As Congress ends its first post-Trump term, the biggest political question hanging over America is: when will the Republican party finally reach its anti-Trump tipping point – when a majority of Republican lawmakers disavow him?
Again and again, it looks like the tipping point is near but the party remains under Trump’s thumb.
What about last month’s dinner at Mar-a-Lago, with Ye - formerly Kanye West - the man whose fame as a musician has been dwarfed by his antisemitic declarations, along with infamous Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes?
It didn’t come near to tipping the scales.
What about Trump’s 3 December declaration that the “massive fraud” of the 2020 election would allow for the constitution to be “terminated”?
Nope.
Both events caused grumbling among a few Republican lawmakers, but most avoided criticizing Trump (as they’ve avoided in the past and as they avoided doing the moment the furor over January 6 had died down) for fear of his wrath.
But what’s to fear now? Didn’t the midterms reveal how weak he is?
After all, most of the candidates he endorsed flamed out, including celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania; Tim Michels in Wisconsin; Adam Laxalt in Nevada; Blake Masters and Kari Lake in Arizona; and Herschel Walker in Georgia. (Walker’s campaign even asked Trump to stay away in the final weeks.)
Many election deniers hit the skids. Michigan’s legislature swung to the Democrats for the first time since the 1980s.
Democrats defied almost all doomsday prophecies as well as the historic pattern of sitting presidents’ parties losing midterms. Why? In large part because so many voters fear and loathe the former president.
Nearly as many viewed the midterms as a referendum on Trump as who saw it as a referendum on Joe Biden. As Mitch McConnell explained, swing voters “were frightened” by the Trump-induced Republican rhetoric, “so they pulled back”.
And it’s only going to get worse for Trump.
His business has been found guilty of criminal fraud. Investigators have found more classified documents in a storage unit near Mar-a-Lago. A criminal case is pending in Georgia. The January 6 committee is likely to make a criminal referral to the justice department, whose special counsel is already building a criminal case against him. Several leaders of the January 6 attack have already been convicted of seditious conspiracy.
Even the kingpins of the Republican party, including the rightwing media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, have switched their allegiances away – to Ron DeSantis or Ted Cruz or another Republican hopeful.
So why hasn’t the party as a whole tipped? Why aren’t almost all Republican lawmakers publicly disavowing the former sociopath-in-chief?
Two words: the base.
Utah’s Republican senator Mitt Romney, no friend of Trump, put it bluntly last week:
I think we’ve got, I don’t know, 12 people or more that would like to be president, that are thinking of running in 2024. If President Trump continues in his campaign, I’m not sure any one of them can make it through and beat him. He’s got such a strong base of, I don’t know, 30% or 40% of the Republican voters, or maybe more, it’s going to be hard to knock him off as our nominee.
That’s the problem in a nutshell, folks.
It’s not so much the size of Trump’s base. Even 40% of Republican voters is a relatively small group nationwide, especially considering that fewer than 30% of all voters are registered Republicans.
It’s the intensity and tenacity of their support, which gives them effective control over the Republican party. They won’t budge.
Until they budge, most Republican lawmakers won’t budge either. (With Romney and Liz Cheney being notable exceptions, and we know what happened to her.)
The problem isn’t some highfalutin moral issue, such as Republican lawmakers putting their party over their country. It’s more prosaic. They want to keep their jobs.
The only hope for the Republican party is that Trump is opposed in the 2024 presidential primaries by just one opponent – most obviously Florida’s Ron DeSantis – who becomes the alternative for the majority of Republican voters who don’t particularly want Trump to be their standard bearer.
But if DeSantis were to jump in, it’s likely so would a bunch of others – Mike Pence, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, et al (Romney’s “12 or more”) – who’d split the non-Trump Republicans, allowing Trump’s base to anoint him the Republican nominee.
Which means the Republican party will continue to rot as a political party, as a governing institution and as a moral entity. This may be good for Democrats in 2024, but in the larger sense it’s bad for us all.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
