The GOP, especially in the House, is approaching a decision point. I don’t know if they are conscious of it, but it’s coming. Greg Sargent of WaPo’s description of the GOP caucus in the House, nominally of a majority party, is illustrative:
What’s become clear now is there is no Republican majority in the House united behind any governing approach. The Gaetz faction is committed to a project that most House Republicans ultimately are not: eschewing consensus governing entirely wherever possible and making no concessions to Democrats whatsoever.
In this, the Gaetz crew has been urged on by Trump, who wants Republicans to shut down the government to defund ongoing prosecutions of him, a Total War posture that would make any compromise on spending bills impossible. “The MAGA dysfunction caucus within the GOP just mirrors Donald Trump’s political style and program,” Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.) told me.
And this won’t work to keep the Party together:
But that’s not quite where McCarthy and most House Republicans are. Their game is to indulge Trump and the MAGA movement some of the time, but not all the time. They are willing to run bad-faith investigations designed to smear the Trump prosecutions, to launch an impeachment inquiry into Biden without any serious basis and to use hearings to hype fears that MAGA voters are widely persecuted by law enforcement.
Resentful Trumpists, aware they’re being treated like children, will simply become more destructive.
The GOP needs to accept
- That they will be losing the election in the House in 2024. The special election history since 2022 spells it out, the abortion polling spells it out, the Democrats’ relative internal comity spells it out, and the failure of the far left spells it out.
- The longer the Trumpists are Republicans, the more extremist the GOP will become, and less welcoming to those Republicans who feel it is their responsibility to govern, rather than rampage.
And then they need to boot the Trumpists out. Let them piddle off and make their own Party, because that’s what they are. Stop permitting the Trumpists to suck the internal juices of the Party. You already look withered.
And accept that there’ll be some losses.
The Republican victory in 2022, as shockingly small as it was, was one of the worst things that could happen to the Republicans. It exposes their extremism, inability to work together, inability to compromise, its pernicious victimhood, and the ascendancy of personality over competency.
Not coincidentally, that’s Trumpism as its most essential: Me Me Me.
The first step is to kick Trump and his followers out. Accept the 2024 losses. Kick out Gingrich and repudiate his dictums. Learn – not how to win, but what the electorate thinks about the issues, and what it means to be a humble leader.
But they won’t. Not yet. It’s a culture tailored to the self-centered leaders, like Trump, Gingrich, Rubio, and the rest of that rabble.
