For all the antics among House Republicans, what is most notable from their Senate Republican colleagues is silence. No Republican senator besides Mitt Romney is meaningfully criticizing the President. I continue to hear that in closed door caucus meetings the attitude toward the President and the widening scandal is considerably more hostile to the President and fearful than one might suspect. Sen. John Thune, a consummate party man, likely gave some hint of this when he told reporters yesterday that “the picture coming out of [the impeachment inquiry] based on the reporting we’ve seen is, yeah, I would say is not a good one.” Of course, if we had a dime for every time we’ve heard about private criticism of President Trump that never goes public we wouldn’t need to work so hard to drive up our membership numbers here at TPM. But there’s another point that is worth exploring about the Republican Senate.
It’s not all about voting to impeach or acquit.
I often hear people say that Republicans always have an easy out whenever they choose to take it: if Trump becomes too radioactive, just cut him loose, move on to Pence and have all the policy goodies they want and none of the constant embarrassment and chaos. That assumption entirely mistakes the current make up of the Republican Party, and, indeed, American politics generally. There is simply no scenario in which the GOP can easily quit the President or do so without driving a major, divisive and lasting wedge through the center of the party.
Four years ago Will Saletan said the GOP is a failed state and Donald Trump is its warlord. That is still the case, though you’d have to say the deal has worked out pretty well for the GOP so far. But the downsides are simply the flip of the upsides. Trump’s rule has been so durable because despite his unpopularity he maintains the intense support of a large minority of the electorate. For a mix of demographic and geographical reasons it is a minority that generally over-performs in electoral terms.
Since he entered office President Trump has hovered right around 40% approval or one or two points higher. We may speculate that as much as 10% of this number isn’t entirely comfortable with Trump but supports him out of partisan attachment: They’re Republicans. He’s the Republican President. That’s enough. But probably 30% and certainly more than 20% are deeply attached to Trump, not only for his few relative points of ideological heterodoxy (trade restrictions, isolationism, etc.) but much more for his embodiment of an authoritarian and illiberal worldview both at home and abroad. These voters will have a very hard time forgiving any Republican leaders who turn on Trump and try to drive him from office. He has simply remade the party so thoroughly around an emotive ecosystem of dominance, obedience and betrayal.
Trump has built his political movement and persona around the politics of grievance and resentment. These are the taproots of the version of American conservatism we now call Trumpism. But Trump embodied and thus sealed and deepened those tendencies in a transformative way. Any partisan would resent politicians who turned on a leader to whom they felt a profound loyalty. But none like pro-Trump diehards.
The facts of the Ukraine extortion plot seem pretty clear cut. The political fallout is less clear — specifically how firm Trump’s heretofore impregnable wall of GOP defense will remain. It is still unlikely that any substantial number of Republicans will vote to impeach or remove the President from office. But if the scandal continues on its current trajectory, there’s really no scenario in which most Republican senators won’t face a damaging outcome whichever side of the impeachment question they come down on. Voting against the President would in almost all cases remain the most damaging choice — even if a substantial majority of the public believes the President’s actions are indefensible (something a number of Senate Republicans appear to have privately concluded already.)
In the unlikely event that President Trump is removed from office or compelled to resign, the sense of betrayal and grievance from probably half of Republicans will be intense and long lasting. Late in his presidency Richard Nixon was able to rely on the support of rightwing diehards and the sense of grievance about a liberal establishment ganging up on the President. But Republicans were able to recover internal coherence fairly quickly after Nixon’s fall because to conservatives and the Movement Right, Nixon was never really one of them. That’s very different for Trump. He embodies their politics and he’s governed exclusively in their interest.
Don’t expect major defections. But that’s not really the question. The real issue is that Republicans are trapped with someone they can’t cut loose.
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