Trump and Beyond

The 2016 Republican primary featured 17 candidates. Pop data analysis website fivethirtyeight.com has an analysis of each failed candidate’s arc titled “How the Republican Field Dwindled From 17 To Donald Trump.” The reasons are varied, from Ted Cruz being too extreme and disliked, to Marco Rubio lacking a base, to Republicans liking Ben Carson, but not enough to vote for him. (The article, which features links to pieces on the start and end of each candidate’s campaign, is worth a read.)

Throughout 2015 pundits dismissed Trump’s candidacy as, in the words of FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, “somewhere between improbable and extremely unlikely.” Silver summarizes factors affecting the Republican party’s embrace of Trump, and observers’ errors in analysis as:

• Voters are more tribal than he thought
• The GOP is weaker than he thought
• Media is worse than he thought

With regard to voter tribalism, Silver cites Trump’s focus on “cultural grievance” – against immigrants, against Muslims, against political correctness, against the media, and sometimes against black people and women.

With regard to the party, Silver’s argument has some circularity – he has written elsewhere that strong parties nominate strong candidates – but he also cites what he calls “actual disasters” in the form of congressional and gubernatorial primaries that produced “unelectable” candidates, pointing to Eric Cantor’s surprising primary loss in 2014 as an example. And Silver notes the absence of any organized Republican establishment opposition to Trump.

Finally, with regard to the media, Silver says that the success of any demagogic candidate indicates the failure of political institutions, including the media. Elsewhere he has described Trump as a troll.

Throughout the presidential campaign Democratic candidate former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton remained ahead of Trump in national polls. Clinton was also regarded as having won all three presidential debates. After the so-called “Access Hollywood” video tape surfaced in October 2016 Trump faced accusations of sexual assault from a number of women. At the end of October Clinton led in national polls by approximately 6 percentage points. On October 28 FBI Director James Comey sent an open letter to Congress stating that in connection to a case unrelated to the investigation of Clinton’s use of a private email server to sometimes send classified information, emails had been found that “appear to be pertinent” to the Clinton investigation. Numerous analysts have shown that Comey’s letter had a significant effect on the presidential race. FiveThirtyEight.com’s popular vote projection shifted in just a week from an almost 6 percent advantage for Clinton to less than 3 percent. The average swing state projection dropped from an almost 5 percent advantage to less than 2 in the same period.

In the end Trump won the election with 304 electoral votes but lost the popular vote 46.1% to Hillary Clinton’s 48.2% with 227 electoral votes. In May 2017 Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller as a special counsel to lead the growing investigation that was underway into Russian state meddling in the 2016 election and ties to Trump associates. The Mueller Investigation led to Trump’s impeachment on December 18, 2019, although he was not convicted.

In the Winter 2016 issue of the New Labor Forum, Darren Dochuk identifies the “Fissuring of the Republican Party.” Dochuk notes that Donald Trump had followed “a pattern laid out by Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s and George Wallace in the 1960s” using “an acerbic sound bite to stir America’s right-wing base.” One difference, in Dochuk’s view, is that, far from adopting the posture of a marginalized outsider, Trump “spoke with brutal frankness out of confidence in his standing among society’s 1 percent….” Another was the notable absence of any substantive policy proposals during Trump’s campaign. McCarthy’s and Wallace’s rhetorical rancor was used to communicate authentic concern about the growing power of the state, the direction of federal policies, and society’s “wayward drifts.” Ross Perot, another billionaire who “also spoke without a filter about the mess in Washington and the need for someone with real-world experience to clean it up,” nonetheless put forward a “polished manifesto of reform” based on historical principles. “With Trump,” on the other hand, Dochuck writes “the real is merely something to tease and distort, and exploit, with a smirk, for sensational effect.”

Yet, in Dochuk’s view, the Republican party’s dissolution had an institutional component, as well. He notes that in 2012 the party shunted aside Herman Cain and Michelle Bachman, et al., and chose the “predictable” Mitt Romney as their presidential candidate. No such party discipline was evident in 2015, as Republican candidates “adopted Trump’s methods and courted attention by way of the outrageous.” Dochuk cites the resignation of then-House Speaker John Boehner as evidence of the inability or refusal of the party organization to intervene in Trump’s antics. Citing fellow historian Heather Cox Richardson, Dochuk labels the Republican party a “bastion of irrelevance.” Dochuk goes on to identify four factors contributing to the party’s “conundrums:”

