For a few hours after January 6, it seemed like the Republican Party might finally be ready to quit Donald J. Trump. It happened again after the 2022 midterms: When the red wave never materialized, with ultra-MAGA candidates under-performing their more traditional GOP peers, some optimistic pundits and Never-Trump Republicans believed the spell was finally, truly breaking.
Then 2024 came and Trump, not even bothering to appear for debates, easily defeated his opponents in the Republican primary, reminding Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his supporters in conservative media that candidates are ultimately chosen by Republican voters — and they, generally speaking, are not interested in a more disciplined version of the man they voted for in 2016 and 2020.
Republican voters, by an overwhelming margin, want Trump to be president again; many are unwilling to consider the possibility that he could ever legitimately lose. That he is 78 and clearly lost a step does not appear to matter to people who quite like the idea of a 1980s insult comic as commander-in-chief.
Elected Republicans and top GOP operatives, however, are well aware that their candidate is unfit for office. Half the people who served in Trump’s cabinet are refusing to support him today; the guy had to find a new running mate after encouraging a mob to attack his last one. But Republican voters like Trump not in spite of his moral failings, but because of them; that a serial liar is regarded by the GOP base as “honest” is in part a reflection of the candidate’s open racism and misogyny, which reads among bigots as him “saying what we’re all thinking.”
Fantasies of a post-Trump Republican Party, if they are to be grounded at all in reality, must confront the fact that the former president is the unquestioned leader of the GOP, today and for the last nine years, because his voters — seeing what the rest of us do — actually like all the stuff that their betters in conservative media view as an unhelpful sideshow.
As Terry Sullivan, a former GOP strategist who worked for Sen. Marco Rubio, told Politico columnist Jonathan Martin, the Republican Party does not have a “top of the ticket problem” but a “voter base problem.”
“It’s not like our leaders have been leading the voters to the wilderness against the voters’ judgment,” Sullivan said.
The hope among some in the party is that those voters will now cost the GOP another election, after which their time will come again. According to Martin, this view is openly espoused by some “high-level” Republicans: that Trump losing in November best positions the party, then in opposition to a President Kamala Harris, to make gains in the 2026 midterm elections, enabling the party to block her agenda and field a morally palatable candidate for president in 2028.
“Those conditions, along with a diminished, twice-defeated Trump, would make it easier for Republicans to recruit Senate candidates,” Martin wrote.
Politico’s Playbook newsletter separately reported Wednesday that this take isn’t shared just by out-and-out Trump haters in the GOP. “Some of the Republicans wishing for a Trump loss include long-standing GOP figures throughout the nation who bleed red and wouldn’t dare say this publicly but who are more than ready to move on from the Trump era," the outlet reported, highlighting the fact that the former president's intra-party critics still live in fear of his posts on Truth Social.
That this is all rather preposterous is revealed by asking one question: You think a soundly, twice-defeated Trump will just slither away — and not seek the nomination again when he’s in his 80s? It’s also reflected in Politico’s reporting, a GOP source musing to the outlet about the possibility that a President Harris would make their job easier by actually pardoning a defeated Trump (along with Hunter Biden), removing the former president’s “persecution complex” and accompanying grip on the party while enabling Republicans to “get on with the business of winning elections.”
But Harris is not Gerald Ford and Trump is not Richard Nixon and this is not 1974, when leaders of both parties were at least willing to say — publicly — that it’s bad when a president commits crimes to undermine democracy. Some 50 years later, elected Republicans were only willing to say that for about 48 hours, and even then only in the immediate aftermath of a Trump-endorsed assault on the U.S. Capitol "("Count me out. Enough is enough," Sen. Lindsey Graham said that evening. "It is my hope that we can now all rally around President Trump as the Republican nominee," he said three years later).
If Republicans really want to move past the Trump era, they need to dig deep and find that which has been sorely lacking since he first secured the party’s nomination in 2016: the courage to say so, openly, and to act on one’s purported convictions, even if it’s only the service of attaining power. While silence in the face of an authoritarian threat is understandable, if not laudable, it won't convince any Republican voters to back away from the abyss. Party elites privately complaining to the mainstream media? That’s what we saw throughout his presidency, furthering a billionaire's claim to be fighting an establishment cabal — and if he loses again, it's how we'll get a “Trump 2028.”
