Much discussed on the op-ed pages recently has been the future of the Republican Party. In the New York Times, which I read every morning, Bret Stephens had a piece earlier this week entitled “Only Impeachment Can Save Republicans,” and yesterday there was a column by Thomas Friedman entitled “Trump Is Blowing Apart the G.O.P. God Bless Him.”
Republican members of Congress are taking up widely divergent positions in response to Trump’s efforts to undo his election loss and his incitement of the mob that stormed the Capitol. One is to emphatically break with the president, endorse his impeachment, and in some cases even acknowledge that they should have repudiated him sooner. These are the Republicans who cannot tolerate their party continuing to accede to the will of Donald Trump. As Lisa Murkowski said after the mayhem at the Capitol, “If the Republican Party has become nothing more than the party of Trump, I sincerely question whether this is the party for me.”
At the other end of the spectrum are those G.O.P. legislators who continue to fiercely defend Trump and insist that the election was, if not outright rigged, at least profoundly problematic. They have cast their lot with the president and his supporters. They either believe that Trump should continue to lead their party or have surrendered to what they see as the inevitability of that future.
And then there are various positions in between. Some would like to characterize Trump as the entire problem, as if their party has not been defending and enabling him for years. They would throw him under the bus and hold the rest of their party inculpable. Some former Trump acolytes in Congress, like Representative Kevin McCarthy and Senator Lindsey Graham, acknowledge that Biden won the election and that Trump’s recent behavior is unacceptable, but call for Democrats to join them in putting the whole messy business behind them in the name of national unity. Most of these members reject the idea of impeaching the president on the basis that he’s leaving office anyway, and an impeachment trial will only further divide the country. They want to have it both ways — they hope to take enough of a principled stand to preserve our democracy but without entirely alienating their pro-Trump constituents.
The problem for the Republican Party is that these divergent positions are irreconcilable. There can be no coalition that includes all of them, which means the party is in deep trouble. It cannot endure as the party of Trump and also the party that repudiates him, or even just wants to move beyond him. Millions of his supporters have no interest in Trumpism without Trump, but the more principled members of the party can no longer countenance aligning themselves with a cult of personality, especially when that personality has proven to be an antidemocratic insurrectionist.
The Republican Party is broken. Many of its leaders have not yet acknowledged as much, but their wishful thinking will not hold it together. The best thing they could do for their party is convict Trump in his impeachment trial so that he is ineligible to hold office again. Only then might they begin to rebuild the party into one that can even hope to maintain a balance of power with the Democrats.