Republicans Choose Chaos, Violence, And Election Lies. By Brian Beutler

Before Iowa in 2016, official GOP unease with Trump was palpable; now they love him more than ever

Donald Trump speaks during a rally at the Steer N' Stein bar at the Iowa State Fair on August 12, 2023 in Des Moines, Iowa. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

Republicans spent the first seven years of the Trump era trying (with no small success) to create artificial separation between themselves and their leader. 

This was a kind of homeostasis they fell into during the 2016 primary, when they believed Donald Trump would lose the general election, but also had poor incentives and limited tools to stop him. The best they could do is act as if he wasn’t really of them. When he won the nomination, they behaved like captives, stuck inside with someone whose company they didn’t enjoy. 

It was obviously just make-believe, of course, because they had another option: They could deny him the presidency. If he was really an interloper, they could have resigned themselves to helping Democrats win—passively or actively—and rebuilding after November. People like Marco Rubio apparently hated liberal society more than they wanted to protect America from someone unfit to control the country’s nuclear arsenal. But they at least play-acted as if they were unhappy about it.

This manifested as Ted Cruz telling people at the Republican convention “vote your conscience, up and down the ballot.” GOP leaders and influential conservatives unendorsed (then in some cases re-endorsed) Trump after he got caught on a hot mic detailing his sexual-assault m.o. They blundered their way into the awkward ritual of pretending not to have read Trump’s deranged tweets. They figured out how to be allies of the aspects of Trump they genuinely liked while disclaiming responsibility for the damage he did to the country. It was why they’d beam with excitement at Rose Garden ceremonies where Trump signed corporate tax cuts, then shrug off or quietly abet his extreme secrecy and illegal concealment. As long as they didn’t know what they were covering up, they could play dumb about the truth. 

In year eight, something different is happening, and both Democrats and the media should be alert to it. This time around they have a clearer path to expunging Trump. With the Iowa caucuses now in the rearview mirror, they could rally for Nikki Haley the way Democratic elites flocked to Joe Biden when the 2020 primary came down to him and Bernie Sanders. 

Instead, they are choosing Trump, without reservation. Many had resolved to support him before the caucuses, and are trying now to edge his challengers out of the race. 

“Congratulations to President Trump and his team for a dominating and historic Iowa Caucus victory!” tweeted Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who once correctly identified Trump as “a xenophobic, race-baiting, religious bigot.”

“It is clear to me - now more than ever - that Trump will be the Republican nominee and will eventually be the 47th President of the United States,” he added. “The Republican Party is fortunate to have so many good candidates, but for all practical purposes this primary is over.”

Trump left the country in shambles, tried to overthrow its government, and Republicans want him as their leader more than ever. 

With the admittedly significant exception of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (who in any case has pledged to support whoever wins the GOP nomination), most of the GOP leadership and rank and file has already endorsed Trump, foreclosing another opportunity to be rid of him. As their coverups have failed (or succeeded only in part) and the world has learned more about his criminality and unfitness for office, their enthusiasm for him has somehow grown. 

They support him more fulsomely now than they did before he engaged in an insurrection that killed multiple people and left scores of police officers injured and maimed. They like him more now than they did before he stole the country’s most sensitive secrets for personal gain. They are more enthusiastic about vesting him with life-and-death power now than they were before he bungled the coronavirus pandemic and got hundreds of thousands of Americans killed.

In some cynical sense it’s an unimportant distinction, because their former unease with him was a matter of personal embarrassment rather than moral revulsion. Trump didn’t change who they were, he just revealed it. But it’s important in the narrative and strategic realms insofar as it renders a final verdict on the question of GOP complicity with Trump. Is the party divided between Trump loyalists and Trump skeptics? Or is it all in for him, such that more or less every official in the party is a proxy for election denialism and insurrection.

That was going to be an important question come election time anyhow—in 2022, Republicans who were understood to have misgivings about Trump, or who had defied him at any point, significantly outperformed MAGA loyalists who lost competitive races across the country. 

But it’s also going to be important, in accountability terms, for how we understand the chaos Trump intends to unleash between now and November. We can’t know in advance what those things will be, but he clearly wants mass violence if he’s convicted of a crime. He wants the economy to crash. He wants terrorists to menace or harm or kill his opponents. As Biden points out quite regularly now, he continues to joke about the bludgeoning of Paul Pelosi, and would be similarly sadistic about it if his supporters began attacking prosecutors or Democratic candidates. 

This is a rightful endpoint for Republican ostrich politics. Reporters should no longer feign naïveté about it when these Republicans pretend not to read his social media rants, or watch his speeches. Democrats should similarly drop the artificial distinction between supposedly honorable Republicans and MAGA. These forms of politeness were never justifiable, but Republicans could at least point to the obvious friction between the rank and file and the man himself. 

Chaos didn’t find them this time around, they chose it. They don’t know what horrors they’ve endorsed, but it doesn’t take great powers of imagination to picture what might await us. Anyone who lived through Charlottesville or January 6 already knows. That includes elected Republicans, who are morally culpable for whatever Trump does to the country as he tries to claw his way back to power.