For the thousandth time, the Republican Party has refused a way out that would allow it to free itself from Donald Trump. As long as he’s there, it never will be.
During this year’s presidential primary campaign, the party had the chance to nominate Nikki Haley, a conservative former two-term governor of South Carolina. Unlike Mr. Trump’s, his public career has not been characterized by a life of moral misery. And many polls show she would be a more formidable candidate against President Biden than Mr. Trump. Never mind. Mr. Trump decimated Ms. Haley, most recently on Super Tuesday. She suspended her campaign the next day. But she never had any luck.
The Republican Party has become more radical, unhinged and sectarian every year since Mr. Trump took control. In 2016, Republicans were outraged after the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape. On the tape, in words that shocked the nation, Mr. Trump said that when you’re a star, “you can do anything.” Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”
In 2023, Mr. Trump was found responsible for sexual abuse. What some considered to be his discussion in the locker room turned out to be more than just words. Yet no major Republican has said a critical word about it.
The same thing happened this year when Mr. Trump was found liable for civil fraud. The judge in the case, Arthur F. Engoron, said the former president’s “complete lack of contrition” bordered on the “pathological.” Yet Republicans were united in their outrage, not in response to Mr. Trump’s actions, but at the judge over the magnitude of the punishment.
Today, many Republicans not only claim to believe the election was stolen; prominent members of Congress like Representative Elise Stefanik And Senator JD Vance say they would not have certified the 2020 election results, as Vice President Mike Pence, to his credit, did. Mike Johnson, who played a leading role in the attempt to overturn the election, is the Speaker of the House.
Republicans are not only excusing the attack on the Capitol on January 6; Mr. Trump and his party also now glorify the insurrectionists. During his campaign launch meeting in 2024, a song called “Justice for All” was released, featuring him and the J6 Prison Choir, made up of prisoners accused of crimes related to the riot. Republicans not only believe he was unjustly impeached and unjustly indicted; nor are they totally troubled by his threats (and slander) against judges, court officers and prosecutors, not to mention his attempts to influence and intimidate witnesses.
They are fine with the former president referent to “radical left thugs who live like vermin within the confines of our country” and insinuating that former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley deserved to be executed for treason. They agree with Mr. Trump encouraging Russia to attack our NATO allies and comparing himself to Alexei Navalny, the Kremlin’s fiercest and most courageous critic, who died while serving time in an isolated Russian prison because of his political beliefs. They agree with his suggestion to “end” the Constitution and with one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers who says that if, as president, Mr. Trump ordered SEAL Team Six to assassinate an adversary, he could be shielded from criminal prosecution. And this is just a small sample of what he has been saying and doing for years.
Call them Fifth Avenue Republicans.
Fifth Avenue Republicans support Mr. Trump no matter what he does — even if, as he said in 2016, he stood in the middle of Fifth Avenue in New York and shot someone . This was not an exaggeration; it was a prophecy.
The radicalization of the Republican Party is not going to abate anytime soon. Another group of mainstream Republicans, who could serve as a counterweight to MAGA Republicans, are fleeing Congress. Republicans who have recently left or are about to leave include Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse in the Senate and Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Patrick McHenry, Kay Granger, Will Hurd, Ken Buck and Mike Gallagher in the House . Some of these people said privately that they knew that continuing to serve in Congress as representatives of a party saying good things about Mr. Trump when they knew they were not true was not not good for their soul.
Twenty-six Republican senators voted against the recent Ukraine aid plan, which a pre-Trump Republican Party would have overwhelmingly supported. And on the 17 elected Republican senators from 2018 And who are 55 years old or younger15 voted no.
In other words, the MAGA takeover of the Republican Party is over. Mitch McConnell, who was one of the most influential majority leaders in Senate history and criticized Mr. Trump for his role in the January 6 attack on the Capitol from the Senate floor, recently announced that he was retiring from his post. Republican leaders, and soon after announced that he supported Mr. Trump. It was a surrender to Mr. Trumpa recognition of his domination.
Mr. Trump will be the Republican nominee for the third time. His imprint on the Republican Party is now comparable to – and in some ways greater than – that of Ronald Reagan. And that imprint will likely last for at least a generation. This is a stunning achievement.
It also poses a profound threat to the country. Whatever one thinks of the Republican Party before Trump, it was not fundamentally illiberal or nihilistic; its leaders were not sociopathic, ruthless, cruel, lawless crooks. No area of Mr. Trump’s life appears to have been untouched by moral corruption.
As a young man, I was influenced by conservative intellectuals like George Will, Irving Kristol, and James Q. Wilson. I served in three Republican administrations, including as a senior White House advisor under President George W. Bush, and voted Republican in nine consecutive presidential elections, starting with Mr. Reagan in 1980. My political tribe was republican; most of my friends too. Seeing what the GOP has become is mortifying. As someone who loves America, I find this terrifying.
To get a better sense of this moment, I reached out to Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jon Meacham. “Historically speaking, the forces that now control the Republican Party represent the most significant threat to fundamental constitutionalism that we have seen since the Civil War,” Mr. Meacham, who helped craft some of Ms.’s speeches, told me. .Biden. “This is not a partisan argument; that’s just the fact. And I’m not talking about particular policies on which we can and should disagree. I am talking about the clear willingness of a once noble party to lie and the desire to seize power beyond essential democratic standards.”
Since 2015, I have repeatedly warned Republicans about Mr. Trump, describing him as the kind of demagogue the Founders feared, shrewd and malicious, a man with a disordered personality. Eight years ago, I declared that while the fight for the Republican nomination was over, the fight for the soul of the party was not.
Once Mr. Trump won the presidency, I knew that was the case. He and the Republican Party merged ideologically; it is now a populist party rather than a conservative one. Its instincts are nativist, protectionist and isolationist. But the most significant fusion is ethical and moral. The Republican Party continues to get darker. He has become anti-intellectual, conspiratorial and authoritarian, intemperate and brutal, transgressive and anarchist. And there’s no end in sight.
Mr. Trump is a human blowtorch, ready to burn down democracy. His party too. When there is no bottom, there is no bottom.
The next 34 weeks will be among the most important in the life of this nation. Mr. Trump clearly posed a danger in 2016; he is much more dangerous now. The former president is more vengeful, more bitter and more unstable than he was, which is saying something. There would be fewer guardrails and more true believers in a second Trump term. He has already shown that he would overturn an election, support a violent insurrection and even allow his vice president to be hanged. There’s nothing he won’t do. It’s up to the rest of us to stop him from doing so.
Pierre Wehner (@Peter_Wehner) is an opinion editor and senior fellow at Trinity Forum who served in the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush, and George W. Bush. He is the author of “The death of politics: How to heal our frayed republic after Trump.
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