Are Republicans Stuck With Trump After Election, Win or Lose?

Photo: Mark Peterson/Redux

One of Washington journalism’s favorite parlor games is guessing at the real sentiments of the ruling political class that contradict their public positions. Since Donald Trump took office in 2015 and conquered the Republican Party, he has been the subject of many such questions. Would Republicans be better off winning elections with Trump, who has swept aside so many tenets of Ronald Reagan’s conservatism and regularly embarrassed them with his crude antics? Or would they prefer, in the long run, that he lose so they can once again promote free trade, entitlement reform, and forever wars while the MAGA hordes retreat into nonpolitical vices and social media rabbit holes?

Politician Jonathan Martin explored this question again this week. He found that, unofficially, many Republicans see benefits for themselves in Kamala Harris taking office in January and presiding over a potentially paralyzed Washington, D.C.:

For most Republicans who haven’t converted to the Church of MAGA, this scenario isn’t even all that provocative. In fact, in polling Republicans last week, the most fervent private debate I heard within the party was about how best to speed Trump’s exit to the 19th hole.

The bigger question for Republicans is: Is it better to support a Harris presidency to prevent Trump from ever getting into power, probably for good? Or is it better to hasten his exit from politics so he can win the presidency, so he can serve only one more term and be done for good by 2028?

The problem with secretly hoping Trump loses so they can get rid of him as GOP leader, of course, is that that glimmer of hope didn’t appear after his 2020 defeat, even after a failed insurrection and despite the availability of 12 opponents challenging him for the 2024 nomination. Can anyone be sure that a twice-defeated Trump will go away? Apparently not, Martin reports: If he loses this year, he [might] He insists once again that he was deceived and leaves open the possibility of a fourth consecutive candidacy, thus prolonging the party's stranglehold.

True, in 2028, Trump would be 82, the age that proved fatal to Joe Biden’s reelection in 2024. But the 45th president has never met anyone’s standards. Specifically, J.D. Vance seems to have performed poorly in his audition as Trump’s heir apparent. Does anyone imagine that it would take much effort to convince the former president that he remains the only one who can save the country, as he likes to say? Becoming the only politician other than Franklin D. Roosevelt to win four presidential nominations would likely appeal to his unique view of himself. True, FDR never lost, but in the minds of Trump and his loyal supporters, he didn’t lose either.

The possibility of a 28th runoff election would help answer a lingering question about his current campaign. As election law expert Rick Hasen recently explained, the 2022 Vote Reform Act appears to have put an end to all the tricks (including fake voters or a coup by the vice president and/or state legislatures) that the Trump team used to try to overturn his 2020 defeat. Yet he and his allies are devoting enormous resources to efforts to cast doubt on the 2024 results and slow their certification at all levels of government. Short of a violent revolution to overthrow the federal government, Trump is unlikely to have a positive outcome, unless the goal is to extend his grievances into the next presidential election cycle.

It’s no wonder that the title of Martins’s article is “If Republicans Want to Win, They Need Trump to Lose Big.” Given the broad scope of Trump’s perennial allegations of Democratic voter fraud (he has insistently repeated his bizarre and unsubstantiated 2016 claim that millions of noncitizens can and will vote) and voter fraud (he has been arguing for months that the 2024 election was already rigged by lawsuits against him and also by Harris’s replacement of Biden in a coup), it’s hard to see what kind of improbable landslide victory by Harris would be needed to send her to Loserville permanently. A great many Republican politicians have already been screwed once by urging Trump to concede in 2020 and then deploring his conduct on January 6; nearly all of them have crawled back into his tent. Is there any chance they will throw him out of the party if he predictably renews his election denial in November? No.

The Republicans Martin spoke with, who want to get rid of the old demagogue but lack the courage to do anything about it, probably lost their best chance to get rid of Trump when they failed to unite behind a viable Republican challenger in 2024. Or maybe they never had a chance and will simply have to wait for one in the near future. If so, they have richly earned their discomfort, if only because they have shared it with all of us.

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