Trump's shotgun marriage with GOP leaders is unraveling

Trumpism and the Republican Party always represented a marriage of convenience. It never was a natural fit.

I’m not talking about Trump’s jet-setting, playboy persona not meshing well with the party’s white evangelical base. That actually fit all too well, which accounts for the fact that evangelicals still support Trump overwhelmingly — notwithstanding Pat Robertson’s recent rebuke.

The strange bedfellows were always Trump and corporate Republicanism. It’s easy to forget how hard the Republican elite pushed to defeat Trump back in 2016, preferring first Jeb Bush, then (reluctantly) Ted Cruz as their standard-bearer. And how Trump threatened to run a third-party campaign if the GOP tried to ignore him.

But Trump succeeded, forcing strident critics like Cruz and Lindsey Graham to not just fall in line but lick his boots as penance for defying him. Even Mitch McConnell, the crafty tortoise who always seems to beat the hare, had to play along.

Until now.

McConnell’s gambit

With Trump having adopted a bunker mentality in the aftermath of his loss to Biden, McConnell saw an opening. And he seized it, blowing up two Trump priorities in one fell swoop — by giving him exactly what he wanted. By bundling $2,000 stimulus checks together with a measure that could make social media companies liable for content posted by their users. It’s called Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act.

Democrats agree with Trump on the stimulus checks, while Republicans back him on the Section 230 repeal. Neither side can stomach the other’s priority passing, so both are DOA. This tells you one thing: McConnell is willing to sacrifice the Section 230 repeal, at least for now, in order to stop those $2,000 stimulus checks.

And that, in turn, reveals something else: McConnell is trying to steer the Republican Party away from Trumpism and back toward the corporate oligarchy it had become before Trump hit the stage.

McConnell and other corporatists tolerated Trump for several reasons. First and foremost, his base gave him ammunition to “primary” them if they appeared to stray from his priorities. Second, he’d delivered two things they’d pined for: a huge corporate giveaway tax cut, and judges on the federal bench. But with Trump on his way out of office, he can’t appoint any more judges or sign any more corporate tax cuts.

He’s still got his base, true. But by holing up outside the public eye, he’s diminishing his influence, and McConnell’s counting on the idea that a non-president Trump won’t have the kind of clout when it comes to backing primary challengers that he’s enjoyed for the past four years. It’s a gamble, but McConnell is not one to make bad bets; you can bet he’s looked at this from virtually every angle.

Trump is the hare in this scenario; McConnell the tortoise. Trump’s scattershot approach to governing is running out of gas, while McConnell’s deliberate obstructionism is back in ascendancy.

The old-line conservative wing of the Republican Party and Trump share this in common: They’re both corrupt. That’s true of a whole lot of politicians, Democrats included. But they’re a different kind of corrupt, with different power sources and constituencies. Reagan conservatives are beholden to Charles Koch, his late brother David, and Sheldon Adelson to prop them. Their corruption is in the corporate vein.

Trump, on the other hand, appealed to a populist strain in the party that the corporatists underestimated. Trump doesn’t focus on big donors directly. Instead, he puts all his energy into solidifying a rabid base of supporters, who can then convince the corporatists they have to buy in — or else.

The corporate elite that ran the GOP pre-Trump went along because they had a political gun to their head. But the moment Trump started firing blanks by losing the election, the old guard was more than willing to seize power directly once again.

What next?

Enter Mitch McConnell, their leader, to do their bidding.

His poison-pill legislation linking the $2,000 stimulus checks with Section 230 was a political master stroke, eviscerating both Democrats and Trump in one fell swoop, and leaving the corporatists — led by McConnell — in the driver’s seat once again. At least for now. What will happen in the next four years is anyone’s guess.

Will Trump use his still-considerable clout to seize back control of the GOP? This seems more likely if Republicans lose those two Senate races in Georgia, because it will curb McConnell’s power by removing him as majority leader? Is this Trump’s strategy even now? Quite possibly. And if so, it’s fascinating to see Trump and McConnell pay lip service to each other while each holds a dagger behind his back.

Will Trump fail in this gambit and launch his own independent movement, as he threatened to do if he was denied the nomination in 2016? Can such a gambit work?

It seems like a longshot: Until now, Trump has railed and cursed against the political system, trying to undermine it at every turn, but he’s (so far) failed. Trying to upend the two-party system seems similarly unlikely, but that doesn’t mean he won’t try, or that he might not become a major factor in the manner of Teddy Roosevelt in 1912, George Wallace in 1968, or Ross Perot in 1992.

Will Democrats be able to win back some populist votes if Trump recedes into the background and the corporatists reclaim full control of the GOP? That’s an open question, but with the country so polarized into urban and rural factions, it seems doubtful.

Still, there is this irony to consider: Trump won over the GOP by using the same kind of corrupt methods once favored by Democratic Party “machines” that ran big cities like Chicago and New York once upon a time: Cement loyalty by promising (and sometimes delivering) favors to your supporters, even if those favors are far from legal.

That’s not the kind of corruption Republican corporatists favor, and they’ve been biding their time, waiting to reinstitute the kind of “trickle-down” Reaganomics that benefit the 1 percent. Populism isn’t their cup of tea. The base is an unnecessary middleman between those to be exploited and those to be rewarded.

The tortoise is their champion. Right now, he’s winning. But the race continues, and how it ends is still anybody’s guess.

Still, I wouldn’t bet against the tortoise.

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Featured photo: Mitch McConnell speaking in 2011 in Washington, D.C., by Gage Skidmore, Creative Commons 2.0.