In the wake of Trump’s electoral defeat and political survival, principled Republicans must offer their own vision for America.
Donald Trump’s refusal to accept his electoral defeat is alarming, but unsurprising. It is Mr. Trump’s character to reject even reality itself when it conflicts with his ego. More alarming is the long list of state and national Republican leaders cravenly falling in line behind his desperate efforts to topple American democracy.
On Friday, the Supreme Court rejected a Texas lawsuit to overturn the election, a legal challenge that was as frivolous as it was anti-constitutional. Yet more than 60 percent of House Republicans signed a supporting brief, joining 18 Republican attorneys general who filed their own and embraced entirely the unreality of Trumpism by lending their names to undoing an election that put them in office.
These were not just fringe elements. The minority leader Kevin McCarthy and the whip Steve Scalise signed their names, as did the incoming ranking member for the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee, Cathy McMorris Rodgers. Some, such as Kevin Brady, Bill Flores and Ann Wagner, were Republicans who the NeverTrump movement once hoped would break with the president once we made him an electoral loser.
That they instead clung to his mad king strategy, like sailors lashed to the mast of a sinking ship, proves that the majority of the party has, at least for the foreseeable future, forsaken democracy. Even though Mr. Trump has been defeated, there is still no home for Republicans committed to representative government, truth and the rule of law, nor is one likely to emerge anytime soon.
So what’s next for Republicans who reject their party’s attempts to incinerate the Constitution in the service of one man’s authoritarian power grabs? Where is our home now?
The answer is that we must further develop an intellectual and political home, for now, outside of any party. From there, we can continue working with other Americans to defeat Mr. Trump’s heirs, help offer unifying leadership to the country and, if the Republican Party continues on its current path, launch a party to challenge it directly.
Although we hoped that defeating Mr. Trump would start to right the Republican ship, our efforts over the last four years have not been in vain. We defeated and removed immoral and dishonorable Republicans like Roy Moore, Dana Rohrabacher, Steve King and Martha McSally. We turned out to ensure that Democrats nominated a unifying leader whom a majority of voters could support. And we were a key part of the coalition that defeated Mr. Trump himself.
But the NeverTrump movement has mostly been inward looking thus far. It emerged to defeat Mr. Trump and defend foundational principles such as self-government, liberty and justice, sovereignty, pluralistic society, the sanctity of all life, decency and objective truth.
But to turn back Mr. Trump’s dangerous ideology, which has survived his defeat, and move America forward, we must build on these ideals and look beyond ourselves.
We must now offer our own vision for the country capable of uniting more Republicans, Democrats and independents to advance solutions to the immense challenges we face. Because Trumpism will be on the ballot again, in 2022 and 2024.
It should start with unyielding commitment to the equality and liberty of all, and then to facts, reason and knowledge. It should champion democracy and its improvement and cherish life in all its phases. It should promote personal responsibility, limited government and government’s vital role for the common good. It should advance justice for all, and uphold the personal and religious freedom of a diverse people.
It should expand economic opportunity, rejecting cronyism and protectionism, while defending innovators and workers from theft and predatory practices abroad. It should recognize immigration as a vital national asset and universal access to quality health care, public and private, a national obligation. It should imagine new methods of learning and work. It should be decent, ethical and loyal to the Constitution.
If the coalition that defeated Mr. Trump and elected President-elect Joe Biden, of which we are a part, fails now to lead the nation past the coronavirus pandemic, widespread job losses and economic instability, social division and injustice, inaccessible health care, fiscal shortfalls and disinformation, we will invite a resurgence of Trumpism and even more formidable illiberalism in the future.
Soon, we may field and promote our own slate of candidates running on either party’s ticket or as independents, but under our ideological banner. To advance this vision and support these candidates, we should further develop the infrastructure we’ve created over the last four years: including data firms, messaging platforms, research capabilities and grass roots networks.
Eventually, we will have to make a decision: Will we return to a Republican Party liberated of fear, corruption and authoritarianism, or will we attempt to replace it with a new conservative alternative? Our hope is that we can still help foment a broad rejection of extremism inside the Republican Party. But our immediate task is to build our home for either eventuality, and to continue the fight for liberty, equality and truth.
The Different Ends of NeverTrump
But an important group of NeverTrumpers identified with the right on a very specific set of issues — support for the 1990s-era free trade consensus, Wilsonian hawkishness, democracy promotion — that are unlikely to animate conservatism again any time soon no matter how the Trump presidency ends. These intellectuals and strategists aren’t particularly culturally conservative, they’re allergic to populism, they don’t have any reason to identify with a conservatism that’s wary of nation-building and globalization — and soon enough, they won’t.
