Will the GOP's Blood Pact With Trump Survive?
We have short political memories these days, perhaps a consequence of the constant news cycle churn so many of us get caught up in during our daily lives. I try hard to resist this trap since it leaves us walking about the world without the knowledge to understand what we are seeing. As I tell my students on the first day of class, if you do not understand the past, you have no hope of understanding the present.
The recent past of 2016 still gets flame wars going on Twitter among supporters of Bernie Sanders and Hilary Clinton, but the Republican Party primary that year has largely been forgotten despite its significance. It’s inconvenient after the Republican Party went all in for Trump for conservatives to recall a time when they were deeply divided over him. National Review even ran an anti-Trump issue.
That all soon changed. Today Ted Cruz and Lindsay Graham are among Trump’s biggest sycophants, but once upon a time, they worked hard to prevent his nomination. Cruz even spoke against it at the Republican National Convention that year. Back in 2016 Trump doxxed Graham and insulted Cruz’s wife and father. After the convention both gave their fealty, to the point that Cruz campaigned for Trump without an apology and Graham is being sought as a witness in election tampering in Georgia.
This is because after the 2016 RNC, the leadership of the Republican Party signed a blood pact with Trump. The terms were thus: Trump would support the Republican Party’s unpopular legislative agenda, and in turn they would shield him from prosecution. The GOP leadership understood that their dogma of letting the public feel the hard hand of capitalism -expressed pitch perfectly by Mitch “47%” Romney- was political poison. Trump’s populist bigotry gave the teeming masses of Republican voters the rhetorical red meat they so craved and a message of resentment that ended up getting enough votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Once in power, Trump dropped the stuff that appealed to independent voters and prioritized slashing taxes on big corporations and the wealthy and nominating judges who would dismantle the regulatory state and ban abortion.
While the GOP leadership hoped to keep Trump on a leash, exemplified by former RNC chairman Reince Priebus serving as his first Chief of Staff, those hopes came crashing down pretty fast. Instead of being the front man for their unpopular agenda, he became a metonym1 for the party itself. The Republican Party was Trump, and Trump was the Republican Party. This blood pact held through the first impeachment, and while it was challenged in the immediate aftermath of the January 6th attack, Republicans fell back into line. Even an attempt to overthrow the government that put the very lives of Congressional Republicans at risk could not break their loyalty. Over a hundred members of the House still voted against validating the election on that very day itself. In a truly surreal turn of events, Trump instigated a mob that wanted to kill Mike Pence but Pence has maintained his loyalty. Now the Republicans who are cooperating with the January 6th committee are pariahs in their own party.
Republicans have had many easy opportunities to be Peter and deny Trump, but that would be anathema to their base. For that reason, I assumed the old blood pact of 2016 would stay intact forever. This month, for the first time, I am not so sure.
Many Republicans were quick to denounce the FBI search of Trump’s Florida resort, offering the usual rote excuses for his law breaking. However, when the nature of the potential crimes involved came out, many Republicans started lowering their voices. Some things are easier to deny than others. I also get the feeling that the Trumpy version of the GOP is making some normie conservatives ambivalent. By Trumpy I mean not only the ideology, but the brazen disregard for majority opinion. The abortion vote in Kansas, for example, showed that plenty of Republicans in a very conservative state do not agree with the party line on the issue. The Dobbs decision has taken something theoretical and made it real. Many who had overlooked or denied the reality of a post-Roe world are getting cold feet. They were okay with the state slapping around immigrants and Black people, but are not as keen for them or their loved ones to get hit.
I took a trip to visit a friend in Amarillo, Texas, last week and was surprised by the enthusiasm gap I witnessed. In an area that gave Trump roughly 75% of the vote, I saw a lot of Beto signs and none for Greg Abbott. I am sure Abbott will still win handily, but a lot of Republicans will be voting out of obligation rather than enthusiasm. The only conservative expressions I saw were on the extreme end, like a pickup truck with “kill all molesters” written on its side and a guy at a baseball game wearing a “Let’s Go Brandon” shirt with firearms all over it.2 The people on the conservative fringe are feeling their oats for sure. They are screaming at school board meetings and attacking FBI buildings and taking over state level parties and exulting in draconian new abortion laws.
A lot of conservatives aren’t too keen on these things, though. They might buy the hype about school indoctrination but trust their local schools and are alarmed at how educators in their community are being treated. Many are not pleased with the post-Roe reality. Many more are a bit frightened by the rise in political violence. With Trump no longer doing a lot for the Republicans after losing the election and his legal troubles an increasing liability, the blood pact might be under threat.
It will not end with a pro wrestling heel-turn type moment. One of the central tenets of American conservatism is that a liberal can never be right about anything under any circumstances. That means Trump can not be directly repudiated. However, Republican leadership might start ghosting Trump like a bad first date. Someone like DeSantis will still attack the “out of control Democrats” for the Florida search, but might not defend Trump directly.
Essentially, the Republican leadership wants to retain the benefits of their blood pact, but not necessarily with Trump still around. They have learned from his use of populist resentment and grabbing power at all costs, traditional restrictions be damned. They just want to avoid the PR headache he gives them and to maybe turn things down a notch or two to keep from scaring off the normies. To attack immigrants and teachers, but with a big ol’ smile on their faces. The Republican Party’s may break their blood pact with Trump, but it will continue in his image.
Sorry, it took me years to understand what this word means and now I can’t stop using it!
Oh how I was tempted to act naive and ask him, “So who is this Brandon guy? He must be pretty great if all of these people like him so much.”