A GOP alliance to oppose Trumpism

The New York Times reports on a GOP effort to keep Trumpism from fully consuming the party, making the ex-president a full-blown dictator in control. This effort has been going on quietly for months. This is surprising news to me. More surprising is the NYT’s disclosure that Mitch McConnell is leading the effort to stop Trumpism and he is aided by former president George Bush.

The circumstances here are bizarre. In public, McConnell has supported essentially all of what the ex-president wanted and did, including protecting him from impeachment on transparently crackpot hyper-partisan logic. 

What the hell is going on here? What effect, if any, will the reporting of this story have on internal GOP politics and the party's corrupt authoritarian, ideology? What about the critically important issues? Specifically, where do defense of or opposition to democracy, the rule of law, inconvenient facts, inconvenient truths, sound reasoning, secularism and civil liberties stand with each side in this quiet internal Republican war among GOP elites? 

It is the fight among the elites that count here. Rank and file Republicans are just as clueless as I, and probably most of the rest of the American public, were. In the end, rank and file Republicans and with the rest of us, will be lied to, spun, manipulated, distracted and deceived, no matter how this war plays out.

There are three basic ways to see this, roughly mostly good, mostly bad and mostly mixed-ambiguous.

The NYT writes:

As Mr. Trump works to retain his hold on the Republican Party, elevating a slate of friendly candidates in midterm elections, Mr. McConnell and his allies are quietly, desperately maneuvering to try to thwart him. The loose alliance, which was once thought of as the G.O.P. establishment, for months has been engaged in a high-stakes candidate recruitment campaign, full of phone calls, meetings, polling memos and promises of millions of dollars. It’s all aimed at recapturing the Senate majority, but the election also represents what could be Republicans’ last chance to reverse the spread of Trumpism before it fully consumes their party.

Mr. McConnell for years pushed Mr. Trump’s agenda and only rarely opposed him in public. But the message that he delivers privately now is unsparing, if debatable: Mr. Trump is losing political altitude and need not be feared in a primary, he has told Mr. Ducey in repeated phone calls, as the Senate leader’s lieutenants share polling data they argue proves it.

In conversations with senators and would-be senators, Mr. McConnell is blunt about the damage he believes Mr. Trump has done to the G.O.P., according to those who have spoken to him. Privately, he has declared he won’t let unelectable “goofballs” win Republican primaries.

History doesn’t bode well for such behind-the-scene efforts to challenge Mr. Trump, and Mr. McConnell’s hard sell is so far yielding mixed results. The former president has rallied behind fewer far-right candidates than initially feared by the party’s old guard. Yet a handful of formidable contenders have spurned Mr. McConnell’s entreaties, declining to subject themselves to Mr. Trump’s wrath all for the chance to head to a bitterly divided Washington.

Mr. Trump, however, has also had setbacks. He’s made a handful of endorsements in contentious races, but his choices have not cleared the Republican field, and one has dropped out. 

If Mr. Trump muscles his preferred candidates through primaries and the general election this year, it will leave little doubt of his control of the Republican Party, build momentum for another White House bid and entrench his brand of politics in another generation of Republican leaders.

If he loses in a series of races after an attempt to play kingmaker, however, it would deflate Mr. Trump’s standing, luring other ambitious Republicans into the White House contest and providing a path for the party to move on.

But while there is some evidence that Mr. Trump’s grip on Republican voters has eased, polls show the former president remains overwhelmingly popular in the party. Among politicians trying to win primaries, no other figure’s support is more ardently sought.

Mr. Trump is backing primary opponents to incumbent governors in Georgia and Idaho, encouraged an ally to take on the Alabama governor and helped drive Gov. Charlie Baker of Massachusetts into retirement by supporting a rival. The Republican Governors Association, which Mr. Ducey leads, this week began pushing back, airing a television commercial defending the Georgia governor, Brian Kemp, against his opponent, former Senator David Perdue. It was the first time in the group’s history they’ve financed ads for an incumbent battling a primary.

Mr. McConnell has been loath to discuss his recruitment campaign and even less forthcoming about his rivalry with Mr. Trump. In an interview last week, he warded off questions about their conflict, avoiding mentioning Mr. Trump’s name even when it was obvious to whom he was referring.

The Senate Republican leader has been worried that Mr. Trump will tap candidates too weak to win in the general election, the sort of nominees who cost the party control of the Senate in 2010 and 2012.

“We changed the business model in 2014, and have not had one of these goofballs nominated since,” he told a group of donors on a private conference call last year, according to a recording obtained by The New York Times.

Analysis

On the one hand, McConnell dislikes goofballs and tries to get reasonable-sounding Republicans like Maryland governor Larry Hogan to run for office. On the other hand, nearly the entire GOP leadership went along with open attacks on or rejection of democracy, inconvenient truth, the rule of law, civil liberties, etc. Before T**** came on the scene, corrupt authoritarianism and incompetence was the direction the GOP had been moving toward for decades. T**** accelerated the moral rot in already anti-democratic, anti-truth, anti-civil liberties GOP. McConnell cannot undo anything he did, e.g., saving T**** from impeachment twice.  

Assume that McConnell succeeds in neutering T**** and the goofballs. So what? What will be left to run the party? When it comes to the important issues, how far apart is the T**** goofball wing of the GOP and the McConnell-Bush radical Christian right, laissez-faire capitalist wing? Christian nationalists and their grip on the party are not going to go away. Neither are laissez-faire capitalists with their hundreds of millions in cash needed to run party operations and campaigns. None of that will change. Both have shown their acceptance or tolerance of T**** and the goofballs. What about Kevin McCarthy? he is a hard core T**** supporter and likely to become House speaker in less than one year. He is not going to go away or change his mendacious authoritarian brand of politics.

Given the intense threat that democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties are under from hyper-toxic T**** wing of the Republican Party, it probably makes sense to hope that McConnell triumphs and what is left of the GOP can be more effectively opposed.

So, much as I dislike the self-serving, sleazy, corrupt McConnell (and his corrupt wife Elaine Chao), I hope he succeeds and democracy remains more or less intact.

The Democratic Party better wake up. There isn't much time left, assuming there is still enough left to effectively defend democracy.

Acknowledgement: Thanks to PD for pointing this NYT article out.