Now that Donald Trump has authored Republicans’ third national electoral rebuke in four years, the party that collectively surrendered to his dangerous buffoonery has devised an equally brilliant strategy for emerging from its resulting marginalization: They’re simply going to “move on.”
“Republicans are ready to move on without Donald Trump,” said a Fox News column declaring the resoundingly reelected governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, “the new Republican Party leader.” Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, who campaigned for Trump in 2020, warned that “a true leader understands when they have become a liability.” And Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a member of the party’s vestigial rational wing, told CNN that the midterm election was Trump’s third strike and he was therefore out.
But politics ain’t baseball any more than it’s beanbag. Republican elites planning to “move on” to a glimmering post-Trump future should ask Atlantic City and Mike Pence how that turned out.
For all the party’s fond hopes of declaring the end of a disastrous era by op-ed or executive order, it has yet to secure the cooperation of at least one prominent Republican: Donald Trump.
A week after the election embarrassment was widely pinned on him, Trump showed precisely how much respect he had for his fellow partisans’ determination to leave him behind by traipsing into the political wreckage to announce his next presidential campaign. Underscoring the sense of shamelessness, the announcement coincided with the publication of a memoir by Pence, the vice president threatened with hanging at the hands of Trump’s supporters, and took place at Mar-a-Lago, the Florida compound where he could be federally charged with hoarding classified documents.
All the party’s talk of page-turning fails to account for Trump’s invariable refusal to accept responsibility for any defeat or disgrace. It also ignores countless previous paroxysms of futile Republican exasperation with him, beginning with his original hostile takeover of the party in 2016. Trump’s outright ownership of the GOP never had anything to do with the preferences of its ostensible intelligentsia, and it doesn’t have anything to do with them now.
In an attempt to suggest otherwise, the anti-tax Club for Growth released a polling memo this week purporting to show that likely Republican voters in early-voting Iowa and New Hampshire prefer DeSantis to Trump. Other surveys showed DeSantis surging after his strong showing last week, but they also underscored the persistence of Trump’s base. A recent YouGov poll put the ex-president and the Florida governor in a statistical tie among Republicans nationwide, while a Politico-MorningConsult poll showed Trump maintaining a lead among registered Republicans.
Besides being in the shadow of the midterm results and over a year ahead of any presidential voting, the polls put DeSantis in the sort of head-to-head matchup with Trump that he is unlikely to enjoy. They also uniformly show that Trump still has the level of Republican support that propelled him past a fractured field six years ago.
Sure, DeSantis had a good election night. But he is also a petulant bigot with a penchant for bullying the vulnerable and presiding over mass fatalities — a brand Trump seems to have mastered with considerably more charisma and showmanship. Moreover, DeSantis went into the election as a Republican incumbent in a state that has been drifting right for years and, overrun as it is by alligators and theme parks, isn’t a lot like the rest of the country.
As Trump has emphasized lately, it was his own endorsement that played no small part in catapulting DeSantis into the governorship four years ago. It’s another reminder that even if the former president’s nearest rival could somehow exorcise Trump from the party, it will still be the party of Trumpism. Try as Republicans might to move on from the man, they can’t run away from his miserable legacy.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Josh Gohlke is Deputy California Opinion Editor for McClatchy and The Sacramento Bee.
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