The Republican Party Enters an Abyss

Last week, two major moments happened in the Republican Party's battle for the White House in 2024.  The first was something they had planned-a debate between many of the major candidates, though former President Donald Trump was missing from the lineup as he refused to attend.  The second was something that we all knew was coming eventually, but it became clear would overshadow the debate entirely-Donald Trump being booked on the charges from Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis over his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential race in Georgia.

This is certainly not the race that RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel hoped she'd be running against Joe Biden, an affable but aging president who is very vulnerable to losing reelection if you look at polling numbers.  But it is where the Republican Party is at-their best options upstaged by a criminal, and of their own choosing.  During the presidential debate, six of the eight candidates publicly expressed that even if Trump was convicted (i.e. a literal felon & prisoner) they would still support him if the was the nominee, with only former Govs. Asa Hutchinson (AR) & Chris Christie (NJ) finding this a line in the sand.

There's a lot to unpack in these moments, where the candidate who arguably got the most bounce out of the debates (other than Trump himself by not being there) was Vivek Ramaswamy, a multi-millionaire pharmaceuticals businessman who has a college freshman's grasp on national politics & foreign policy.  Nikki Haley, hardly the poster-child as a policy wonk, destroyed him on national television over his stances on Ukraine, Taiwan, & Israel, and he just grinned through it not realizing or caring what an ass she was making of him.  But Trump and Ramaswamy's rises in the party indicate something we've long known, but the Republicans are now realizing-decades of Fox News lies, propaganda, and conspiracy peddling means that you can't turn the off-switch when you want to, and when that becomes politically damaging.  It might've just been a game for the establishment, but their base actually believed all of this garbage, and they don't want to admit they were hoodwinked.

I'm talking here, first-and-foremost, about Trump's conviction.  It's now clear that the former president, facing 91 indictments, will almost certainly be convicted of a felony, becoming the first US President to do so.  Only death or a pardon is going to prevent that.  Trump's goal here is to try and run out the clock.  He knows that the closer we get to the election, the more likely it will be that he will be the nominee, something the Republican Party can't back out of without risking serious damage to their electoral prospects in 2024, when they are not only trying to win back the White House, but also hold a thin House majority and take the Senate for the first time in four years.  As the nominee, he has a 50/50 shot at getting to the White House, where he can retaliate against people like Willis, Joe Biden, & Merrick Garland, and pardon himself for all of the crimes which he is being tried over...likely in the process setting up a situation where he topples American democracy as we know it (if these 91 indictments doesn't convince you Trump is someone who is willing to use dictatorial moves to stay in power, I don't know what will-American democracy is at stake once again in 2024).

This is all a problem for the Republican Party, because the 2024 election becomes a proxy battle over Trump's legal issues, not Biden.  Trump will use some (if not much) of his time in the next year not just fundraising, but using at least some of those funds to go toward his many legal defenses, which will cost millions of dollars, and the notoriously cheap Trump will take advantage of cash going into his coffers to make sure he's not paying for his lawyers.  All of this will mean that the Republicans are looking at having a distracted, damaged nominee representing their party next year, one who could be arrested at any moment.  And the first debate on Wednesday showed that not only is there no obvious candidate who could remotely challenge Trump for the hearts of Republican voters, it exhibited something that I long suspected-the Republican Party has so warped its voters' view of the world that a post-Trump party isn't really possible.

Vivek Ramaswamy

That's clear when it comes to someone like Vivek Ramaswamy, a candidate I hadn't mentioned since my May article about ignoring unserious candidates (because I was trying to make a point that this man doesn't belong in the same stage as former vice presidents and UN Ambassadors), but after Wednesday I don't really have an option.  The voters clearly liked him-he came across as the one most in-line with the Republican Party, and likely will get a polling bounce.  He's also the Trumpiest of all of these candidates.  He's willing to defy conventional Republican orthodoxy, even on social issues, and is mostly just running on "vibes" rather than any substantive public policy.  Like Trump, he doesn't have a grasp on major issues & is mostly just saying whatever will get him the most applause in the next 2-3 minutes.  And the right-wing media & right-wing online communities ate it up.  I've felt for a while that the successor to Trump would not be a return-to-normal nor even someone like Ron DeSantis (a more buttoned-up, hardline conservative), but instead someone who felt like Trump.  Someone whose only goal is "owning the libs" and continues to feed the MAGA id for voters.  Someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Donald Trump, Jr., or Lauren Boebert...Ramaswamy was the only person trying to fill that role on Wednesday, and look who got all of the headlines the next morning.

This is a continuation of 2022, when candidates like Blake Masters, Mehmet Oz, & Herschell Walker lost winnable races by running as unqualified candidates...who learned quickly that without Trump's universal name recognition & ease as a decades-long-celebrity that you can't win just by clicking with voters' worst impulses.  But it's not just candidates that are the problem.  Look at the issues that Republicans are being forced to take stances on.  In a post-Dobbs world, the Republican Party has no way to handle abortion rights.  For years, they were able to rail against it because Anthony Kennedy & Sandra Day O'Connor made sure this was all talk, nothing would actually change.  Now, moderate voters see total abortion bans in red states with Republican names on it, and they don't like it, and they don't trust the party to come up with a compromise.  It's clear that moderate voters want abortion legalized nationwide again, and they don't think the GOP will do that.  This will be hard for even Trump to convince them otherwise; in 2016, many people (me included) assumed Trump simply didn't care about abortion rights, he'd talked so cavalierly about it previously...but then his Court overturned them.  The GOP now has a deeply unpopular stance to defend, and decades of telling their core base that "abortion is murder" means they can't reverse without risking primary losses.  This is true for legalizing LGBTQ discrimination in red states and book bans...America's suburbs and swing voters don't support these positions, and they aren't comfortable voting for a party that does, even if they might be grumbling about four more years of an octogenarian leading the country.

If I was a strategist for the Republican Party, I'd be at a loss of how to fix this.  The best case scenario for them is a Biden health scare, which is admittedly something Democrats' should worry about, but feels like a lottery ticket situation for them the closer we get to the election.  Biden is vulnerable, but it's clear that the powers-that-be are lining up behind him in the Democratic Party.  Progressive leaders like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez & Ilhan Omar are already behind Biden, and while Joe Manchin is flirting with a presidential run, I suspect he will ultimately decline & run for reelection (it's clear Republicans are also hoping for a No Labels miracle, but I've been to this dance before-people don't vote third party when they think it'll matter).  Democrats might not be thrilled about their options, but they aren't willing to take any risks against Trump after the shock of 2016, and they showed in 2020 that Biden can pull together a winning coalition.  Republicans have an opening against an unpopular president, and could very well win...but they are looking at a situation where they are running an even less popular nominee, one who may be in jail on election day, who is going to suck up tens of millions of dollars of fundraising cash into his legal strategy.  And even if you can see beyond Trump & 2024, you now have a party that can't change the subject beyond abortion, book bans, & discrimination...all issues the bulk of Americans don't support their stance on, and aren't going to vote for a party whose base insists these are the biggest issues facing America.