Republicans Are About To Become Desperate

But they won't respond by listening to the public; they'll respond by ratcheting up the menace.

(Photo by Rich Graessle/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

Prior to this most improbable of months, a hallmark of the Biden era had been a great forgetting of the Trump years that preceded it. 

Joe Biden’s belief that he could unilaterally turn down the temperature in American politics (as if Republicans had no power or incentive to keep it ratcheted up) along with the difficulty he had defending himself or mounting partisan attacks, allowed a fatal resignation to take hold within the anti-Trump majority. Biden’s lackluster politics enervated the broad left, while the right reveled in revisionism. Many Americans let go of their never-again determination to lock Donald Trump out of power. Other softened their memories of his terrible presidency, and even reconceived it as part of the pre-COVID good-old days. 

It took about six days, plus a little grit and good fortune, for a great remembering to set in.

The key was calling an early end to the Biden era, and turning leadership of the Democratic Party over to a younger, vigorous, more comfortably partisan campaigner. But the reversal was helped along by two less dramatic contingencies: 

1. Trump’s decision to nominate an un- or under-vetted candidate for the vice presidency, making his ticket a perfect foil for one led by a female former prosecutor; and 

2. Democrats’ late, related discovery of an effective rhetorical pitch to reconsolidate the anti-Trump movement. It’s us versus them, we are normal, they are weird. 

The effect has been dramatic. Wherever the horserace lands in the next couple weeks, these developments have remade the game board. They’ve seen Trump survive an assassination attempt, play the press like a fiddle through his third nominating convention…and lose popularity. They’ve seen Democrats coalesce around a figure they’d long counted out as political roadkill, only to see her favorability numbers soar.  

According to the most recent ABC/Ipsos poll, Kamala Harris’s favorability was 11 points underwater until she became the presumptive Democratic nominee, at which point her popularity spiked to 43-42, giving the party a popular standard-bearer for the first time in three years. Trump, meanwhile, ended his convention where Harris began, 11 points underwater (not bad for him, actually) but ended the week seven points less popular than he started, a catastrophic 36-52. Less than a quarter of the public views his running mate, JD Vance, favorably.

If Republicans aren’t now just as desperate as Democrats were one month ago, they probably will be if and when the dust settles and Harris enjoys a meaningful lead. 

But it will be a very different kind of desperation—one that’s likely to drive the GOP into a civically destructive spiral, rather than toward a virtuous revival. 

WEIRD, FLEX

The contrast between these two forms of desperation, and the changes they portend, reflect elemental differences between the parties. 

Democrats acted out of desperation when they leaned on Biden to stand aside, but it doesn’t follow that they did so for purely cynical or self-interested reasons. The drastic remedy—the voluntary retirement of an incumbent president, the leap of faith into uncertainty—reflected genuine determination to protect the country from danger. They were desperate, but they were also being civic minded, and so the public responded positively.

Harris’s welcome reception represents a healthy form of gratitude to the party for listening and taking action. People who’d given up on Democrats are suddenly eager to give them another look, reciprocating for Biden’s selflessness. Biden himself is enjoying a little popularity bump of his own.

But with Harris at the helm, the pro-democracy majority was able to take a clear look at the GOP, unburdened by the 3.5 years that have been, and remembered why it spent the four prior years working to deny Trump a second term. 

If revisionist views of the Trump presidency were deeply imprinted—if they were not merely artifacts of discontent with political life under Biden—Harris’s new mantra, “we’re not going back,” would fall flat. People would be happy to go back! They evidently are not. They suddenly remember what made the period from 2016 through 2020 so unpleasant.

We’ve long understood the anti-Trump opposition as a mass “normie” rejection of Trumpian aberrance—the cruelty and incompetence and narcissism. But it took the Harris reset, and a certain kind of street-smart thinking, to recognize that the best way to maintain the coalition is by defining MAGA, first and foremost, as the opposite of normal. Not dangerous, not intimidating, though it is those things. But weird. Weird ideas about policy, weird ideas about women, weird rallies where an old cult leader rants about Hannibal Lecter and electrocuting sharks.

MAGA activists love guns and puffed chests and want to inspire fear. But they mostly just embody a way of life people find bizarre. Recognizing that, and articulating it, is the politically galvanizing flip-side of the early resistance mantra “this is not normal,” which conveyed fear and helplessness, rather than confidence and resolve.

It’s not that there’s no weirdness in the anti-Trump coalition, but it’s a welcoming kind. The happy weirdness of Simpsons trivia and pride parades and dancing in public, set against the abusive, medieval, rule-or-ruin weirdness of the new internet-addled American far right. 

CEAUŞ F*CKERS

That fundamental difference between the coalitions is why we can’t expect a desperate GOP to do anything noble if they find themselves behind in the race.

Trump is temperamentally incapable of responding to the prospect of defeat by broadening his appeal, and Republicans are structurally incapable of deposing Trump as a chastened peace offering to the country. They will see only one option, and it will be to intimidate and demoralize the anti-Trump movement all over again. Mission critical for Trump and his allies now will be to resow the defeatism and fatigue that has marked liberal politics for well over a year now. They also have a ton at stake, but in their case it’s not the high ideals of democracy, freedom, and human decency. 

For Trump, the only freedom that matters in this election is his personal freedom. He’s conducted himself throughout the campaign under an assumption that he’d win. Imagine how destructive he’ll become if he starts to believe that he’s headed for defeat, followed by criminal trials, bankruptcy, and imprisonment.

As for the rest of the GOP, winning or stealing the election is the only way to stave off the recriminations that will follow if, after remaking themselves in Trump’s image, Trump is defeated once and for all. The suddenly leaderless party will be overrun by thousands of minions who mimic Trump’s cruelty and aggression but lack his celebrity and charisma. The only people left to stand in their way will be the remnants of the old guard that allowed them to take over in the first place. How’s that likely to go?

Republicans obviously brought this on themselves. They could have spent the last four years rebuilding a bench of leaders who correctly understood Trump to be an anomaly and a bad all-in bet for the party. Instead there isn’t much left for the party to rebuild around other than MAGA creeps, plus a few Glenn Youngkin-like posers who will never be able to live down their affiliation with Trump.

What would a decadent party in a bind like this do to stave off destruction? What wouldn’t they do? GOP judges will likely step in where they can to help Republicans tilt the playing field of the election. Their propaganda apparatus will run hotter than ever to divide the opposition. Their rabid supporters will become yet more receptive to calls for political violence. 

The newly energized Democratic base should steel itself for political battle with a GOP that has everything to lose, and resolve not to let up in the slightest. What’s happening to Trump right now bears hallmarks of the fall of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, who ruled oppressively through coup attempts and rebellions, until one day, in the midst of yet another megalomaniacal speech deriding the “fascist” plots against him, people began to jeer and mock and laugh at him—and just like that his reign of terror ended.

If the next 100 days look anything like the last seven, Democrats will win the election, possibly by a wide margin. And we might look back on July as the moment when the aura of invincibility Trump spent so many years cultivating suddenly dissolved.