The extraordinary dominance of Donald Trump over the Republican Party, showcased by his resounding win in South Carolina and explained in the reporting of Lisa Lerer, is the salient political fact of this election season, offering us another 8 months of torture by news. The article’s teaser noted that Trump “shows no sign of being shaken from his controlling position in the G.O.P. — not in 2024, and not in the foreseeable future.”
Acolytes populate every Republican committee and organization from school boards to Congress, and sometimes dominate them. If they are not more numerous than those just willing to go along, they are much louder and scarier. The predictions about what a second Trump administration might do are indeed frightening. But what if he loses?
Biden might just edge Trump, leaving the partisan divisions and Republican dysfunction in Congress and state houses intact. Or sentiment might shift over these next long-winded months, as some Americans see reason and move away from Republicans as a Party, depriving the disruptors on the right of their power to do anything but scream.
That distinction might not matter, because Trump and his MAGA movement don’t care about the Republican Party outside of themselves. They define the non-MAGA half of the Party as RINOs. At every opportunity, Trump has been promoting his personal victimhood, not just predicting a fixed election, but proclaiming that the fix is already in place. He tells Black voters that he, like them, is suffering from discrimination. The long delayed judicial reckoning with his years of criminal behavior has been turned into “election interference” orchestrated by Joe Biden.
Millions of Americans, already credulous, are being primed to believe that any Trump defeat, close or landslide, must have been created by liberal treason, spread throughout government. They will be more ready for action than were Trump’s believers in 2021. They are more likely to be armed.
Only Trump himself could keep them under control. Given their levels of paranoid mistrust of anything that clashes with their beliefs, a televised Trump statement that he lost a fair election, grudgingly offered days later, would not be sufficient. Trump would have to implore his movement army to stay peaceful, because he really did lose and America goes on.
Is that likely? What would he do after that? Go back to real estate? Hit the New York clubs again? Golf endlessly?
There is no reason for a losing Trump not to encourage his followers’ social, political, economic, and virtual war against the “vermin” who are destroying America. I therefore foresee public violence, but I also believe it will be contained, as happened on January 6. I don’t dismiss the lasting repercussions of violence, however it turns out. Official Republican claims about “hostages” demonstrate the impossibility of any common narrative about that abundantly recorded and adjudicated event.
But below any eruption of violence lies a hot bubbling mass of despair, disbelief, distrust, shading into hatred. It is easier than ever before to bring a mass of angry people to one place and to direct them into action. We will not lack for people who seek personal gain by whipping up their passions. Marjorie Taylor Green, Kari Lake, Kristina Karamo, and hundreds of others at every level of government are not likely to urge Trump or their believers to accept reality, because unreason is their calling card.
I can’t imagine a defeated Trump fading into political unimportance. I think he will fully embrace his role as “proud political dissident” from above, safely ensconced in Mar-a-Lago, teaching ever wilder nightmares about our society to MAGA through TikTok and X. He would no longer be hemmed in by the need to appeal to any but his most idolatrous fans. Rules of governance, international treaties, American history, and the Constitution would all become irrelevant. The media personalities who have made their names by propping him up for years will continue to offer fake news to anyone who will listen. Trump could distort our American lives for another decade.
I hope Biden wins. I fantasize about a national awakening to the conviction that Trump needs to go and the Republican Party remade. But I read “The Monkey’s Paw” by W. W. Jacobs as a child, so I’m careful what I wish for.
Steve Hochstadt
Boston, MA
May 1, 2024
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