This week in Milwaukee, Republicans will formally nominate as their presidential candidate a shocking first offender: the first president to be impeached twice, the first to deny defeat, the first to resist the peaceful transfer of power and the first to have a criminal conviction. Then the voters will decide.
In the party’s own interest, Americans should vote against every Democratic candidate, from Donald Trump to the dogcatcher, and against whoever comes to the top of the Democratic Party, whether Joe Biden or anyone else. To save the once great party, voters must destroy it.
With apologies to longtime Republican strategist Stuart Stevens, we might call this a “burn it down” project. Four years ago, he said this about radicalized former party members: On CNN“Just burn it down and start again.”
Opinion columnist
Jackie Calmus
Jackie Calmes brings a critical perspective to the national political landscape. She has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.
Voters lit a fire in 2020 and early 2021, ousting President Trump from the White House and ousting Republicans from control of the Senate. In the 2022 midterm elections, Republicans won a majority in the House of Representatives, but only barely. The expected red wave turned out to be a mere smear, with President Trump being blamed. In recent years, under President Trump’s radical MAGA banner, because Under his banner, party candidates repeatedly suffered defeats in local and state elections they were expected to win.
But so many of Trump’s allies remain in power at all levels of government that the Republican Party has not shaken off Trumpism, and Trump himself has surprisingly emerged from his insurrectionary notoriety to become his party’s standard-bearer for a third time.
And his resurrection will be a reminder that he is a criminal He was indicted four times. Convicted 1 (out of 34 New York State felonies); civilly committed Financial fraud, Sexual Abuse and Defamation (2 times) and fined about $500 million. None of that matters in a party that has become a personality cult built on the grievances of Trump and his supporters: Trump’s legal troubles only fuel the pity party.
So with a vengeful convicted felon and born-again liar poised to return to the White House and his party on the lam to retake the Senate and hold the House, his opponents, Stevens and others, have renewed and expanded their calls to take them all down.
“You know, pain is the best teacher in politics, maybe the only teacher,” he says. Said In an April PBS episode, he said the Republican Party needed to lose: “The Republican Party needs to lose, and they need to lose a lot of times, so that we can have a viable, legitimate political party.”
Historically, political parties have responded to electoral rejection by looking inward, fighting over new policies and installing new leaders, as the Republican Party did after the devastating Watergate scandal a half-century ago, and the Democrats did after their crushing defeat under Reagan.
But Trump has ignored the norms of politics, and so far, the norm that political parties do not side with losers. It is clear that further major defeats are needed to return the party to grassroots, moderate, and healthy status. As Stevens suggests, political parties cannot survive repeated defeats. They may have no choice but to reform.
Stevens doesn’t think a more traditional center-right Republican Party will emerge before 2032. And it’s an illusion to think the Republican Party will fully return to what it was — a party that is small government but not anti-government, supports free trade, immigration and international engagement, opposes autocracy, and is fiscally conservative but agrees with a government-run safety net. Compromises with the far right will be necessary.
That being said, our democracy needs a healthy conservative party, and the current Republican Party is neither healthy nor conservative; it is extremist.
As Stevens explained to me, the party he has helped elect candidates for decades has gone from being the country’s “beating heart of anti-Communism” to being openly “pro-Putin,” and that the party is “at war with the modern world, and losing.” He cited the culture war between the Republican Party and corporate America, big brands, and celebrities like Nike, Disney, NASCAR, and Taylor Swift.
Republicans still claim to be the party of law and order, but Stevens noted that their hostility toward far-left groups has been replaced by hostility toward the FBI and their support for Trump’s pledge to pardon “thugs who attacked the police officers guarding the Capitol.” Republicans are so anti-government that they oppose mandatory vaccinations in schools, and Stevens lamented, “Are there really that many people who are immune to polio?”
Stevens is not the only current or former Republican to have found himself in a position to burn it all down. George Will, a favorite columnist of traditional Republicans, wrote: Urged Voters would reject the party altogether, from Trump to “his supporters in Congress, especially the senators who prowl around his ankles with the craving of a dog.” Such rejection, Will wrote, would be “a fitting punishment for their Vichy collaboration.”
Republican senators are becoming more and more like puppies, desperate to curry favor with Trump and more and more deserving of defeat. The same is true of House Republicans, who have long been Trump’s lapdogs and an obstacle to good governance.
Liz Cheney, a former Republican champion Election Campaign She said she would support the Democrats if the candidate lost in the 2022 election. “We can survive if they have bad policies,” she said, justifying her support for Democrats even if they are Democrats with whom she has strong and different opinions. “We cannot survive if we have leaders who burn down the Constitution.”
Former Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a courageous Republican partner on the House January 6th Committee, spoke out last month, along with another Republican, former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan. their support For Biden. Kinzinger was founded three years ago. Country First To defeat the “harmful parties” that deny the election.
Even a major defeat in 2024 (mainly by Trump) would be just the first step in forcing the Republican Party to rethink and realign itself. But it would be a big step.
Let’s get the (new) party started.
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