In no small part, the GOP in the Donald Trump era has been marked by a craven failure to take offramps.
Trump’s encouragement of white supremacy, his strong-arming of a foreign ally, his multi-tentacled plot to destroy our political order, and his incitement of a violent, deadly insurrection — none of these have pushed Republicans to finally disavow him as a leader of their party and unfit to lead this country.
When Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., delivered her closing statement at Thursday’s Jan. 6 hearing, she offered Republicans one more offramp. She posed this question: “Every American must consider this: Can a president who is willing to make the choices Donald Trump made during the violence of Jan. 6th ever be trusted with any position of authority in our great nation again?”
Now ask yourself this: Why will so few Republican lawmakers forthrightly answer Cheney’s question in the negative?
The latest hearing starkly demonstrated that Trump knew many in the Jan. 6, 2021, mob were armed and adamantly wanted to lead the mob on a march to the Capitol anyway. Trump actively chose, again and again, not to call off the violence, and the committee linked this directly to his apparent desire for the mob to help complete his coup.
Even after the attack started, Trump pointed the mob at his vice president, Mike Pence, like a howitzer — even as Pence’s security detail thought his life and their own were in grave danger.
Republicans failed to render Trump unable to run again by overwhelmingly voting against his impeachment and conviction after Jan. 6. So Cheney is asking: Now that we have starkly demonstrated Trump’s depraved dereliction of duty and illustrated the full scope of his likely criminal coup attempt, are you ready to say at this point that he’s unfit as a leader of your party and the country?
It’s hard to see how this will play out with Republican elites. One possibility is a muddled resolution that sidelines Trump while harnessing the radical, insurrectionist tendencies that were long nursed by Republicans but under Trump have been overtly embraced.
Geoff Kabaservice, a historian of the modern GOP, notes that such an outcome would resemble historical moments. Just as GOP elites today want to exploit energies Trump has exacerbated, Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunt “resonated with the Republican base very powerfully,” Kabaservice says, giving GOP elites “the possibility of riding his crusade.”
With Trump, one way this all ends, says Kabaservice, is that GOP elites quietly coalesce around GOP alternatives to Trump heading into 2024 — such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Meanwhile, they would cast Trump as an unfairly maligned but overly politically damaged victim of Democratic witch hunts.
In this endgame, Kabaservice notes, there would be “no open admission of error.” The narrative of Trump’s passing from the scene would be spun “in a post hoc way.” Republicans would never decisively answer Cheney’s question. That would be a bad ending: Scholars of democratic breakdown believe a decisive repudiation by GOP elites of Trump’s crimes against the country could help avert a future of increased political instability and violence.
But the fact that Cheney’s question is still dangling out there, unanswered, suggests that may be the future that does await us.
Greg Sargent is a columnist for The Washington Post.
