GOP LEADERS SEE TRUMP’S POWER THROUGH THE BLUR OF A REARVIEW MIRROR

The only thing that might save the Republican party from self-immolation is the warp-speed development of an anti-myopia vaccine.  Party leaders seem hell bent on crafting strategies for 2022 and 2024 with a vision that doesn’t extend past November of 2020. 

For the past four years, congressional Republicans showered an unhinged fool of a president with an obnoxious display of sycophancy.  They did this out of neither respect nor admiration. They did it out of fear. Donald Trump enjoyed consistently high approval ratings among GOP voters, not to mention a base that would literally go to war for him. And did. These legislators knew only too well from their fallen comrades that a binary choice awaited them: Either bow to the king or sacrifice your career. (Among the fallen: Jeff Flake, Bob Corker and Dean Heller.)

The issue then was about principled leadership. The goal for most Republican lawmakers was their own political survival, and that meant sacrificing their integrity for the electoral security afforded by Trump’s protection racket.  Although not exactly Profiles in Courage behavior, the choice was rational and understandable.  And it worked, until it didn’t.

The issue now is about how to steer the party in a post-Trump presidency, how to strategically craft an organizing principle that reaches beyond a warped reverence for a failed one-term demagog.  Sadly, for both the GOP and our democracy, this challenge is being badly blown. Stuck in pre-election and pre-riot mode, party strategists are forging ahead with a vintage 2017 litmus test: do no harm to Trump and his base.  

Smart, agile leaders don’t rely on the inertia of yesterday’s strategy to guide them through tomorrow’s challenges. Politics, like life, is dynamic, not static. Sure, Trump’s astronomically high polling levels among Republicans held for more than three years.  But that was yesterday. Today, his GOP approval rating has moved from the 80-to-90 percent range, to the 50s and 60s, according to the political polling site FiveThirtyEight.com.  National Public Radio reported last week that tens of thousands of recent Republican voters have changed their registration to either independent or to another party.

But that’s not all that has changed in the past few months.  Trump lost the election by more than 7 million votes, while Republicans did better than expected in down-ballot races. He lost his megaphone when Twitter permanently blocked him. Some 71 percent of Americans, according to a Reuters poll, believe the former president was responsible for the deadly Capitol riot. He became the first president to be impeached twice. Now that he is out of office, he faces a barrage of criminal and civil investigations that could well hold his feet to the fire for the next four years. 

Yet, the vast majority of congressional Republicans continue to cling to the same old script, somehow believing that Donald Trump’s political omnipotence knows no end. By looking behind them, they lose the opportunity to adjust for what lies ahead of them. In so doing, they end up feeding the beast when they should be starving him. 

There is a scientific concept that captures this dynamic, at least metaphorically. In 1927, Werner Heisenberg shook up the world of quantum physics by positing that you can’t, at the same time, know both the position and the momentum of a subatomic particle. The act of isolating the particle in order to measure its position, means you can’t simultaneously know how fast it is moving. Heisenberg’s work came to be known as the “uncertainty principle.”  You may remember it from physics class or Breaking Bad.  

Although politics hardly operates with the precision of quantum physics, it has its own version of the uncertainty principle:  A position created in and for a given moment is subject to unmeasurable momentum and therefore may not be suitable for future moments. Many politicians have ignored the uncertainty principle at their peril.  Remember “Read my lips: No New Taxes” from George H.W. Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign? It got him elected.  Two years later, the economy took a dive and Bush signed a tax hike bill. Angry voters denied him a second term.  

Poor John McCain took a position in his 2008 presidential campaign that was obliterated by momentum in far less than two years.  “The fundamentals of the economy are strong,” McCain said, despite an approaching recession. Hours later, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. The recession was on, and McCain’s quest for the White House was, for all practical purposes, over. 

Republicans in Congress had a perfect opportunity to take full advantage of the rapid momentum of Donald Trump’s decline. They could have hastened it with a total reset of the master-servant relationship of the past four years. After all, their lives and our country’s democracy were on the line when the 45^th president sent his rag-tag militia on a violent rampage of the Capitol.  That inflection point cried out for an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote to impeach and convict in the name of national unity. It was the perfect time for Republicans to have changed their position in light of the momentum of Trump’s declining power.

The argument against such a move was that the party needs the Trumpism faction in order to win future elections, although it didn’t seem to work that well for Trump himself last November. As the Washington Post’s Megan McArdle wrote last week, “There is no Trumpism. There is only Trump.”   The MAGA thugs who desecrated the Capitol didn’t urinate on the floor or throw fire extinguishers at cops out of a deep commitment to supply-side economics or the appointment of originalist judges. They wanted the system blown up, and Trump was their guy to do it. 

Their hero is now out of the White House and off of Twitter. He sits on a Mar-a-Lago balcony thinking up insults to toss at Mitch McConnell. Except nobody really cares, certainly not Mitch McConnell.  The imaginary revolution is over. The swamp wasn’t drained. The wall wasn’t built. The virus didn’t disappear.

For shellshocked Republicans, all that remains is to decide whether to, once again, become a party of ideas, or remain a delusional coalition of Q-Annon loonies, angry Proud Boys and other assorted red-hatted white supremacists.  Those who prefer the former need to let go of Trump, to cut the cord and move on.

 Until that happens, the Republican Party will be but a noisy bastion of ineffective uncertainty.