In a June 17 post, I asked why Bill Stepien (who in testimony before the January 6 Committee had contrasted his realistic, accurate views of the election outcome with the duplicitous concoctions spread by Team Rudy) had not come forward sooner, before receiving a subpoena. My conclusion:
Team Normal means business as usual. It was -- is -- better to fade into the background, not drawing any attention to oneself, and continuing to profit from the big lie. This don't rock the boat approach makes sense. It is hard to deny from a strictly financial point of view, from personal self-interest, that this is the rational choice. This counts for normal in today's Republican Party.
In other words, Stepien, a Republican strategist, has a business to run. Truth-telling isn't good for his livelihood. He is now running the Trump-endorsed campaign of Harriet Hageman, who is seeking to unseat Liz Cheney. Jonathan Chait, comments on the rationalizations, offered in Tim Miller's book Why We Did It, by GOP political consultants who know Trump lost the election, but continue to bolster Trump and his lies. His account, which matches mine, notes that
while the specifics of every Trump-supporting Republican differ, one motif of his subjects is a failure to summon the imagination and moral courage to break free from their career path and social identity. By the time you have attained a job in Republican politics that carries enough influence to matter, you have enough at stake professionally and socially that truly abandoning the party becomes as difficult to imagine as a fish leaving the water for land.
In a June 24 post, I praised the Speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives for standing up to Trump in the aftermath of the November 2020 election, but noted that Rusty Bowers expressed a willingness to vote again for the disgraced former president:
Rusty Bowers is prepared to vote again for Donald Trump. He rejects the big lie as a lie. He recognizes the outcome of the 2020 election. He knows Trump lost. He witnessed firsthand Trump's relentless war against that result, no matter the damage to our democratic institutions. Yet he is still onboard with Trump if the former president is on the ballot again.
With his decision to vote again for Trump, Bowers places himself back at the center of his tribe, the Republican Party circa 2022. No longer subject to an angry, hateful campaign conducted by the red team, he finds himself in accord with the vast majority of the GOP's leaders and voters. Donald Trump, so long as he leads the Republican Party, has the loyalty of the party faithful.
This is the path of least resistance. Bowers' expression of loyalty to Trump will not harm his bid to win a Republican primary campaign for the state senate.
Last week in the Atlantic, Mark Leibovich (whose new book is Thank You For Your Servitude), considered "the doormat duo," Kevin McCarthy and Lindsay Graham, both of whom have a clear-eyed view of Trump and the threat he represents, yet have been "slavishly devoted" to the man.
Once, early in 2019, I asked Graham a version of the question that so many of his judgy old Washington friends had been asking him. How could he swing from being one of Trump’s most merciless critics in 2016 to such a sycophant thereafter? I didn’t use those exact words, but Graham got the idea. “Well, okay, from my point of view, if you know anything about me, it’d be odd not to do this,” he told me. “‘This,’” Graham specified, “is to try to be relevant.” Relevance: It casts one hell of a spell.
“I could get Trump on the phone faster than any staff person who worked for him could get him on the phone,” McCarthy bragged to me. There was always a breathless, racing quality to both men’s voices when they talked about the thrill ride of being one of Trump’s “guys.”
Relevance. Prominence. Maintaining ones livelihood. Counting on advancing ones career. Keeping ones friends on the red team. Never mind protecting our democratic institutions. That ain't in the cards. Not in our polarized political culture. Not when grasping for, or keeping ones grip on power.
Chait asks how such "profound cynicism" comes so easily to this crew. He points to the chasm between the GOP's core policy objectives (low taxes for the rich and scant regulation of business) and the campaign themes (focused on a trumped-up culture war) that win elections for Republicans. That chasm and the decades of campaigns to gin up fear and anger in the base are hardly new. (I recall reports from the '80s and '90s that George H. W. Bush regarded campaigns and governing as separated by the brightest of bright lines. He shrugged off campaigns -- remember the rallies at flag factories and the Willie Horton ads? -- as coarse, unseemly necessities, but endeavored to govern as a serious, thoughtful leader.)
Chait's conclusion: "That cavernous gap between the means of campaigning and the ends of governing produced a political class of cynics and nihilists."
This much is certain: that gap is undeniable, as is the Republican reliance on the culture war to win elections. And campaigns have consequences, especially permanent campaigns trumpeted by conservative media. Over time the demonization of the party's political opponents has grown fiercer, angrier, and more fantastical. This has damaged the prospects of good faith debate and created huge obstacles for the workaday give and take of the democratic political process.
This didn't start with Donald Trump. He pushed the envelope, but that was par for the course. Trump didn't represent a difference in kind, only a difference in degree. And for Republicans across the board there is never a bridge too far. Not even rejecting the results of a democratic election, the peaceful transfer of power, or the rule of law.
Cynical? Nihilistic? Or just the cost of doing business in today's Republican Party?