.. Along with Rubin I’m thinking here of Max Boot, her fellow Post columnist and the author of a new book denouncing the Trump-era right, who self-defined as a conservative mostly because he favored a democratic imperialism of the kind that George W. Bush unsuccessfully promoted. I’m thinking of Evan McMullin, the third-party presidential candidate turned full-time anti-Trump activist, and certain Republican strategists from the Bush-McCain-Romney party, whose Twitter feeds suggest that they never much cared for the voters who supported their candidates anyway.
.. But observers trying to imagine what a decent right might look like after Trump should look elsewhere — to thinkers and writers who basically accept the populist turn, and whose goal is to supply coherence and intellectual ballast, to purge populism of its bigotries and inject good policy instead.
For an account of policy people working toward this goal, read Sam Tanenhaus in the latest Time Magazine, talking to conservatives on Capitol Hill who are trying to forge a Trumpism-after-Trump that genuinely serves working-class families instead of just starting racially charged feuds.
.. I don’t know if any of these efforts can pull the post-Trump right away from anti-intellectualism and chauvinism. But their project is the one that matters to what conservatism is right now, not what it might have been had John McCain been elected president, or had the Iraq War been something other than a misbegotten mess, or had the 2000-era opening to China gone the way free traders hoped.
Four species of Beltway Republicans
In focus groups I conduct across the country, even Republican voters who readily acknowledge Trump was not their first or even tenth choice in the Republican primary in 2017 will nonetheless say they are glad he is picking fights, breaking things, and draining the swamp. Last week, Trump’s approval rating among Republicans tied its record high of 90 percent.
.. a taxonomy of Republican leaders with four different categories.
.. [1] The first category of D.C. Republican is the Trump enthusiast. The true believer, the die hard. This is the type of person who was aboard the Trump Train from the get-go, someone for whom the Republican Party of Donald Trump is the party they’ve always hoped for. Tough on immigration and trade, never enamored of Bush-era foreign policy, thrilled to have overthrown the old guard, this is the type of individual for whom a Trump administration has made Washington their oyster.
[2] The second category of D.C. Republican is the establishmentarian. Someone who was perfectly comfortable under the “old ways” but has adapted quickly to survive in their new, harsher environs. They play for Team GOP and Trump is their quarterback, so they’re happy to run his plays as long as they keep winning games. Trump was not toward the top of their list of possible choices for a nominee in 2016, but once he was picked, he was the guy and it was time to fall in line. A significant portion of Capitol Hill and the Republican Party apparatus fits into this category. Do they love the tweeting? Not really. Do they care enough to object? Absolutely not, not so long as regulations are being reformed and taxes are being cut.
[3] .. The third category is the internal opposition. As the continuing echo of the “Never Trump” movement, they view Trump as consistently wrong and categorically dangerous. They have found common cause with Democrats in the #Resistance, holding semi-secret meetings to discuss how to combat what they view as a hostile parasite that has found in the GOP a too-willing host. There is very little that they find praiseworthy about the current moment, and there have even been moments where some, like former presidential candidate Evan McMullin, have actively called for the defeat of mainstream Republicans at the ballot box as a way of teaching the party a lesson.
Could Evan McMullin tip the election?
“He can’t do anything, but he hurts us in Utah,” Trump complained. “If for some reason we lose Utah, that could have a very devastating impact on the overall.”
McMullin, a Utah native, promptly tweeted: “@realDonaldTrump, Yes you’ve never heard of me because while you were harassing women at beauty pageants, I was fighting terrorists abroad.”
.. The funny thing is a lot of people in Utah are Mormons, and they don’t drink coffee,” he said, sitting down over hummus and ice water at the Hawk ’n’ Dove on Capitol Hill. “So, we’ve done zero campaigning in coffee shops. If Donald Trump were truly interested in the state and in the voters, he might know a thing or two about that.”
McMullin added with a smile that dessert is “what we do in Utah. We have a lot of desserts, a lot of sugar-infused treats, and that’s what we do instead of coffee.”
.. After leaving the CIA in 2011, McMullin — who has an MBA from Wharton — became an investment banker for Goldman Sachs in San Francisco.
.. In the “Meet the Press” green room on Sunday, McMullin ran into Mike Pence, Trump’s running mate, who had joined in mocking the Utahan in the joint interview with Baier, saying: “Nobody ever heard of him.” In person, it was all different. McMullin recalled: “He said it was truly nice to meet me, and I reciprocated, and we wished each other well.”
.. McMullin is the key player in one of two “not-impossible scenarios” that would throw the election into the House. Under what Krueger calls “The Utah Scenario,” if McMullin takes Utah’s six electoral votes, Clinton could wind up with 267 and Trump with 265, both short of 270.
..The LDS Church-owned Deseret News wrote a jaw-dropping editorial in October calling for Trump to resign his candidacy, which essentially outlines why Trump is the antithesis of Mormonism.”
.. “That means the Republican Party is headed more quickly to problems than perhaps the Democratic Party is. But it also means the conservative movement can emerge anew in a more viable way.”