As the Republican coalition shows its seams or, as Karl Rove suggested, engages in “civil war,” a central paradox of President Trump’s administration is coming more clearly into vision.
“Responsible leaders made his election possible by creating a vacuum that a demagogue could fill,” Gerard Baker of the Wall Street Journal observed. Without “the establishment” having created the environment and set the example not to be emulated, the story goes, there would have been no Trump.
More to the point at hand, Baker could have reasonably followed up by accusing the establishment of making his reelection possible by becoming his support system. Without the Republican establishment’s buy-in, Trump’s presidency would have amounted to little. That’s the paradox — that the career Republicans, against whom popular anger was directed (so this telling of events goes), saw to it that Trump’s agenda was executed.
The establishment’s cooperation under Trump is totally lost on at least one very prominent populist leaner and probably a lot of his Republican-leaning viewers.
“They haven’t spent five minutes wondering why you voted for Donald Trump in the first place, and by the way, they don’t care,” Tucker Carlson said during his show on Monday, the antecedent “they” being “the dummies in the Republican Party who think impeachment will help them in the long run” who, in this formulation, must also be part of this horrible, voter-despising establishment.
One can assume he has in mind the 10 House Republicans who supported the impeachment and the handful of Republican senators who entertained it. Carlson does not offer a bunch of names, but he does refer to “slow learners like Mitch McConnell.” Perhaps McConnell, for his part, does believe it will help the party in the long run. It was reported that he thinks impeachment would make it easier to purge Trump from the party. He has also said he plans “to listen to the legal arguments when they are presented to the Senate.”
Carlson added, “At no point does it seem to have occurred to McConnell or any of the geniuses clustered around him that what is really at stake right now is not the future of Donald Trump but, instead, the future of his voters — tens of millions of them, who in the space of the last seven days have seen themselves recast as domestic terrorists.”
To be clear, McConnell has not come out and said very much since the riot on Jan. 6. Carlson relies mostly on spurious news reports about what the man thinks. Either way, there is reason to believe that McConnell, probably more than any other Republican in Washington, is especially aware of the stakes. And his record as Republican leader puts a lie to this reductive notion that he is a self-serving and unreflecting establishmentarian. If anything, he is a party-serving power who has done nothing but benefit the interests of the Republican base.
McConnell stood against former President Barack Obama’s effort to fill Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat. Since Trump assumed office in 2017, McConnell helped push Justice Brett Kavanaugh through the Senate, and he justified the appointment and confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett just before the 2020 election. Under his leadership, the Senate passed the 2017 tax cuts with 51 votes. None of these suggests that he doesn’t care about voters who supported Trump.
That McConnell is willing to listen to the arguments during a Senate trial and that he is angry about the president and the riot are not the only admissible evidence in a trial to determine McConnell’s allegiance. He refused to let Democrats push the GOP around on this second impeachment trial and, again, got behind Trump and helped institute the administration’s priorities for four years.
McConnell’s face is right on the cover of Carlson’s 2018 anti-establishment book Ship of Fools. It has long been his bit to set readers and viewers against an elastic body of Republican officials who reliably work for Republican policy interests and who keep getting reelected for it. McConnell was just elected to another six-year term, as was Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, another “establishment” man (also on the Ship of Fools cover).
Both men, and plenty of other long-standing Republicans, became close Trump allies. Any separation they make from him now has to do with the fact that the riot was a horrible event and Trump is uniquely connected to it.
Republican-leaners should not be tempted to reinvest in the “Republican establishment vs. all of us” paradigm. For one, it’s not a comprehensive view of things. More than that, it will not help much in 2022.
