Trump's treachery is what Republicans love about him

And I saw a best rising out of the sea... And one of its heads seemed to have a mortal wound, but its mortal wound was healed, and the whole earth followed the beast with wonder. — Revelation 13: 1, 3

Like many people, I spent years scratching my head over the Trump phenomenon. Why have so many Republicans been so loyal to such a corrupt figure for so long?

If they needed a conservative standard-bearer to give them corporate tax breaks and conservative judges, they could have gotten that from anyone within the party. Mike Pence, Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, John McCain before his death could have done the same.

Heck, if Trump had been convicted in at his first impeachment trial, Pence would have taken over. If anything, wouldn’t they prefer a consistent conservative with deeply held personal beliefs about God and country to a mercurial playboy with few principles and even fewer scruples?

And not only was he unprincipled, he actually fought against many of the principles they’d worked so hard to advance: fiscal restraint, moral decency, personal responsibility, vigilance against Russia... No Democrat could have undermined the (supposed) conservative agenda on so many points as effectively as Trump did.

And every time he did, we said to ourselves, “Surely they’ll abandon him now. Won’t they?”

Blind loyalty

Time and again, they answered with a resounding “NO!” The tenacity with which they defended and protected an incompetent narcissist baffled me and many others.

The icing on the toxic cake came Jan. 6, when Trump — who had built his re-election bid on the regurgitated Nixonian GOP mantra of “law and order” — not only enabled but incited the most flagrant violation of law conceivable. He provoked his followers to assault the police. And why? To disrupt the business of those who actually make the laws in the first place.

Yet despite this, the vast majority of those “law and order” Republicans lawmakers, who had to be taken to a secure location to escape Trump’s mob, voted not to impeach him.

All of this brings my back to my original question: Why would these Republicans defend a man intent on undermining so much of what they stand for — even to the point of doing away with the party’s platform altogether at last year’s GOP convention?

The only possible conclusion is that we’ve overestimated Republicans (or at least, a lot of them). They’ve argued so passionately for their supposed principles that we thought they actually valued them, even as provided evidence to the contrary. Case in point: Their willingness to argue for balanced budgets while simultaneously running up huge deficits.

Peas in a pod

Turns out, the majority of Republicans weren’t that interested in principles at all. Just like Trump. They were peas in a pod from the very beginning. Those cherished “principles” were just a means of pursuing their real goal: personal power. When touting those principles failed to produce the results they sought — electoral victories in 2008 and 2012 — they abandoned them in favor of a different approach, an approach embodied by Trump.

Like them, he was only interested in personal power, but unlike them, he’d seemingly been able to attain it, amassing a sizeable fortune and a lucrative brand by gaming the system. He bragged about not paying taxes: “That makes me smart.” He boasted about being able to sexually assault women, and get away with it. This didn’t sink his first campaign, as most people assumed it would. He ended up winning anyway.

The disconcerting truth is that, Trump wasn’t just elected in spite of his ability to defy those principles Republicans had long so vehemently defended. He was elected because of it.

Republicans saw him as a “disruptor,” someone willing to game the system by using executive orders and pardons to get what he wanted. This meant he was also willing to defy it, even if it meant trying to overturn a fair and legal election. And it meant he was willing to try to destroy it, by inciting armed insurrection if necessary.

When you see the system as the enemy, you want to destroy it. Trump’s madness, and his genius, was in focusing his supporters’ rage on institutions: the media, the scientific community, public education, “the swamp” in Washington, and ultimately democracy itself. All stood in the way of his ambitions, so they had to get out of the way. And when he tethered Republican ambitions to his own, he had the engine he needed to steamroll the republic.

He did all of this without apology, and vast numbers of Republicans liked this about him, too. They were tired of apologizing for a host of things they didn’t dare express in polite society: their misogyny, their racism, their hellfire brand of Christianity, their bitterness, their anger. They praised Trump as a truth-teller, because he was not only honest about being an angry white apologist for Jim Crow and the Confederate flag. He was proud of it. He gave them permission to be proud of it, too.  

Trump’s recipe for ruling America was treachery and tyranny, but he marketed it as “patriotism,” and his embittered followers bought it like the latest iPhone or PlayStation.

Unprincipled and proud

It should come as no surprise that Trump attracted a coalition of the disempowered who viewed him not only as a leader, but as a role model. They ranged from white supremacists to working-class rural families to Republican lawmakers petrified of being relegated to permanent minority status.

These lawmakers’ fears became amplified whenever Trump threatened to throw them under the bus for “disloyalty.” At first, he imperiled their political careers with threats to recruit primary opponents if they opposed him. Then he put their lives in danger by empowering violent extremists to vent their wrath against such “traitors” against Trump’s authority.

In a quest for personal power, they had ceded it to someone even more obsessed with power and less ethical than they were.

They thought they saw themselves in Trump, and he became a part of their identity — until they disappointed him, which they inevitably did, not because of their own failings, but because their fealty inspired him to make ever more outrageous demands on them. Poor Mike Pence, the ultimate loyalist, found this out the hard way when he dared to do his job in the face of Trump’s “request” that he overturn the election.

For the past four years, a parade of celebrity sycophants and lesser narcissists have naïvely paraded themselves before Trump, bowing and scraping, convinced that “I’m different” or “I’m better” because they’d succeed in business or in the military, oblivious to the fact that they’ve engaged in a fool’s errand. It’s a no-win situation, because no one wins with Trump.

Except Trump, because, to quote Highlander, there can be only one.

Or, in Christian terms, all have sinned and fall short of the glory of Trump. It’s simple enough to transfer one’s faith from an all-powerful God to an earthly leader who claims to his all-powerful representative on Earth — a flesh-and-blood king or messiah endowed with the authority to carry out his will.

But Trump is no Jesus. He lost the election. He incited an insurrection, then, in true Trump fashion, he threw those who answered that call under the bus when it failed. He didn’t provide the salvation he promised to his true believers. The only question that remains to be answered is whether he’ll be crucified for it.

Stephen H. Provost is the author of the three-book series Trumpism on Trial, available on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08RC7L8X1.