HOWEVER THE MIDTERMS GO, THE REPUBLICAN PARTY IS GOING TO GET
MORE EXTREME
Jonathan Chait November 28, 2018 New York Magazine
Politics since Donald Trump's election has felt like a static
state of misery, as the president's approval ratings have been
surprisingly stable and the only apparent variable has been each
party's chances of gaining or consolidating power in the
midterms. But that reading ignores something tectonic: the rapid
decay of the institutional Republican Party. Everything that was
terrible about the party that nominated Trump is significantly,
terrifyingly worse today. Even more distressing: It is likely to
lurch further rightward regardless of the outcome of the
elections. This will happen right away.
It was not so long ago that most Republican professionals
firmly believed the party was still theirs and Trump had merely
borrowed it. The GOP Establishment, one congressional staffer
told the reporter David Drucker earlier this fall, had "forced
Trump to govern as a 'conventional conservative.' was Ten months
ago, when the Senate voted to pass a huge tax cut, Majority
Leader Mitch McConnell declared, "If we can't sell this to the
American people, we ought to go into another line of work."
They couldn't. They tried convincing the public their tax cuts
for the rich will mostly go to the middle class, but the middle
class doesn't believe them. "I would have bet you a lot of money
going into this year that if you cut people's taxes by thousands
of dollars per year, that would be politically popular,"
Republican consultant Ryan Ellis told Politico "But it has not
worked out that way." As private Republican polling has
confirmed, the party "lost the messaging battle" on taxes.
Rather than finding another line of work, however, McConnell's
colleagues have grasped a disturbing reality: They don't need to
sell their policies to the American people. They're better off
following Trump's political formula of constructing an alternate
reality in which their party is cast as one of economic
populists. Recently, Trump has been insisting he has another
plan to give the middle class a tax cut. A big one! A whopping
10 percent cut, just for the average taxpayer. "We're doing it
now for middle-income people," Trump told reporters about a bill
he claimed would pass before Election Day.
Reporters quickly noted this was impossible. Congress was out
of session until after the election; it would need 60 votes to
pass another tax cut, anyway. Trump then insisted he had a
secret plan, which he would reveal soon, that would allow a huge
middle-class tax cut without adding to the deficit. "We're doing
other things, which I don't have to explain now, but it will be
pretty much a net neutral," he told reporters. No such tax
proposal exists, and nobody actually believes anything like it
will ever materialize. Yet Republican leaders are pretending to
take Trump's instructions seriously. "We will continue to work
with the White House and Treasury over the coming weeks to
develop an additional 10 percent tax cut focused specifically on
middle-class families and workers," promised House Committee on
Ways and Means chairman Kevin Brady. Why shouldn't they go
along? What cost is there to sustaining the lie?
Republicans are attempting a similar trick to resolve their
political liability on health care, where Trump has ramped up
their strategy dating back to the beginning of the Obamacare
debate: promise to do all the good stuff Obamach-care delivered
but without making anybody pay for it. The administration,
joined by several Republican states, is suing to overturn
Obamacare's regulations preventing insurance companies from
charging higher rates to people with preexisting conditions and,
in the meantime, undermining those protections by allowing
insurers to sell cheaper plans to healthy people. Yet the
Republicans' health-care message has betrayed not the slightest
hint of their anti-regulatory fervor. Arizona's Martha McSally,
who as a member of Congress gave a pep talk to wavering
Republicans urging them to vote to repeal Obamach-care and not
replace it, is running ads for her Senate campaign claiming she
"led the fight" to "force insurance companies to cover
preexisting conditions." Florida governor and Senate candidate
Rick Scott, whose state is currently supporting the Trump
lawsuit, is declaring in an advertisement, "I support forcing
insurance companies to cover preexisting conditions." Trump
himself has advanced this lie to its Orwellian conclusion. Not
only does he promise to defend the regulations he is actively
seeking to eliminate, he has accused Democrats of trying to
destroy them: "Republicans will totally protect people with
Pre-Existing Conditions, Democrats will not! Vote Republican."
The defensive effort to steal the economic-populist mantle from
Democrats, without making any substantive concessions toward that
end, has been largely overshadowed by the louder cultural
messaging that accompanies it.
Republicans have stoked white racial paranoia against a
shifting array of targets. Kneeling football players and
transgender bathrooms have momentarily given way to a convoy of
Central American migrants that allegedly contains "unknown Middle
Easterners."
And Trump's allies have gone from justifying his
child-reality-show authoritarian persona as a necessary expedient
to embracing it as a positive good. "It doesn't matter if it's
100 percent accurate," a senior Trump-administration official
told the Daily Beast defending the president's fearmongering
attacks on a caravan of potential refugees. "This is the play,"
Scott Reed, a strategist at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, told
the Washington Post a standard tactic to use fear as a motivating
choice at the end of a campaign, and the fact is the fork in the
road is pretty stark." In Texas, when a fan at a Ted Cruz speech
exclaimed about Beto O'Rourke, "Lock him up!," Cruz answered,
"Well, you know, there's a double-child-occupancy cell with
Hillary Clinton."
The degree to which Trump's party has molded itself in his
image is worth bearing in mind when contemplating what the next
two years might bring.
If Democrats win the House but not the Senate, they will be
working with an even more hardened foe: The Republicans who will
have lost, or who are retiring, are those most vulnerable to
outside pressure; the surviving core, from the reddest districts,
will be the most Trumpian. They will be much less likely to
abandon their president in the face of incriminating evidence
than were Richard Nixon's Republicans in 1974, and much more
likely to escalate his attacks on the rule of law into a
full-scale culture war.
In the event Republicans retain full control of Congress -
improbable, but about the chances FiveThirtych-Eight gave Trump
toward the end of October two years ago - the transformation
would be even more dramatic. The American people would be led
not by a party learning to accommodate its unhinged leader but
one trained by him, and the con job they have been enacting on
the American people would swiftly come to completion.
Imagine Republicans waking up after Election Day and
discovering their aging coalition has been given a new lease on
life. They will instantly grasp the possibilities available by
campaigning in opposition to reality: telling voters they are
protecting popular social programs that Democrats are trying to
cut and reinforcing this message through media channels their
party effectively controls. What would stop them from launching
the full-scale assault on the welfare state that Newt Gingrich
and Paul Ryan never mustered the courage to fully enact? Why
wouldn't they go through with abolishing Obamacare and slashing
funding to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid?
Though they control all branches of the federal government,
Republicans have been held back for two years by the expectation
of a backlash and a setback in the midterms. After not one but
two expert-defying victories, the Trumpian cult of personality
would grow exponentially. For all the unprecedented and brazen
acts the past two years have brought, what we have not yet seen
is a Trumpian party that feels invincible.