IF IT WALKS LIKE A DUCK AND TALKS LIKE A DUCK…

 

“A massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”

—Former President Donald J. Trump—

He never should have gotten this far. Donald Trump never should have been a candidate for president and certainly never should have been endorsed by the Republican Party. Many of us said this from the outset—screamed it from the rafters, in fact. Okay, so a lot of people refused to listen, refused to see the warning signs, refused to face reality. We had to learn the hard way.

But even after Trump clearly demonstrated that he was not only as bad as, but actually even worse than some of us had warned, even after he abused power for four years, usurped the leadership of the GOP and bastardized its traditional party line to fit his ambitions, even after he engaged in nepotism, pardoned his cronies of their crimes and heaped praise on every ruthless dictator he met, after he tried his level best to demonstrate unequivocally that he was an enemy of our allies, an enemy of American traditions and ideals, an enemy of the Constitution and an enemy of liberal democracy, even then, the majority of the GOP leadership backed him to the hilt. And leading Republicans who were appalled and refused to bend to Trump’s inexplicable power in the party were ousted from positions of leadership and opposed for reelection in their own camp. In most cases they also received threats against their lives and those of their families, in tactics usually circumscribed to the world of gangsters and organized crime, when not to the world’s worst dictatorships—Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Xi Jinping’s China, Mohammed bin Salman’s Saudi Arabia, and Kim Jong Un’s North Korea, among others, where opposing the authoritarian leader exposes rivals to mortal risk.

Then, this would-be authoritarian president of the United States did the unthinkable and, for the first time in the history of the country, refused to accept the results of a free and fair democratic election—the most transparent election in American history—that he lost, went to more than sixty courts to try and find a judge who would quash the election results, and when that flatly failed, sought to elicit help from the Supreme Court, which he had heavily weighted in his favor by appointing three far-right justices during his time in office, but was rebuked once again. And when all else failed, he tried to pressure election officials to alter the results of the elections in their states by “finding” the necessary votes to overturn his loss—votes that clearly weren’t there. Then, when any sane person would have just accepted clear defeat—in his case, marked by a seven million popular vote margin and a definitive majority for the other candidate in the Electoral College—he again made dubious history by inciting an insurrection in which his most radicalized supporters violently attacked and sought to take over Congress, in an assault that left one police officer dead, one hundred forty-four injured, the Capitol in shambles and lawmakers and Trump’s own vice president, whom he abandoned to the attackers, having to run for their lives.

And yet, the Trump-infected GOP—it’s hard to think of the party any other way, since Donald Trump is like a virulent virus that has attacked and continues to attack liberal democracy and all other core American values—refuses to flatly reject Donald Trump or to question his party leadership. Like infected cells in an infirm body, his vast majority of enablers in the party have been killing off the remaining healthy cells—true conservative democratic Republicans like Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Anthony Gonzalez, Jaime Herrera Beutler, Peter Meijer, Tom Rice and John Katko, all of whom were either primaried by Trump-groomed candidates or decided not to run again.

Only two of the ten who voted to impeach Trump after the January 6^th, 2020 insurrection have survived the authoritarian onslaught (namely, California Republican David Valadao and Washington State Republican Dan Newhouse). Instead of being praised for standing up for democracy and against Trump’s authoritarian designs, the GOP leadership (in the person of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and his merry band of election deniers and insurrection justifiers) ousted the likes of Cheney and Kinzinger for daring to sit on the House January Sixth Committee, an investigative body that has been doing what all sides in Congress should be devoted to doing: investigating the role of the former president in a plot to overthrow the US government and install a dictatorship in 2020.

Even after the drama of the January Sixth Revolt and its attendant aftermath, the GOP leadership has remained too cowed by Trump and his minority base to call the former president out, and has once again permitted him to register as the main Republican candidate for the 2024 presidential race—this, despite the fact that all serious political opinion polls are showing the only other apparent GOP candidate so far, Ron DeSantis, to be far ahead of Trump in popularity.

Continuing to embrace Trump, as if in some sort of trance from which they can’t seem to wake up, the GOP leadership suffered a veritable trouncing in the recent midterm elections. Widely predicted to win a resounding victory in both chambers of Congress in those elections, the party’s decision to support Trump-backed election deniers and conspiracy theorists in major House and Senatorial races cost them dearly as those candidates, by and large, suffered humiliating defeats. In the end, the GOP shared that humiliation, far underperforming pre-election expectations and once again losing the Senate to the Democrats and only eking out a razor-thin majority in the House.

It wasn’t, however, like it should have come as a surprise to the GOP leadership—or to the less than oracular pundits who predicted a GOP shutout—since the party had already made the same mistake twice before in elections in which they took a beating because they misread just how sick and tired the majority of Americans are of Trump and his narcissistic quest to be a king rather than a president. What is more, opinion polls since the midterms seem to be clearly demonstrating that disillusionment with Trump is only growing, with his popularity plummeting following the vote.

The message is that it is clear to swing-voters, independents and traditional conservatives that Trump’s politics are toxic and un-American. They are no longer willing to put up with a supposedly conservative party that looks more like a three-ring circus with a modern-day P.T. Barnum grifter as the ringmaster. They want to see a new face in 2024 and for Trump to be a four-year “wonder” who finally fades away.

The more unpopular he is becoming, nevertheless, the more Trump is typically doubling down on his anti-democratic rhetoric, still vehemently resisting conceding his 2020 election defeat, still spouting conspiracy theories and claiming “massive election fraud” in the 2020 General Elections. The Supreme Court that he thought he “owned” after naming three hand-picked justices to it during his White House tenure has stubbornly rejected his every attempt to use the Court as a tool to help him legitimize his false claims of a fraudulent election. And the three justices that he appointed have, to their credit, shown that they, unlike him, will continue to defend the US Constitution and the rule of law, that they are, in other words, the exact opposite of what he has just accused them of being: namely, an institution that, in his words “has lost its honor, prestige, and standing, and has become nothing more than a political body…” On the contrary, the Court remains a bastion of justice that opposes the designs of a would-be despot—even if it’s the same tyrant who named a third of the Court.

Trump’s meltdowns are growing more and more worthy of concern. They would be of no concern at all, it should be pointed out, if it weren’t for the fact that prominent Republican leaders continue to render him relevant on the American political scene, instead of treating him like the raving madman that he has become. In this latest phase of the Madness of King Donald, he is now calling for the Constitution to be “terminated”. This is rhetoric that is, by any standard in American life, qualifiable as “batshit crazy.” And yet, way too many powerful Republicans are either going through a thousand sweaty contortions to act like they’re not sure what he meant, or are ignoring the pronouncement completely, with only a handful unequivocally criticizing him for saying it.

This begs the question, if the GOP has lost three elections because of Trump, if they got trounced because of him and his conspiracy-theorist candidates in the latest midterms, and if, with their own ears, they’re hearing him call for the dissolution of the rule of law in the United States, is it still all about the party’s being cold-sweat scared of “losing the Trump base”? Because if that’s the case, don’t look now, guys, but that base is shrinking by the minute, proportionate to the growth of Trump’s own legal liability—because, slowly but surely, Justice is coming for him.

Instead of thinking of the Trump “base” as some magical key to success, the GOP should be thinking of it as an ice cube, and if they continue to try and hold onto it against all odds, they had better start thinking of 2024 as what is very likely to be the sweltering summer of the party’s electoral discontent.