by I thought I was beyond shocked, but this week has been deeply shocking to me. I spent most of my adult life on the right side, generally supporting the Republican Party, because I thought that party served America better. People like Sarah Palin and Donald Trump pushed me out of the Republican orbit (gradually and then all at once), but I still hold out hope that my many friends on the right are something of an occupied country. They have to utter Trumpian prejudices to survive in this era, but somewhere deep in their souls the party of Reagan still lives.
After this week and the defeat of the immigration-Ukraine-Israel package, it is already difficult to believe that. Even if some parts of the bill survive, the party of Eisenhower, Reagan and McCain has simply disappeared, and not only among House Republicans but apparently among their Senate colleagues as well.
My progressive readers are now thinking: Haven’t you been paying attention? Donald Trump has owned this party for years. If he told them to cancel the compromise on immigration because he needed a campaign issue, they were going to cancel that proposal.
To which I respond: I don’t think you understand very well what just happened. It wasn’t just about Republicans cynically kneeling before Trump. Rather, I am convinced that Trumpism now permeates the deepest recesses of their minds and governs their unconscious assumptions. His fundamental mental instincts are no longer conservative, but Trumpian.
These are some of the convictions that Republicans had to accept in order to do what they did this week:
Democracy is for fools. In a democratic society, opposing parties negotiate and try to reach a compromise that is ultimately better than the status quo. This week’s package on immigration, Ukraine and Israel is one of the most one-sided compromises I have ever seen. Republicans got most of their long-term priorities, while Democrats got almost none of theirs. “By any honest estimate, this is the most restrictive immigration legislation in decades,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board said. noted. “This is almost entirely a border security bill, and its provisions include long-standing Republican priorities that party restrictionists could never have passed just a few months ago.”
And yet, one Republican after another came out against the package, arguing that it doesn’t have absolutely everything they want. They have adopted the Trumpian logic that under his command they will never have to give in. The dictator will give orders and whatever the Republicans want will simply happen. Meanwhile, Republican James Lankford, who ran a lavishly successful negotiation, is being savagely attacked on the right side of the Internet for being a weak-willed compromiser.
Entertainment about governance. Under Trump, the Republican Party is less of a ruling party and more of a non-stop entertainment complex. He has no supporters; has audience members. Trump’s program has certain arguments: Washington is an ungodly mess that will never get anything right. The United States is in chaos. Joe Biden is an uncompromising left-wing radical who never veers toward the center. Only Trump can save us. The passage of this package would have turned all of these narratives upside down. The package had to be destroyed to save the story.
The spectacle has eclipsed even simple governance. Republican senators just abandoned a compromise that could have passed and are already parading heroically behind ideas that have no chance of getting 60 votes. Like Mitt Romney put it: “Politics used to be the art of the possible. Now it is the art of the impossible. That is, let’s present proposals that cannot be approved so that we can say to our respective bases: look how I am fighting for you.
Foreigners don’t matter. When Dwight Eisenhower defeated Robert Taft for the Republican nomination in 1952, the Republican Party became an internationalist party and largely remained that way for six decades. Isolationism is now the dominant position of the Republican Party. Isolationism is the attitude that the outside world does not matter much to American security and that global problems can be safely ignored. It is based on the fictional notion that the United States once lived in splendid isolation until elite globalists took power. Opposing further aid to Ukraine is the quintessential isolationist act, a position that now appears to be adopted by a majority of Republicans in the Senate and an implacable majority in the House.
Today’s Republican isolationists have no grand strategy. Their foreign policy approach is based on a non sequitur: that since we have to spend more to defend our southern border, we have to spend less to defend Ukrainian democracy. People like JD Vance really seem to believe that if we let Vladimir Putin win his wars of conquest in Europe, it will have no consequences for us at home. Somewhere, even Neville Chamberlain is gaping in disbelief.
Lying is normal. Politicians always distort proposals they disagree with, but Trump has given his colleagues permission to make things up with abandon. In the hours after the package was released, Republican officials produced a Vesuvius of misinformation about its contents.
Rep. Steve Scalise claimed the package “accepts 5,000 illegal immigrants a day.” No, not really, Fox News reporter. explained. Representative Dan Bishop stated that undocumented immigrants “not from Mexico or Canada will not be counted in the total encounters.” No, financier Steven Rattner corrected, this provision refers only to unaccompanied minors, of which very few arrive from non-neighboring countries. The president doesn’t need new laws to stop illegal immigration, President Mike Johnson said. So why did House Republicans go to such trouble to pass HR 2 last year, an attempt to create an ambitious new law to stop illegal immigration?
Trump has erased the assumption that it is good to have credibility.
America would be better off in a post-American world. As Noah Rothman noted In National Review, if the pre-Trump Republican Party had been presented with an immigration bill tied only to provisions to contain Russian, Chinese, and Iranian aggression, basically all Republican fantasies would have been fulfilled in one fell swoop. But today’s party rejected the agreement, not only because it did not like the immigration aspects, but also because it no longer believes in the US-led international order.
The American economy is enjoying one of the fastest growth periods of our lifetime, and yet many Republicans have become convinced that the nation is in ruins and cannot afford foreign commitments. In the 60 years since World War II, the United States and its allies built and preserved a global order that produced a world far safer and wealthier than the world before, and yet Republicans have convinced themselves that The United States is impotent, its foreign policy entanglements perpetually fail. Republicans say they oppose Xi Jinping’s regime in China and sometimes even claim to oppose Putin’s regime in Russia, but operationally they also share many of Xi and Putin’s goals: reducing the United States’ role in the world. , destroy America’s confidence in its ability to project power, to reduce the United States to a regional superpower.
We are living in one of the most dangerous periods of modern times. As historian Hal Brands says noted Recently in Foreign Affairs, the current situation is reminiscent of the mid to late 1930s. At that time, fascist Italy attacked Ethiopia. Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland. Japan devastated China. These three regional conflicts had not yet metastasized into a global world war, but even in 1937, Franklin Roosevelt warned of an “epidemic of global anarchy.”
That epidemic of anarchy is back. Russia, Iran and China have initiated or escalated regional tensions in ways that threaten to coalesce into something truly unpleasant. Groups like the Houthis seek to fill the voids left by American weakness. Storm clouds are gathering.
One would think that these trends would inspire a note of seriousness among the men and women chosen to represent the people of this nation. It is not like this. Trumpism was once a stance that most Republican officials took to preserve their political viability. But it’s an eternal truth of human psychology: if you wear a mask long enough, eventually the mask will become who you are.
