The Republican Party gave gallons of gasoline and a box of matches to an unstable man in exchange for maintaining power. Now they were shocked when they saw the flames and lost all control. The cost to them is huge.
“The best trick the devil invented was to convince the world that it didn’t exist,” Kevin Spacey in The Ever-Suspects quoting Charles Baudelaire.
Hours before the Capitol was held in Washington, the Republican Party was sending operational text messages that, according to journalist Jake Tapper, read: “Perhaps it is better, instead of recriminations, to tacitly acknowledge that we made a deal. with the devil for four years. “
A large proportion of Republican congressmen seem to be beginning to accept that they are responsible for the current crisis in the country. It must be remembered that from the beginning they knew that things would get out of hand if they let a populist like Donald Trump come to the White House. “If we call Trump, we will be destroyed … and we will deserve it,” Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham wrote in May 2016.
But like Graham, dozens of Republicans preferred an individual, who was given gallons of gasoline and a box of matches, to ignite the nation and try to destroy all institutions for four years in exchange for power. This week’s coup attempt, however, was simply too much to assimilate and now most want to take away from everything that has happened. That’s why they suggest to their supporters to stick with the “good” of these years and “look to the future”: to a new Republican Party that will look more like the old one. Cross and streak is what they expect.
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“(But) be proud of what we got (judges in the Supreme Court, in federal courts, tax reform and the end of neoconservatism and fiscal austerity) and move on,” the Republican message added this week. But now that everything is out of control, turning the page so nothing else as they suggest is not so simple. And not just because the responsibility for what has happened has to be shared and in the same way they should receive a punishment like losing their curule; in fact, so do several editorial boards and opinion leaders (including Republican voices).
First, this deal that the Republican Party signed with “the devil” was a lousy deal for the first part. With Donald Trump at the helm, Republicans managed to get to the White House in 2016 and maintain control of the House and Senate. But in 2018 they lost control of the House and in 2020 they lost the White House, the House again and now the Senate. They lost everything.
And yes, they managed to put a number of ultra-conservative judges in federal courts and in the Supreme Court, but those appointments are in doubt. Some judges do not meet the requirements to be in charge, so they face “impeachment” processes. And the next administration, which will already have control of the Legislature, could take steps to reduce Trump’s legacy in the Supreme Court by pushing for reform so that these positions are for periods and not for life as they have been so far. What Trump left to Republicans was very little, and what he took from them was much; for this reason, turning the page will be difficult.
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The biggest tragedy for Republicans in supporting Trump was losing control of his party after 167 years. The Republican Party is broken: it is no longer the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower or Reagan. For many, this is Trump’s party. And some conventional, veteran lawmakers, such as Mitt Romney and Lisa Murkowski, who became the first Republican senator to call for the president’s resignation for “hurting the country so much” after what has happened in the capital, may wishing to rebuild their party to return it to the old days of glory and self-regulation, but they have many barriers in the way.
The first is that they don’t have Trump’s voter base, which is impressive: he got 74 million votes in the last election. This election loot is what led to senators like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, two of the senators who supported Trump’s failed attempt to object to the election results in Congress this week, continuing to support the president.
Inside the party there will be a big fight to see who and how stays with Trump voters, if he gets out of the way. And here conventional Republicans like Romney and company have a disadvantage: Trump, his family, and some of the few allies left by his side convinced the trumpeters that all those who did not support the president were traitors, including Romney. And they believed this fanciful tale. If anything to highlight Trump’s manipulative ability was to blame what happened to Vice President Mike Pence and Republican leaders, although it was he who gave the order directly to his supporters. ‘invade the Capitol. Trump could convince the world that he never existed.
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For conventional Republicans it will be quite a challenge to reclaim the voters that Donald Trump appropriated by confronting the same members of his party to get it. In addition to the six senators who objected to the election results and knelt before Trump, it goes without saying that in the House 121 Republican representatives supported the president’s plan this week and could continue to side with him. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the fanatical representative of QAnon’s conspiracy theories is just the most visible face of this pro-Trump resistance. Mary Miller, another Trump representative, went so far as to quote Adolf Hitler this week: “(he) was right. Those who have youth will have the future.” Will the future of the party be equally extremist?
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Donald Trump Jr. he already anticipated before the taking of what was to come: he promised to defeat every “traitor” at the polls. From now on and for the next three years, each primary, whether for a government or a mayoralty, for a seat in the Senate or the House, will be above all a struggle for the heart and soul of the Republican Party. Every charge, no matter how tiny, matters for Republicans like Romney to regain control and rebuild “Republican values.” Meanwhile, the rest watch in surprise the live self-destruction of what was once Lincoln’s party.