The next Republican debate, like every previous one, is a staged performance simulating a debate. It is in the spirit of a Potemkin Village, the painted wooden facade of a thriving town transported place to place on the orders of Prince Gregory Potemkin to impress his lover Catherine the Great on her grand tour of the new lands of the Russian empire in 1783. The legend of the Potemkin Village gained currency with the publication of the Marquis de Custine’s Russia in 1839. Inspired by the first volume of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Custine decided he would secure his fame by the parallel feat of traveling through Russia. “The Russians have only names for everything, but there is nothing in reality. Russia is a country of facades,” he wrote. His insight has never faded, from the Romanovs through the Soviet Union down to Putin, where nothing is true.
The Potemkin Village of the Republican contest, conducted under the shadow of a tyrant, is more Custine than Tocqueville, more Russia in 1839 than Democracy in America. It is the triumph of scenography above ideology. Revealing the reality behind the theatrical setting is too terrifying to contemplate for the participants. The pasteboard facade of a debate is shuttled into the pasteboard facade of an impeachment.
Yet the utter political and moral collapse of the tattered remnants of the Republican party has been the subject of several recently published exposes. McKay Coppins’ Romney: A Reckoning has disclosed the lonely ruminations and regrets of the Republican presidential nominee of 2012. Mitt Romney is unrestrained in his contempt for Trump, his venality and threat to the constitution. Romney’s scorn for Trump is equaled by his disdain for Trump’s cowardly enablers, especially his fellow senators. “I don’t know that I can disrespect someone someone more than JD Vance,” he said. Observing from his unique perch, Romney wrote out for himself a line from William Butler Yeats’s apocalyptic poem, The Second Coming, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” “A very large portion of my party,” he told Coppins, “really doesn’t believe in the constitution”.
Liz Cheney’s new memoir, Oath and Honor, draws the same conclusion of a party jettisoning its principles in the embrace of a despot who would overturn the constitution. Her story describes herself running from Republican leader to leader as a modern-day Paul Revere sounding the alarm on the eve of the January 6 coup to find herself standing alone on Lexington Green. The only patriots joining her are Democrats. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, would-be master of strategy, tells her not to worry, there’s no need to do anything, he wouldn’t support Trump’s impeachment and removal after the coup, that Trump will “fade away”. She mounts her horse again to warn that Trump intends to establish a dictatorship for life.
Cheney’s memoir has followed on the heels of Robert Kagan’s dark essay making the same point in the Washington Post. Kagan, like Cheney, a neoconservative turned Never Trumper, wrote, “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.” Trump mocked Kagan and his ominous prediction by approvingly posting a link to the article on his Truth Social account, turning forewarning into vindication. Trump retweeted one of his acolytes, Congressman Cory Mills, of Florida, who wrote that Kagan proved the case for Trump: “For months, the radical left and never Trumpers tried to claim President Trump could not win a general election. They tried to launch countless indictments & false allegations to get him off the ballot. Now, it’s obvious the Americans from all walks of life, not from any singular socioeconomic background, are in staunch support of Donald J Trump.”
Then there has been the publication of Tim Alberta’s book on the moral corruption of the evangelical right, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism. Alberta, an evangelical himself, disillusioned by the movement’s turn to Trump, whom he calls a “lecherous, impenitent scoundrel”, chronicles its leaders’ sinful descent to idol-worshipping Trump as their “mercenary” redemptive Christ. It does not matter that Trump, as Alberta reports, considers “these so-called Christians” as “some real pieces of shit”. Christian nationalism is now completed with its fusion with Trump. Nothing illustrates Alberta’s shudder more than the rise of Mike Johnson, evangelical true believer and Trump coup plotter, to become speaker of the House.\
So far, the decadent ruination of the Republican party, the threat to the constitution and Trump’s brazen plans for a dictatorship have not been seen fit to discuss as the centerpiece of any Republican debate. Role-playing is the essence of sustaining the suspension of disbelief. The mise en scene of a weighty event is physically replicated to complete the picture – the podiums, the long desk, the patriotic backdrop – the Potemkin Village. But the pretense only further contributes to the flattening of the party that has been trampled by the despot in waiting.
