The break between Trump and the GOP

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Who is to blame? Who has disgraced the United States in the eyes of the world, putting it on a level with Turkey or Egypt or some tin-pot dictatorship where democracy is contingent?

Those most obviously responsible, of course, are those who stormed federal buildings, vandalized property, and sought to interrupt constitutional government. They are guilty of sedition, and they should be punished accordingly.

Who else? Who stood behind them? Who motivated, enabled, and incited them? Should we blame the senators who threatened to withhold their consent from the election result? Or right-wing shock jocks? Or, as some are doing, the media ecosystem that sustained President Trump for four years despite his cavalier attitude toward constitutional proprieties?

It is a principle of Western justice, and, indeed, of all the main monotheistic religions, that we are answerable for our actions. Guilt by association is a dangerous concept. I have argued before in this column that it is absurd to blame Muslims in general for jihadi terrorism or white people in general for Dylann Roof’s shooting spree in Charleston or black people in general for Micah Johnson’s in Dallas. To establish responsibility, it is not enough to point to some vague similarity. You have to show incitement.

Most Republican lawmakers, far from inciting the mob, did their job and certified the result. Most commentators, likewise, stood by due process, although one or two disgraced themselves. Trump, though, is plainly guilty. He knowingly and deliberately incited a crowd against an election result. His behavior was the very definition of sedition: “By force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof.”

South Americans call it an “auto-golpe” or a “self-coup.” An incumbent, duly elected, takes power but then seeks to dismantle the constitution that got him or her there. True, Trump’s coup attempt failed. The guardrails held — just. The various Republican politicians and conservative commentators who had been indulging the ridiculous fantasy of a stolen election drew back in time.

In time, at least, to save the republic. Whether they were in time to save the Republican Party is another question. The trouble with telling people that they are victims of a massive fraud — a fraud apparently so fiendish that the Democrats managed to lose seats in the House and fail to take control of the Senate until Trump’s ham-fisted interventions gifted them Georgia — is that some will take you seriously and literally. In the immediate aftermath of the November election, eight out of every nine Republican voters believed that the ballot had been fair. By last week, 45% of Republicans applauded the putschists who attacked the Capitol.

The break between Trump and the GOP, a party to which he came late and malevolently, is now total. He ended his presidency as he began it, by lashing out in furious language against the party’s leading figures.

My guess is that Trump will now go to a third party, setting up a MAGA movement to speak to and for the protectionist and nativist constituency that exists, to a degree, in every country. A sad consequence of the coronavirus and the lockdowns is that that constituency has gotten bigger. People have become warier, more introverted, and more demanding of strong leadership.

It will be hard for Republicans to resist these tendencies and keep alive the spirit of Reaganism. But they must try. Their fundamental purpose is in their name: They are there to defend the republic and the values on which it rests. Foremost among those values is the supremacy of constitutional norms over what the Founding Fathers called “Caesarism” — an apt word when we consider that some of the Trumpist irreconcilables in the run-up to last week’s coup attempt were using the hashtag #CrossTheRubicon, a reference to the moment when Julius Caesar broke the law by bringing armed forces against Rome in order to set up an autocracy.

In the run-up to the 2016 election, I lamented in this space that there was no candidate for traditional conservatives to back, and I wrote that Trump was disqualified by his “refusal to recognize that he is aspiring to an office bigger than he is.” Nothing in the intervening four years challenged that view, and Republican congressmen and congresswomen know it, even if fear of their audience made them reluctant to spell it out. That reluctance, sadly, has led the U.S. to its present breakdown. Their last chance to salvage some honor, even at this late stage, is to indict the man who has done so much to harm their party and their nation.

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