No matter how divided Democrats are right now, divisions among national Republicans are now far worse.
“This debacle of the past week or so” is how Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham referred to recent days in a Thursday press conference. “If you’re a Republican, [it’s] been a tough couple of weeks,” he also said. No way that’s how he says it in private.
The world isn’t over, but the center did not hold for the GOP. Discord over the election and then coronavirus relief payments and defense authorization were beginnings. Twin losses in Georgia’s Senate runoffs were a kick in the groin after the party had been pretty well-positioned to keep its majority. And that pales next to the abomination that went on at the Capitol on Wednesday. That scene will haunt the party more than the rest because the rogues who broke in did so in the name of their leader.
Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s former chief of staff who most recently served as special envoy to Northern Ireland, was among those who resigned over it. “The folks who spent time away from our families, put our careers on the line to go work for Donald Trump,” he told CNBC, “and we did have those successes to look back at, but now, it will always be, ‘Oh yeah, you work for the guy who tried to overtake the government.’”
Similar thoughts must be whizzing through congressional Republicans’ brains as they mull over how to situate themselves among it all, how to take Trump-era accomplishments with them, and how to relate to the president going forward.
The crazy thing is, in the few weeks after the election, it looked like Democrats had the unity and morale problems. Members complained that others were too radical and caused the party’s election performance woes, and activist groups pushed back against Biden’s transition picks.
Even before Nov. 3, the left-most were skeptical of Biden — they promised to “push” him — and he, of them. Former President Barack Obama warned those folks against seeking too much. The Democrats’ beef will surge again, but Republicans have the worse lot today.
Finally, Trump-Pence, the unit that incarnated balance for Republican voters wary of the president, is all but done. More than likely, it’s done, done. And the end was storybook, in a bad way.
Mike Pence had been a foil to Trump all along, measured and dry. The disparities of character showed, but perhaps never more nakedly than on Wednesday, when the president, in a tweet, said the vice president lacked courage.
“After all the things I’ve done for [Trump],'” Pence said, according to Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe. Trump put Pence in an impossible position, and it would be their end.
That’s where the Republican Party is, having lost its advantages under a crisis of leadership, and it’s not how it had to be.
