The Republican Party is like a poker player with a bad hand who’s decided to stop bluffing but insists on staying in the game — and upping the ante — anyway.

Donald Trump is the last desperate gamble of a party that’s in so deep it can’t walk away from the table. They just keep pushing chips toward the center, until they’ve got nothing left.

And in this case, the chips are American credibility, democracy, and lives.

The poker game didn’t start when Trump sat down at the table. It started 20 years ago, in a very different world. In that world, the major parties were too similar. That’s how the complaint went. It didn’t matter which one you chose, because the “New Democrats” under Clinton had tacked to the right, and George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” was an appeal to the left.

There was a difference, though.

The Democrats made it work, and the Republicans couldn’t.

Bush’s compassionate conservatism went down the tubes with the second Gulf War and, more to the point, the Great Recession. His attempts to “expand the tent” didn’t work, nor did John McCain’s or Mitt Romney’s after him.

But even with McCain and Romney, the desperation had started to show. Rather than choosing a moderate as his running mate (there were rumors McCain would choose Democrat Joe Lieberman, who’d run with Al Gore), McCain tacked hard right and chose wingnut Sarah Palin. They say running mates don’t matter, but this one may have — in the long run.

Romney, more recently the only senator to vote for Trump’s conviction at his impeachment trial, alienated the middle with his comment that 47% of the electorate wasn’t going to vote for him, anyway.

The big tent collapses

As the Republicans’ big-tent approach kept collapsing, they became increasingly reliant on the far right: initially the Drudge Report, Rush Limbaugh, and the Tea Party. Trump merely co-opted this approach and solidified it with increasingly extreme appeals to white supremacists, frustrated “macho” males, and xenophobes, amplified by Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and their ilk.

This is the third poker hand the Republicans have been dealt, and they’re using up their chips. The first was Bush’s compassionate conservatism. The second was the Tea Party’s small-government, anti-tax crusade.

The Tea Party movement helped Republicans retake the House majority in 2010 and expand it in 2014, but midterm elections typically favor the party out of power in the White House. And, despite this apparent momentum, it didn’t translate into success at the presidential level.

That’s why the party went the populist route in 2016 with Trump.

Their gambit was helped by the fact that Democrats dealt themselves an exceptionally weak hand in nominating Hillary Clinton, their most unpopular candidate ever. But it still required a bluff because the Republicans’ own hand was weak, too: Trump was even more unpopular than Clinton. Despite this, dissatisfaction with “establishment” politics — epitomized by Clinton — combined with a built-in Electoral College edge, delivered the election to Trump.

The bad, bad bluff

Trump hadn’t drawn an inside straight, as some commentators have suggested. He’d won on a bluff, with 2.8 million fewer votes than his opponent, a margin that represented 2% of all votes cast. (The last time a candidate won with a minority of the popular vote, fewer than 544,000 votes separated Al Gore and George W. Bush in 2000 — 0.5% of all votes cast).   

And Trump had to preserve the illusion, the mirage that he was a “winner,” at any cost. So, he stopped bluffing. He was so intent on “proving” he had a winning hand, that he actually showed it every time new cards were dealt. He showed his affinity for white racism and absurd conspiracy theories, and his disdain for science and health care.

In the process, he’s kept throwing Republican chips toward the center of the table: chips that represent the support of senior citizens, suburban women, and others he can’t afford to lose if he hopes to repeat his improbably victory of 2016. Chips that represent Senate and House seats that would have been safely Republican in any other recent election year.

The question is: What will the Republicans do when Trump walks away from the table? They won’t be able to win future elections with the wreckage of Trump’s “base” — fringe racists, high school dropouts, a shrinking number of evangelical Christians, and middle-aged white males spooked by photoshopped “riots” and brainwashed by caricatures of machismo by a spoiled brat who avoided the draft.

On the other hand, they can’t very well pivot back to another attempt at a “big tent” approach. That strategy didn’t work when they still had a measure of mainstream credibility under Bush. Now that they’ve spent the past four years condoning (through their silence or otherwise) Trump’s affirmations of racism, misogyny, and science denial? Is there really a path back to that approach now?

The gunman at the table

There wouldn’t seem to be. Republicans, however, have two advantages. First, voters have a very short memory; and second, they only have two viable alternatives. If they grow disenchanted with Democrats, there’s only one other place they can go.

The question is where that place is. People used to know what it meant to be a Republican. But no one does anymore — not after the GOP has twisted in the blustery wind for nearly four years, scrambling to support every whim of an incompetent, capricious leader. Republican principles are among the chips Trump pushed toward the center of the table; most of them now lost in foolish bets against what most Americans believe.

Republicans are now enablers of Russians, not a bulwark against them. They’re protectionists, not free-traders. They’re profligate spenders, not fiscal conservatives (well, that’s been a façade for a while now). But the point is, the only things they’ve been consistent on is Trump’s kowtowing to shrinking minorities who deny climate change, love Confederate monuments, and adhere to the evangelical version of Christianity.

Could these trends reverse course? That would require a demographic reversal the likes of which we’ve never seen.

So, what will Republicans do? What can they do?

They’ve backed themselves into a corner from which there seems to be no escape. But a word of warning: In the Old West, a gunman who lost at poker could almost be counted on to pull out his six-shooter and start firing. That’s what Trump’s dog-whistled militias have already started to do, and if that’s all that’s left of the Republican Party, we’ll never have any rational, viable alternative again.

Oh, for the days when the parties were too similar.