The death of the Washington Post’s favorite austere, pious religious scholar should help President Trump and his political party. It may heal, or at least paper over, the schisms between his base and the much less enchanted wings of the party.
Just as the Kavanaugh hearing, this event transcends all divisions on the Right. The late Arizona Sen. John McCain would have relished this venture, as do Sens. Mitt Romney of Utah, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, and all of the Bushes. The spirits of President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher beamed down on it all from above. The Republicans, who have been the party of freedom and of the force that sustains it since President John F. Kennedy’s torch had been dropped by Democratic South Dakota Sen. George McGovern, can reclaim some of their old sense of mission.
It doesn’t hurt either that many Trump critics have been neoconservatives, ardent proponents of this sort of action. They cannot disown it now. Amy Walter has noted on Twitter that President Barack Obama’s 5-point rise after his strike at Osama bin Laden reverted to normal after a few months’ duration, but he wasn’t facing an impeachment proceeding. The argument that Democrats made 20 years ago in defense of President Bill Clinton — that in spite of his sins, he was “doing the people’s business” and running the country well — can now be made again with a little more confidence.
The two things that matter in elections are the economy and the cluster of war and peace issues. Trump’s calling card was and still is the economy; in foreign relations, the raid is the “big get” that his resume has been missing. Expect to hear this mentioned as an argument against his removal in the impeachment proceedings, if they do happen, and then in the campaign to come.
It might also, if just on the edges, defuse some of the tensions between Trump and the party, especially in those purple and swing states and districts, where Republican candidates in House and Senate races need Trump skeptics and Trump fans to survive. The GOP primaries in 2016 had been extremely divisive: Trump never won 50% of the votes in the primaries, fought through the campaign with other Republicans, and never once even tried to mend fences and bring together the people he had brought into the party with the ones he found in it. Call it the “tiny tent strategy,” but he seemed happy with this status of nonintegration, not caring that his approval lurked in the low 40s, or that “his” party, on the congressional level, was starting to be pulled apart.
Only a handful of things could unite the whole Republican Party. One of them was the courts, and the Kavanaugh wars did prove the great saving grace of the 2018 midterm elections, arguably adding to the GOP margin in the Senate, even as the party lost its House majority. In 2020, it’s the Senate in danger, with Sens. Cory Gardner of Colorado, Martha McSally of Arizona, and a very long train of some of the party’s most promising people threading the needle of being cordial but not servile toward Trump — their own man or woman, but also his friend.
Expect the raid to take center stage for the president and for all of the rest who are running for something and need something big to hold the party together. Or at least, until the next seat on the Supreme Court opens up.
