BOUND TO BE THE VERY NEXT PHASE
2500 years ago, Sun Tzu, in THE ART OF WAR, wrote “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” So I keep plugging away, trying to understand Donald Trump and the Republican Party.
Understanding Donald Trump has been the easier of the two tasks, and I won’t belabor points I’ve made in previous posts. Michael Wolff’s instant best seller, FIRE AND FURY, confirms what we knew or suspected all along. Trump wasn’t that bright to begin with; he knows (and cares) less about government than most American teenagers; he ignores moral and ethical boundaries; and he’s clearly suffering from serious cognitive impairment.
When he won the election last November, Donald Trump had spent seven decades doing whatever he damned well pleased. His father’s money and influence kept him out of Vietnam, financed his career, and when he went broke, financed a fresh start. His money allowed him to ignore or buy off creditors, business partners, and ex-wives. He hadn’t planned on winning the election, but he wasn’t going to let a little thing like being President of the United States change his lifestyle. It was going to be business as usual, and screw any laws, regulations, or customs that stood in the way.
It’s not a pretty picture, but it’s not hard to understand.
Republican behavior, on the other hand, has confounded my expectations. Between Trump’s election and his inauguration, I speculated that quite a few mainstream Republicans, especially those Trump insulted during the campaign (McCain, Cruz, and Rubio, for instance), would happily turn on him if he made a misstep. Boy, was I wrong.
Trump’s first year in office was nothing but missteps. He is less popular than any other first year president in the history of opinion polls. Elections in late 2017 appear to show that his endorsement, whether in a swing state like Virginia or in the reddest state of them all, Alabama, isn’t enough to guarantee that his handpicked candidate will win.
And yet despite these signs of weakness, congressional Republicans have rallied behind the man that many of them ridiculed in private. Senators like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, who were mavericky in the summer and fall, turned out to be merely summer soldiers and sunshine patriots. They, like gadflies Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, and Lindsey Graham, all knelt before the throne as autumn gave way to winter.
Jim Wright, in his Stonekettle Station blog (link below), theorizes that national Republicans know that the they’re going to lose control of Congress in next year’s elections, and they’ve decided to give themselves golden parachutes to soften the blow. That makes sense as far as it goes. It explains the unanimous Republican support for the abominable tax bill. They don’t expect to be around when the chickens come home to roost.
But it doesn’t explain why Republicans are doing their best to abort investigations into the Russian sabotage of the 2016 election, or why they’re so desperate to undermine the FBI, or why they can’t let go of their dream of prosecuting Hillary Clinton. The more obvious it becomes that there are sinister connections between Trump and Vladimir Putin, the harder Republicans work to prevent the truth from being revealed. As Yul Brynner sang in THE KING AND I, “Is a puzzlement.”
One obvious possibility is that there are a fair number of congressional Republicans who got their hands dirty during the campaign, either as members of the Trump transition team (for instance, Devin Nunes and Trey Gowdy), or simply as recipients of campaign contributions from Russian sources. It is an inconvenient truth that taking cash or accepting assistance from foreign sources are against the law. And indeed, THE HILL reports that Robert Mueller has questioned members of the Republican National Committee about using data from Russian hacks in their digital campaign last fall.
I hope Wright’s theory is correct. What worries me is the possibility that congressional Republicans do not, in fact, expect to lose control of the House and Senate after the 2018 elections. Maybe they have some tricks up their sleeve. They have one built in advantage because many of the Senate seats being contested in November are already held by Democrats, so there won’t be as many opportunities to pick up new seats, even if they hold on to the ones they currently have. That’s just the luck of the draw.
But Republicans will also benefit from gerrymandering in many states, dividing the Democratic vote in ways that guarantee a lot of safe Republican seats. That give them a big head start in retaining control of the House of Representatives. A few months ago, a polling group estimated that Democratic candidates could win 54% of the combined nation-wide votes for the House and still wind up with only 47% of the seats.
Republicans are also using a variety of techniques to suppress voter turnout among likely Democratic sympathizers (e.g. minorities and students). Between now and November you can bet that they’ll do their best to disenfranchise even more people.
I suspect the recent Senate election in Alabama has suggested a new tactic – simply refusing to concede a loss in any close election. Roy Moore didn’t have the credibility to pull it off, but my guess is that in November, less odious Republican candidates who lose by a narrow margin will claim fraud and refuse to accept the results. And they could get some traction – at least in the court of public opinion, if not in an actual court of law. And since Trump is rapidly appointing right wing mediocrities to the federal bench, it’s not inconceivable that the judiciary will soon be as corrupt as Congress.
Corruption, I think, is their real goal. They’re trying to build an oligarchy that looks enough like our historic democracy that no one notices the change until it’s too late. Republicans aren’t trying just to suppress votes. They’re trying to suppress reality itself.
That’s why they want to ignore the Russian election hack and use the FBI to persecute their political enemies. It’s banana republic stuff.
Can they get away with it? Absolutely – unless Democrats understand what’s going on and figure out effective ways to fight back. They can start by rejecting the conventional wisdom that Democrats can only win by being more like Republicans.
That’s a good way for Democrats to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Harry Truman put it well in 1952: “If it’s a choice between a genuine Republican, and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will choose the genuine article every time.”
The only way Democrats can win majorities in Congress is by doing what Ralph Northam did in Virginia and Doug Jones did in Alabama. Use voters’ frustration with Trump and his Republican enablers to maximize turnout among registered Democrats and progressive independents.
In 2018, Democrats need to be Democrats.