Yesterday I wrote a tedious little essay (like this one) about how the Republican Party proceeds, post-Trump. The party can survive without Trump, but how can they survive without Trump voters? What real sanction can be rendered against Trumpists, and even if you can expel them, how can you keep Trumpists out of the party going forward? Far-right candidates will continue to emerge and run for offices in heavily gerrymandered-districts, and win election, whether the party likes it or not. How does the party maintain a coalition of blood-hungry extremists and moderates who pine for a more collegial time? How can they win another presidency with its own membership at war with each other?
Today, for the first time, Mitch McConnell was quoted as supportive of an eleventh-hour impeachment. But the REAL story that emerged from this revelation is a concept that I have heard stated aloud for the first time – purging Trump from the Republican Party.
Back in 2015, I thought it would be lunacy for the Republican Party to permit Donald Trump to represent them in a presidential election, and observed that they didn’t have to defer to the results of primaries and caucuses if they didn’t want to. They are an autonomous organization and are not legally bound to the results of primaries, and were only bound by their internal bylaws, and could, if they wished, pull a change of rules in the Convention and vote in the nominee of their choice rather than put forward a man who could potentially ruin the party and the country.
Of course, doing so would alienate all the people who went to the trouble to vote and turn them against the party. They’d lose the election, their majorities, and probably within a few years give way to a new conservative party that would soon render the Grand Old Party into third party status.
But at least a fucking idiot madman wouldn’t be President.
But who really knew what would happen if Trump was elected? It might not be that bad!
Four years later, McConnell is looking at a party that has lost all of its majorities in Federal government, whose membership is split almost evenly between the money class and yahoos, whose extremist wing is threatening literal bloodbaths in DC and every state capitol across the country over the next week. By raising the concept of purging Trump from the party, he must have come to the conclusion that, now that he has no real power to lose any more (THANK YOU, STACEY ABRAMS!!!), two things are true:
- The Republican Party can no longer maintain its coalition of the rich people he really cares about and the idiot scumbags they have cultivated the last 40 years to win elections.
- The idiot scumbags must not triumph in the party’s internal war.
So now McConnell is talking about purging Trump from the party. With him go his acolytes, about a third to half of his base. A third party is almost guaranteed. Minority status as far as the eye can see.
But this would have happened if they had blocked Trump from the nomination in 2016 anyway. At least he got tax cuts and a generation of right-wing federal judges out of it.
He’s 78 years old. He’s done his job. He can go home and spend his enormous and mysteriously-acquired wealth while the next generation figures out how to protect rich old white guys.
