GOP and Trump Agree They Should Rule

The GOP opposes Trump on some things, but not the main one

This piece ran at Arc Digital in January 2020, during the first nightmarish Trump term. I think it’s worth reupping, since it looks at when the GOP will oppose Trump and when it won’t.

The GOP just elected a Senate Majority leader Trump opposed, and blocked his nominee for AG. Trump loses a lot when he challenges Republicans; he’s neither smart nor strategic nor really determined. We should take advantage of those divisions…but we shouldn’t count on them to protect democracy. Because, unfortunately, Trump and the GOP agree that Republican power is more important than democracy.

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Last month (December 2019), the Republican-led Senate voted unanimously to recognize the Armenian genocide of 1915. This was a stinging rebuke to the Trump administration, which opposed the resolution. At the same time, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declared he was working with White House counsel to figure out how to best defend Trump during the impeachment trial in the Senate, where McConnell is, in theory, supposed to be one of the jurors. Republicans simultaneously handed Trump a humiliating defeat and agreed to defend him to the hilt.

This disconnect is striking, but it’s not new. Trump entered the presidency as an outsider, with few connections to Republican party networks, and a raft of heterogeneous policy preferences. He has faced striking and unprecedented opposition from his own party on some core parts of his platform. But on other issues, Republicans have rushed to obsequiously abandon former principles — and common decency — at Trump’s behest.

So how do Republicans decide when to support Trump and when to oppose him? The answer seems straightforward. Republicans drag their feet when Trump pushes policies with which they disagree, and they support him when his positions align with theirs. The most important position on which Trump and Republicans agree is on the guiding, central principle that Republicans are above the law, and Republican power is more important than democracy.

Democrats sometimes argue that Trump and the Republican Party are indistinguishable, and that congressional Republicans always back him. But looking at the record, that’s clearly not the case. Republicans often avoid trumpeting their disagreements with the president. But those disagreements are numerous, and Trump has had a string of setbacks because of opposition from a Republican Congress.

Trump’s long-hyped infrastructure package has been DOA for more than three years, largely because of Republican opposition to public spending initiatives that benefit the middle class rather than the wealthy. Republicans have also blocked Trump’s efforts to put unqualified personal loyalists like Herman Cain on the Federal Reserve Board. They’ve dragged their heels on the construction of Trump’s border wall, not because they’re pro immigration, but because the expensive boondoggle is obviously ineffective and foolish, and probably because it would require the use of eminent domain to hoover up private property. Republicans also opposed Trump’s effort to stage the G7 meeting at his own hotel, an egregious instance of self-dealing which Republicans worried would reflect badly on the entire party.

Republicans have also, and more openly, opposed Trump on foreign policy. Many Senate Republicans voted against military aid to Saudi Arabia for the war in Yemen. Trump’s sudden, bizarre decision to abandon the Kurds at the behest of Turkey drew vocal and almost uniform Republican opposition. Republicans have also been split on support for Trump’s tariffs.

In contrast, when Trump embraces Republican goals, he receives strong Republican support. Republicans love tax cuts for the rich, and happily passed a huge one pushed by the Trump administration in 2017. Trump and Republicans share a commitment to conservative judges; the president and Republican-controlled Senate have been confirming them at a rapid clip (even when they are manifestly unfit).

Republicans have strongly supported Trump throughout the Russia and Ukraine scandals. At first, this may seem like an instance where Republicans are choosing Trump over their own policy preferences. Republicans have long opposed Russia expanding its international influence, so you’d think they’d be concerned about the Putin-directed anti-American intelligence operations detailed in the Mueller Report. They’ve also generally supported a strong, independent Ukraine. Republicans attack Joe Biden now for trying to reform the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office, but at the time they backed his effort. Why do Republicans choose principles over Trump on infrastructure, but Trump over principles on Ukraine?

The answer is straightforward: they’re not actually choosing Trump over principles. The Russia and Ukraine scandals are about foreign policy to some degree, but they are even more centrally about election interference. In both cases, Trump is accused of soliciting foreign aid to damage Democratic candidates, and gain an unfair electoral advantage. And Republicans have shown, over and over, that their guiding principle as a party is that they should be allowed to tamper with elections.

Since the election of Barack Obama in 2008, and in many ways before that, Republicans have embraced voter suppression and election manipulation. Republican strategists and officials have repeatedly admitted that the voter ID laws they champion are meant, not to prevent election fraud, but to disenfranchise Democratic voters. Republican gerrymandering in states like North Carolina is also explicitly intended to prevent black voters from electing candidates. Mitch McConnell recently ranted that enfranchising Washington DC voters would be “socialism” — a nonsense contention which boils down to an argument that, in McConnell’s view, it would be immoral to pave the way for more Democratic voters to cast ballots.

Republicans, in short, do not believe that all Americans have an equal right to free and fair elections. The GOP consistently endorses the view that some Democratic voters are illegitimate, and that Republicans have a right and a duty to prevent them from exercising the franchise.

Some might write this off as hardball politics. But if a hardball political strategy involves deliberately blocking some voters, it inherently treats some citizens as more deserving of electoral rights than others, elevating the pursuit of power above the most basic democratic value.

When Donald Trump went on national television to solicit election interference from Ukraine and China in the 2020 election, Democrats saw a shocking violation of democratic norms. But Republicans have in large part subsumed the importance of these democratic norms below the higher good of Republican political victory. They agree with Trump that election interference on behalf of Republicans is good.

Trump and Republicans disagree on many things. But they agree on the main point, which is that Republicans have the right and the responsibility to shape the structural conditions of elections to their benefit—even if it means enlisting foreign regimes to hack Democrats, arranging districts into mangled shapes to grant Republicans an electoral advantage, enacting burdensome voting requirements that disproportionately impact poorer communities, or thwarting democratically-approved measures that would allow more citizens to vote.

In his disdain for democracy, Trump is not an aberration. He is the fulfillment of Republican authoritarianism.

The GOP may oppose Trump on some issues. But they’re not going to oppose him on that.