This particular charade of a debate has most recently taken the form of Nikki Haley’s media-driven star turn as an alternative to Donald Trump. Having won the support of Charles Koch, the surviving Koch brother, she has, in the common parlance, “momentum”. But, a few weeks ago, before wandering Republican donors inflated the Haley boomlet, an influential Republican in Washington touted to me anticipation of her “momentum”. Haley’s backers would concentrate behind her, he explained, but she would lose; they would mostly oppose Trump, who he hoped would lose; and then they would reclaim the party. Haley is a vehicle for keeping hope alive. This scenario imagines that there is another Republican party lying beyond the mists, the world of the past, still intact, only waiting to be reclaimed. Haley is their unlikely figure of restoration, hardly carrying a nostalgic impression, but she is the final thin reed left to grasp, at least for a moment. As Liz Cheney has written in her memoir, that party is gone. Her encounter with McConnell, and his certainty that Trump would “fade”, proves both her point and that the assumptions of a return to normalcy is illusory. How are things in Glocca Morra?
Haley exists in a strange bubble, allowed to float unobstructed, poked at by no one except hapless Ron DeSantis, as she drifts toward her ending foretold by TS Eliot, “not with a bang, but a whimper”. Her candidacy will show once again why Trump strides like a colossus over the Republicans. Her inherent unpopularity has yet to be explored. To the extent she stands for the old conservatism, she is discreditable with the Trump base. His unabashed white supremacist national socialism always beats unvarnished laissez-faire. Her position in favor of what is euphemistically called “entitlement reform” of social security and Medicare is exactly why working-class Republicans adhere to Trump and not to traditional Republicans. “I recognize that social security and Medicare are the last thing the political class wants to talk about,” she has said. “Any candidate who refuses to address them should be disqualified. They’ll take your vote and leave you broke.” She has a record of repeatedly calling for the repeal of Obamacare. “We have fought Obamacare in South Carolina as much as we possibly could,” she has said. And, recently, she added, “It’s not about one small policy of, you know, Affordable Care Act. It’s about fixing the entire healthcare system.” She also had endorsed a series of rightwing nostrums such as “term limits” to fire all federal civil servants after five years (air traffic controllers, food inspectors, scientists?), defunding the Internal Revenue Service, and forcing congressional votes on every single federal rule and regulation (3,000 to 4,500 a year).
Haley’s balloon would puncture if and when the public ever plays attention to her draconian conservatism. In the meantime, she has tried to edge to the right of Trump into RFK Jr territory by giving credence to wild anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories. “You took people’s rights away in the process,” she said, about the federal government funding of Covid-19 vaccine development. “You said, ‘Oh, we have all these vaccines. Make people get it.”
In the coming debate, Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News host and NBC personality, diving into career vertigo, but lately recovered as a podcaster and YouTuber, is the more relevant figure than the pretenders who are to be her props. Her comeback provides greater drama and broader audience appeal than Haley’s remote chance.
In the posturing of seriousness on the part of the questioners, it seems unlikely that the debate will focus on the urgency raised by Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney, Robert Kagan and Tim Alberta. Nonetheless, here are a few questions that Megyn Kelly, et al, might pose:
*Donald Trump has said Gen Mark Milley, former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, should be tried and executed for treason. Do you agree?
*Explain why you would support as a presidential nominee someone who a judge has stated is a rapist “as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape’”.
*Explain why you would support for president a financial fraudster convicted of grossly lying on his bank loans.
*Do you agree with Donald Trump’s assessment of his vice-president, Mike Pence, for fulfilling his constitutional duty to preside over the counting of the electoral college votes that he was a “pussy?”
*Do you agree with Donald Trump, who in speaking about the 2020 election, has said: “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”
*Do you agree with Donald Trump that Putin after his invasion of Ukraine was “genius” and “savvy”?
*Should the Department of Justice drop its indictments of Donald Trump for alleged criminal violations of federal laws? If yes, why, and if not, why not?
*In your view, does Donald Trump have the right to pardon himself for any crimes for which he is being prosecuted?
*Can a person found guilty of a sexual assault be allowed to hold federal office? Should he?
*Can a person who has been involved in more than one bankruptcy case be allowed a role in developing or implementing the federal budget? Should he?
*Is section 3 of the US constitution’s 14th amendment, which prohibits those involved in insurrection against the United States from holding federal office, self-executing?
*Can state legislatures replace a state electorate’s choice for president with their own pick under any circumstance?
*Are the January 6 insurrectionists who have been convicted of violent assault of police officers and are now serving prison sentences being held as hostages who should be pardoned?
*Do you agree with this statement? “If I happen to be president and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say, ‘Go down and indict them.’ They’d be out of business. They’d be out of the election.”
*Finally, in honor of the House speaker, creationist Mike Johnson, how old is the Earth?
Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth
