“There is no stripe in the Republican Party that is sustainable [a] Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger or Mike Madrid,” Madrid, a longtime strategist who has become one of Trump’s fiercest Republican critics, told me. “The party is never going to go back to what it was.” And that means, at least in the short term, there’s a tough choice facing GOP coalition leaders and voters who see Trump as a threat to American democracy. Do they continue to support a party that remains in control, or do they launch a more direct attack on its influence, even if it helps Democrats in the 2022 and 2024 elections? Many Trump critics expect Cheney’s comments Tuesday night, if he loses, to signal her intention to mount such an effort against Trump as a candidate in the 2024 GOP presidential primary and perhaps even in the general election as an independent candidate. . the party nominates Trump again.
Georgia was an exception
Breathless reports of Trump’s supposedly corrosive position in the GOP surfaced all year, particularly after his Georgia foes, Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, handily defeated the primary challengers he recruited to take on them. Axios, in a typical reaction to the response at the time, said these results “cast doubt on the continued importance of the 2020 election to GOP voters — and may portend his weakened lock on the party.” both objective and subjective changes: growing interest among some activists and party donors in a possible 2024 run by Florida Gov. Ron DeSandis, less obsessive coverage of Trump’s every word on Fox News, polls showing some decline in Republican turnout who wanted him to run for president in 2024, and occasional losses during the primary season to some of his preferred candidates, such as his scandal-plagued pick in the Nebraska governor’s race. But over the summer, both Republican leaders and voters have sent a very different message. On both fronts, recent events have underscored Trump’s continued ascendancy — to the point that experts who study democracy see increasing parallels between the modern Democratic Party and the conformist parties that have been subdued by authoritarian-minded strongmen in other countries, such as media mogul and Former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in Italy and current President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey. “The GOP is a party now dominated by authoritarian dynamics,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a New York University history professor and author of the 2020 book Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, told me. “It is so domesticated and subjected by Trump to this authoritarian discipline that there is no room within the party for dissenters.” This shift was evident in both the election results and the behavior of GOP elected officials. Like any political leader, Trump has not achieved victory for every candidate he has endorsed. Candidates who distanced themselves from his false claims of fraud regarding the 2020 election won a number of GOP nominations this summer, including contests for attorney general in Minnesota and Wisconsin and for secretary of state in Kansas. But candidates who support Trump’s discredited 2020 claims have enjoyed a remarkable run of success, often defeating candidates backed by more mainstream Republican leaders. Election naysayers led his endorsements in a clean sweep of all the top GOP candidates in Arizona (including governor, attorney general, secretary of state and U.S. senator), topping previous candidates supported by outgoing Republican Gov. Doug Ducey and former Vice President Mike Pence. Trump-backed caucuses also swept the top nominations in Michigan (for governor, attorney general and secretary of state). Earlier this month, Trump’s pick for governor of Wisconsin, construction executive Tim Michels, passed over former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch (who herself had called the 2020 election “rigged” and had the support of Pence and former Gov. Scott Walker) GOP Nomination. Trump-backed caucuses this summer also won the gubernatorial nod in Kansas and Maryland, as well as the secretary of state in Nevada. A recent CNN count found that at least 20 GOP candidates in this year’s 36 gubernatorial races have disputed or outright rejected the 2020 election results, with the final tally expected to rise as the final nominations wrap up. Election deniers won 10 GOP nominations for secretary of state, according to another CNN compilation. In a parallel push, Trump fired ranks of House Republicans who voted to impeach him after the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol. Of the 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump, four have withdrawn, three have already lost GOP primaries (including two in Aug. 2 contests) and Cheney, who has trailed in the polls behind the U.S.-backed Trump election denier Harriet Hageman is likely to join. the ranks of the expelled on Tuesday. Only two of the 10 have won primaries to advance to the November midterms (Dan Newhouse in Washington and David Valladao in California both finished in the top two in their state primary systems, which feature candidates of all parties together.) At the same time, elected GOP officials, almost without exception, have locked arms to defend Trump amid ethical and legal issues. Almost no GOP leader-elect has expressed concern about the many damaging revelations about his conduct revealed by the Jan. 6 House committee and his broader efforts to overturn the 2020 outcome. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio – — who, like fellow senators Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz, went from a Trump opponent in the 2016 presidential election to a relentless defender — set the tone early when he dismissed the committee as “circus” and “trash” before holding a and listening only. In a recent Chicago television interview, Kinzinger, the other Republican next to Cheney on the Jan. 6 panel, acknowledged that the silence of GOP leaders indicated that Trump, at least for now, had “won” the battle for control of the Republican Party. “Maybe there wasn’t going to be a tidal wave of people coming, but I certainly didn’t think I was going to be alone,” said the Illinois Republican, who is not running for re-election this fall. The rush of GOP leaders to defend Trump after the search warrant was executed at his Florida mansion — even before there was information about what the FBI was looking for — has provided another measure of his dominance. Once again, Rubio set the tone for abject devotion: “The use of government power to persecute political opponents is something we’ve seen many times from third-world Marxist dictatorships. But never before in America,” Rubio wrote in the Twitter on the day of the survey. Only after an apparent Trump supporter attacked an FBI office in Ohio last week — and threats of violence against federal law enforcement proliferated on the right — did some Republicans (including Rubio) qualify their criticism with allegations of violence or praise for federal law enforcement.
International parallels show that the GOP’s faith in Trump is not waning anytime soon
Cheney’s possible defeat on Tuesday will limit these shows of strength by Trump. For experts who study authoritarian movements, it follows a pattern evident in other countries. Ben-Gyatt notes that in Italy, Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party remained firmly in his hands for years despite an endless succession of financial, political and sex scandals reminiscent of Trump’s travails. As she wrote in her book Strongmen, “Berlusconi’s cult of personality left Forza Italia no room to develop a political identity independent of him and no respite from his endless legal woes, scandals and tests of loyalty.” He sees the same hardening dynamic among Republicans. “From January 6 [2021]the party has become much more radicalized,” he told me. “When parties make these negotiations with these charismatic demagogues, they stick with them to the bitter end.” Susan Stokes, director of the Chicago Center for Democracy at the University of Chicago, sees another international parallel to the GOP’s continued deference to Trump. “The case that comes to mind,” he told me, “is Erdogan and his party, the AKP in Turkey, where you have a very charismatic, persuasive leader who always has a narrative to explain things that, in our eyes, It’s super. crazy but he makes people believe it.” Like Ben-Ghiat, Stokes says international precedents leave her skeptical that the GOP will reject Trump’s direction — or even turn away from Trump personally — anytime soon. Madrid also agrees that Republicans critical of Trump must recognize that his forces remain unquestionably the dominant faction of the party. “What we’re seeing right now is just the calcification of the establishment as the party has taken over,” says Madrid. “You can’t back that party” and win a primary within the GOP except in rare cases, he adds. But that doesn’t mean Republicans who resist Trump’s direction have no leverage over the GOP’s direction, Madrid argues. Depending on how pollsters ask, about a fifth to a quarter of self-identified Republican voters (and sometimes more) reject Trump’s lies about the election, think he acted improperly on Jan. 6, or the way he challenged the 2020 result or that his statements encouraged violence before the uprising. Madrid says that if even about…
