Elephant in the room: the GOP and the Trump paradox

Trump’s legacy will be messy. By upending decades of US diplomacy across the world, mishandling a pandemic resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths, and inciting the storming of the Capitol, Trump is sure to have left the world grappling with the fallout from his presidency for years to come. But perhaps nowhere else will Trump’s legacy cast a longer shadow than in the ranks of the Republican Party.

The GOP is, after all, a key political institution in the world’s most powerful country and the laws of political homeostasis mean that it will at some point return to power. However, how it does so and what it then does depends a great deal on how the party processes the Trump years.

Internal battle lines are already being drawn with the remnants of the old Republican establishment squaring off against Trump’s fervent supporters. The latter team certainly seems to have the weight of numbers on its side. A clear majority of Republican House of Representative members voted against certifying Joe Biden’s election victory. The party base also overwhelmingly rejects Biden’s victory, with 64 per cent opposing certification according to a YouGov poll.

Still, the former group also has its strengths. In the Senate, most Republicans failed the final Trump litmus test when they voted to certify Biden’s victory. Liz Cheney, the third most powerful Republican in the House, voted to impeach Trump. Lots of big political donors also seem to be shying away from Trump. Already dozens of corporations have suspended political donations to Republicans who refused to certify Biden’s victory, and some big individual donors are said to be expressing unease.

The complicating factor is that neither side can really afford a comprehensive break. The November election showed the limits of running on a purely Trumpian platform. Democrats turned out in huge numbers, and alienated independent voters who swung Trump in 2016 now swung Democrat in a big way. Since then the Trump brand seems to have plummeted further. Polls show his approval ratings cratering ever since the attack on the Capitol.

Yet, Trump is also still far too popular with the Republican party to be ditched. Being too vocally critical of Trump has been the end of a number of Republican careers, and may yet claim more scalps via the primary process. There is also evidence that the Republicans – to an extent – need Trump to inspire base turnout. It is notable that without him on the ticket in Georgia the Democrats managed to clinch narrow victories in the Senate, helped by a slight drop in Republican turnout.

The solution some Republicans might be tempted to look for is a sort of Trumpism minus Trump: keep the populist appeal but ditch the incitement to violence, peddling of conspiracy theories, and relentless vulgarity.

Some efforts in this direction are already visible. Ben Sasse, Republican Senator for Nebraska, implicitly laid out this argument in a recent article in The Atlantic arguing that Republicans – at the very least – have to kick out the QAnon conspiracy theorists.

However, creating a sanitised Trumpism will be no easy feat.

Firstly, there’s the awkward fact that the beating heart of Trumpism is Trump himself – and he seems unlikely to go away. Lack of access to Twitter has cooled his ability to drive the news cycle on a daily basis but a presidential run in 2024, or one by a member of his family, seems probable. In the meantime, it seems likely he and his surrogates will continue to try and play kingmaker in Republican politics and push conspiracy theories. Events might also push him back into the news – particularly his upcoming impeachment.

Navigating Trump’s second impeachment safely will be very difficult for the party. The Republican base is dead set against impeachment – 83 per cent oppose it according to a Quinnipac University poll. Only ten Republican members of the House voted for it. However, in the less thoroughly Trumpified Senate impeachment might get more traction.

Notably, Senate Leader Mitch McConnell – once a staunch defender of Trump – has become more and more outspoken in his criticism of the soon-to-be former president. Speaking about the Capitol hill storming, McConnell declared “The mob was fed lies, they were provoked by the president and other powerful people”. Even if it’s unlikely that the Democrats will convince 17 Republican Senators to join them in impeaching Trump, giving them the two thirds majority needed to do so, even a handful of pro-impeachment Republican votes would keep party divisions smouldering.

And one shouldn’t underestimate how central demagoguery and conspiracy is to Trump’s appeal. Trump has shown a real skill for persuading otherwise political disengaged voters to turn out for him. His ability to absolutely dominate the news cycle gave him incredible political penetration. Meanwhile, his anti-establishment credentials and conspiracy-mongering had an undeniable appeal to the large sections of the US population that are deeply cynical about America’s political process.

The one way Trumpism minus Trump might work is if the Republican Party combined social conservatism with a leftward shift on economics and welfare. In 2016 Trump benefited from being seen as an economic moderate thanks to opposition to welfare cuts and free trade scepticism. Meanwhile, Democrats’ appeal in areas like healthcare is counter-balanced by widespread dislike of the “woke” ethics embraced by some of its more vocal members.

The problem here is that supply-side economics is perhaps the one sacred cow almost no one in the Republican Party is willing to slaughter. Even as the party went along with Trump in many other ways, a more left-wing economic approach was not on the cards. Infrastructure spending never materialised and instead the party pursued a bungled attempt to repeal Obamacare without providing a proper replacement, and massive tax cuts. They got trounced in the 2018 midterms for their trouble.

As Donald Trump leaves Washington many senior officials in his party are doubtless feeling some quiet relief. Yet over the following months they may discover to their dismay that while they can’t live with him, they also can’t live without him.