lawmakers, saying “the mob was fed lies . . . by the president and other powerful people” at Trump’s incendiary rally on the mall preceding the attack.
But Democrats have good reason never to believe anything McConnell says. His only motivation is maintaining his own power. When few Republicans other than the usual suspects joined his criticism of Trump, McConnell voted with 44 other Republicans against even holding a Senate impeachment trial because Trump was already out of office. (That was because McConnell’s last act as majority leader was refusing to reconvene the Senate until Trump was gone.)
The funny thing is McConnell’s first political instinct was correct. The Republican Party will continue to lose voter support until it moves as far away from Trump as it possibly can. Democratic support is increasing in all the fastest growing populations and areas of the country including cities and suburbs while Republican support is only growing in shrinking small towns and rural areas where fewer Americans live all the time. That’s why Republicans have to depend on voter suppression and corrupt gerrymandering to win elections.
Even Trump’s explicit racism that attracted fringe group voters including neo-Nazis and Klansmen who’d never participated in mainstream politics before has reached the point of diminishing returns. Trump’s attempt to scare suburban voters about Black people moving in was absurdly out-of-date. Many already have mixed race friends and neighbors. Even conservative white voters motivated by race don’t want to believe they’re racists. All our lives we’ve heard the most virulent racists we’ve ever known swear they don’t have a racist bone in their bodies. That’s why the crude Trump rioters ransacking the Capitol were such an embarrassment parading around with enormous Confederate flags and wearing “Camp Auschwitz” T-shirts.
Republicans were fooled because through sheer luck not nearly as many of their colleagues as they’d feared were swept out of office by the enormous voter turnout that mercifully ended the disastrous Trump presidency. Now they believe they have a chance to reclaim a majority in Congress in two years because the opposition party usually picks up seats in mid-term elections. That underestimates the eagerness of voters for Biden to create the competent national vaccination program Trump never did to bring an end to the world’s worst pandemic death toll rapidly approaching 500,000 and begin restoring American life to normal. If Biden succeeds in his first year, the economic boom in 2022 could totally upend the usual political expectations in the mid-terms.