• A void in creative thinking. Singling out Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, Dochuk notes that their apparent new ideas on closer examination “are derivative of something that has been thought and said before, their authenticity sacrificed for the memorability, their depth trimmed to generate the sensational.” Historically, “movement conservatives” were key contributors to the Republican party commitment to making “the rank-and-file mind a weapon in the pursuit of power.” Dochuk joins Princeton historian Daniel Rodgers in asserting that starting in the 1960s, all Americans “lost the ability to conceptualize ‘society and the self, morality and justice….’” Republicans led the deregulation that accelerated “economic, political, and cultural fragmentation.” The Federal Communications Commission’s abandonment of the fairness doctrine in 1990, offered the possibility of a conservative advantage in the “war of ideas,” but in practice led to what Dochuk calls “a shouting match with victory decided by volume.”
• Losing command of the culture-war debate. Dochuk locates the proximate origin of the current continuing culture wars in the social upheavals of the 1960s, and cites 1992 presidential candidate Pat Buchanan’s slogan that he was engaged in a “war for the soul of America.” Writing in 2016 Dochuk describes the culture wars as having “run their course,” with conservatives having “won the day by shaping the terms of political acceptance.” Six years later his observations seem prematurely optimistic. As of this writing three Trump-appointed Supreme Court Justices joined Justice Roberts in overturning Roe v. Wade, which is expected to have follow-on effects limiting rights to privacy more generally. Dochuk quotes historian Andrew Hartman who describes the 2016 culture wars as “less poignant and more farcical,” which certainly applies to the antics of, say, Madison Cawthorn or Marjorie Taylor Greene. But far from having run their course, it seems like culture wars have superseded legitimate policy concerns in the Republican party of 2022.
• Lack of unity behind a political brand. Dochuk quotes CNN’s Chris Cilizza who wrote in the lead-up to the 2016 election that there was no one in office at that time who could “claim with any credibility that they speak ‘for’ the [Republican] party as a whole.” This was certainly true during the 2015 Republican primary season, when fifteen candidates remained in the race into October, who analyst Nate Silver divided into five ideological groups: Moderate, Libertarian, Establishment, Tea Party, and Christian Conservative. While noting that the Tea Party and Christian Conservative factions were busy rooting out candidates who didn’t adhere to their so-called “traditional values,” lower taxes, and limited government, at the time of his writing Dochuk did not see an “electable” candidate who could “occupy the space in the middle” of Silver’s five constituencies. Of course the eventual candidate, Trump, largely eschewed policy discussion, substituting instead, in Dochuk’s words “wisecracks about opponents’ facial features and menstrual cycles,” running on a “platform of personality.” And with a few notable exceptions, such as Wyoming’s Rep. Liz Cheney, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, and Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, elected Republicans have fallen in line lockstep with Trump, even as he continues to subvert democracy.
• Losing sight of political frontiers. As we’ve noted above, historically the West and the South have provided the geography for Republican “land of promise” rhetoric. More recently social groups have replaced geography as the locus of expansion. During the Reagan and Bush administrations Christian evangelicals provided the “room to grow.” And while, as Dochuk notes, by 2012 young people were turning liberal and Evangelicals remained “strong enough to dictate primaries but too fractured and weak to determine the next election’s outcome,” their influence over primaries continues to influence party rhetoric and discipline.

In their 2018 book How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt outline “Four Key Indicators of Authoritarian Behavior:”

1. Rejection of (or weak commitment to) democratic rules of the game. This includes expressed willingness to violate the Constitution; advocating antidemocratic measures like canceling elections, banning organizations, and restricting civil rights; refusing to accept “credible” election results.
2. Denial of the legitimacy of political opponents. This includes characterizing opponents as subversive; claiming opponents are a threat to national security or the prevailing way of life; baselessly labeling opponents criminals or enemy foreign agents.
3. Tolerance or encouragement of violence. This includes ties to armed gangs, paramilitary groups, militias, etc.; promoting armed attacks against opponents; refusing to condemn violent acts by supporters; praising or condoning political violence elsewhere in the world.
4. Support for limiting opponents’ and media’s civil liberties. This includes advocating legal restrictions on civil liberties, such as expanding libel or defamation laws, or restricting protests of the government or political organizations; threatening to punish critics, members of opposing parties, or media; praise for repressive measures elsewhere or in the past.

To anyone who’s followed the news in the last several years these items will seem to be “ripped from the headlines.” Here are a few examples from among many:

In October 2016 Trump suggested at a rally in Toledo, OH, “... we should just cancel the election and just give it to Trump.” In July 2020 he suggested delaying the election “until people can properly, securely, and safely vote….”

The falsehoods that Barack Obama was a Muslim and born in Kenya, hyped by the likes of Donald Trump and Rush Limbaugh among others, are examples of the second indicator, as are the wild accusations that pedophilia pervades the Democratic party.

In August 2017 after the violent white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, VA, in which torch-wielding participants chanted “Jews will not replace us,” and one extremist drove his car into a group of counter-protesters killing one and injuring dozens, Trump famously declared that there were “some very fine people on both sides.” And of course the most extreme instance of advocating violence was Trump and his allies promoting the insurrection on January 6, 2020.

