Trump’s Republican Party is dead.
Not only in its soul, but in the essential qualities that once defined it. While it may still win seats in the Midterms and retain the loyalty of millions, what truly matters has been lost.
The capacity for independent judgment, for institutional self-respect, for the basic reflex of saying ‘No, not this’, is gone.
Donald Trump’s Easter Sunday post, in which he threatened to bomb Iranian power plants, dropped the f-word into the public record, and signed off with ‘Praise be to Allah’, is not an opportunity to wake up Republican Party officials, members and voters.
It is simply more evidence that they may be breathing, but in reality they’re dead inside.
We have been here so many times before that Trump reaction commentary has become its own genre, with its own predictable arc. Something happens. Jaws drop. A Republican or two issue carefully worded statements expressing concern. The news cycle moves on. Nothing changes.
The ‘Grab ’em by the pussy’ Access Hollywood tape, which arguably kicked all this off, feels like a lifetime ago.
Then we had a wave of ‘very fine people on both sides’, of children torn from their parents and put in cages, Russian interference and his references to Haiti and African nations as shithole countries leading to his first impeachment.
Not to mention the second impeachment, attempts to overturn an election, and facing 34 felony counts.
There has always been a fresh wave asking whether this, finally, is the moment that takes him down. It never is.
Yesterday was no exception.
At some point, we need to stop asking where the accountability is and consider why there is none.
The answer is not flattering.
What we’re witnessing now is true compliant devotion and the collapse of any structure in which resistance might be possible.
Tim Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate, called a racist video depicting the Obamas as apes ‘the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House’ and then carried on as normal.
When the line is crossed and then simply redrawn further back, eventually, there is nowhere left to go.
Trump’s Easter post is a useful illustration precisely because of its particular combination of ingredients.
Profanity from a sitting president, directed at a foreign government, on the holiest morning of the Christian calendar, ending with an invocation of Allah.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that any one of those elements, if attributed to a Democrat, would have prompted weeks of hearings and a hymn of outrage from every evangelical pastor with a television slot.
But when it comes from Trump, it generates a shrug and, from his more devoted supporters, unapologetic delight.
The real, harder question is how a party can lose its soul and yet remain electorally successful, and what that means for America.
Trump’s Republicans will be on the ballot in November, and many of them will likely still win. In a damning insight into the soul of America, the moral decay and decomposition of Trump’s administration are not translating into disaster for the party.
American democracy does not yet have a mechanism for automatically disqualifying the morally bankrupt and broken.
So the issue that needs to be grappled with is not really whether the Republican Party is dead. It is whether America wants to revive it – and if so, how it would be done, and who would do the work.
It’s an issue that belongs, uncomfortably, to the Democrats, as much as anyone.
There is a version of the next few years in which the party simply runs out the clock, waits for the exhaustion to set in, and inherits whatever is left. That is a strategy of sorts, but it’s not a vision.
They need to be presented with something worth voting for, rather than simply something to vote against.
That is the reality of the situation for the Democrats – and it’s a reality that’s a lot harder and less satisfying for them than they would like.
So their task will not be to blame everything on the monstrosity of Trump, though monstrous he undoubtedly is. It is to prove that the Republic is recoverable, that institutions can be rebuilt, that the extraordinary can be made ordinary again – in the right direction this time.
Trump signed off his Easter message with ‘Praise be to Allah’.
The Republican Party was ineffectual, and thereby complicit, in its response. It’s what we’ve come to expect, and what we should expect going forward too.
We have established, beyond any remaining doubt, that there is nothing he could say or do that would change that.
For a long time now, America has been at risk of losing itself, facing a fundamental battle for the soul of its country.
We have now reached the natural conclusion of that battle.
The Republican Party – once the party of giants Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan and John McCain – is not sleeping. It is not lost.
It is dead. And in the void where its soul used to be now stands something deeper and darker: an aggressive, erratic, vengeful movement that is isolationist in its instincts, authoritarian in its appetites, and answerable to no one but the man at the top.
Americans must now decide. They can either take the necessary steps to bury the Republican Party as it stands, or do nothing, and accept that what has replaced it is all they have left.
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