Finally, according to the Brennan center, 19 states have enacted 33 laws that will make it harder for Americans to vote. Moreover, the Supreme Court with six Republican-appointed justices, has systematically refused to protect individuals from discrimination by states, striking down federal anti-discrmination laws, the Violence Against Women Act, and Roe v. Wade.

In 2017 political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way warned that the election of Donald Trump “posed a threat to U.S. democratic institutions.” Trump fairly systematically turned key agencies and institutions into weapons to be deployed against political and personal rivals. And he tried to steal an election. As the House Select Committee hearings have shown in detail, Trump pressured federal, state, and local officials to overturn election results, and when that failed incited a mob to march on the Capitol and physically prevent Vice President Pence from certifying Biden’s win.

Trump was impeached a historic second time on January 13, 2021. Only ten Republican members of the House voted in favor of impeachment and only seven Republican Senators voted to convict. Levitsky and Way characterize this as a failure of the Republican party to constrain Trump.

In the end he was constrained – barely – by the few public officials who refused to cooperate with his illegal activities, or spoke out about them, and by judges including Trump appointees who blocked his attempts to overturn the election. Trump’s failed response to the COVID-19 pandemic likely played a role in his election loss as well.

Yet Trump nearly won, and the Republican party continued its descent into extremism. Levitsky and Way assert that political parties “... that are committed to democracy must, at a minimum, do two things: accept defeat, and reject violence.” In the aftermath of the 2020 election Republican party leaders “refused to unambiguously recognize Biden’s victory,” either openly amplifying Trump’s bogus claims of victory, or at least refusing to speak out against them. More than 120 House members signed an amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to consider overturning the election. And following Trump’s incitement of the January 6 insurrection Senate Republicans blocked the creation of a 9/11-style investigative commission.

Echoing what other analysts have observed, Levitsky and Way find that Republican extremism is propelled by an increasingly radicalized base. They note that for the party’s white Christian exurban core, increased diversity and racial equality is experienced as loss of social status. Meanwhile this social group is also declining as a percentage of the electorate. A recent Poynter Institute report found that 70% of Republican voters do not believe Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election was legitimate. A campaign is under way to replace state and local election officials with Trumpistas who seem ready to negate Democratic election victories. Republican legislatures have enacted a range of measures affecting the voting process, from reducing citizens’ access to ballots, to facilitating state intervention in local election processes, to wholesale purging of voter roles and allowing intimidation of voters. In future elections, Republican legislatures could use bogus claims of election irregularities to justify sending slates of electors to the Electoral College that did not reflect the popular vote.

In the aftermath of the events of January 6, numerous Fortune 500 corporations paused their political contributions to the 147 Republican members of Congress who voted against certifying Joe Biden’s victory. By July, however, most had resumed.

Levitsky and Way suggest that something like Viktor Orban’s recent authoritarian putsch after winning election in Hungary – packing courts, co-opting media, and interfering with election processes – would be much more difficult in the US. While Orban faced only weak political opposition, and media institutions still recovering to some extent from totalitarian rule that ended only in 1990, in the US the Democratic party is “well organized, well financed, and electorally viable,” having won seven of the last eight presidential elections, and the US major newspapers and television networks are largely independent. Moreover, despite increasing politicization of courts, they remain more independent than in “other emerging autocracies.” Moreover, federalism and decentralized election administration provide a “bulwark against centralized authoritarianism” they say. “America may no longer be safe for democracy, but it remains inhospitable to autocracy.”

Writing on his website, Democracy Docket, leading Democratic voting rights attorney Marc Elias warns that “Republicans Are Plotting to Subvert Elections Right Before Our Eyes.” Elias cites a May 30, 2022 New York Times report that Republican attorney Cleta Mitchell, who was heavily involved in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, is “recruiting election conspiracists into an organized cavalry of activists monitoring elections." Elias reports that the Republican National Committee (RNC) is simultaneously recruiting lawyers to deploy in contesting elections in the courts. Recent cases in Nevada have sought to allow poll-watchers to interfere with individual voters and institute a voter ID law; cases in Wisconsin, Illinois, and Arizona have tried to limit the use of mail-in ballots. In Georgia Republicans have initiated a new voter eligibility challenge program, empowering neighbors to become what Elias calls “election-suppressing vigilantes.” Elias concludes:

… [W]e need to make preserving free and fair elections our top concern. We will not be able to address climate change, secure reproductive rights or enact common sense gun control unless we have a functioning democracy. The other side knows that. It is why subverting our elections is their top objective…. [W]e are one or two elections away from potentially losing our democracy for a generation or more. We have the ability to stop that from happening. But only if we all act together. And only if we all act now. Because there simply is no time to wait.