This is Not Normal

Trump's Total Party Control

“This is Not Normal” was one of the great clichés of the early Trumpzeit, a kind of liberal mantra with putative magic power to prevent complacency and “normalization.” But like all clichés, it became so because it has a lot of truth to it. Witness the Republican primary in the Kentucky Fourth District last night: Trump’s choice—and AIPAC’s—the former Navy SEAL Ed Gallerin defeated paleolibertarian Thomas Massie, famous for his independent streak on foreign policy, particularly as it regards Israel. Normally, you’d expect a lame-duck president with a 37 percent approval rating to not hold a lot of sway, but voters did as El Trump instructed. And it wasn’t particularly close: Gallerin ran about ten points ahead of Massie. Now everyone will say that pro-Israel groups bought the seat—Massie sure is—but money doesn’t buy votes in such a straightforward manner. The fact of the matter is that Trump still has a ton of power within his party.

Now I have to admit to being wrong. Back in December, I wrote in The Nation:

At long last, President Donald Trump’s grip on the GOP is slipping. There’s no Götterdämmerung, no dramatic denouement, no operatics in the dictator’s bunker. Trump is being dragged down by normal politics: He’s simply unpopular, dogged by a sex scandal and a lousy economy. The laws of gravity, it turns out, apply on Planet Trump. He’s a lame duck, and he’s just plain old. After dominating the news for a decade, he finds himself yesterday’s man. And like the little Nazi in Cabaret, Nick Fuentes and his army of groyper toads are croaking out “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.”

I’ve also commented several times that the normal “Madisonian” dynamics of the US system were asserting themselves, and ambitious politicians would want to get out from under a wobbling Trump. Not so fast, John! I hate being called a pundit, and this is part of the reason why: you always end up with egg on your face when you make predictions.

To demonstrate how strange the present situation is, let’s turn quickly to history. Usually, a low approval rating means lower presidential control of his party and a fracturing caucus and coalition. Truman, with a low 30s approval rating, could not get much of his Fair Deal pushed through despite Democratic control of both houses; LBJ’s massive coattails couldn’t save him as he sank into the quagmire of Vietnam; Democrats couldn’t get far enough from Carter, and one big one, a Kennedy no less, tried to primary him; H.W. Bush faced a strong primary challenge even after a successful war; W.’s second term agenda fell flat as his lame-duckness kicked in fast; and most recently, Biden struggled with his agenda as it became clear to his party how unpopular he was after 2022.

So, what makes Trump special? He really leads a movement more than a party; that movement is the dominant force in the GOP, and his voice still dominates the movement. “I am MAGA,” he once declared, and he’s right. That charismatic domination of his party is part of the reason people like me turned to the fascist precedent when analyzing Trump. But there’s more to the story. “37 percent” means something much different in a world with such a fragmented media environment and polarized politics. Red States and Blue States are culturally different worlds in a way that they were not for most of the 20th century. As you’ve seen, incumbents need to fear a primary from their right much more than the opposing party. You can be close to 90 percent approval in your party and have a shitty national approval because you have zero Democratic support, and all the independents abandoned you. We have something different going on here than the party systems that historians and political scientists studied and made their assumptions about.

On the one hand, Republicans are probably just cruising for a bruising: by sticking with an unpopular president, they are gonna get walloped in the midterms. People like to say blue state liberals are out of touch, but MAGA land may be in for a rude awakening as they find out much of the country really hates their guy. But there are bigger problems afoot here. The system is supposed to ultimately reward the popular will. What’s happening is that the us constitutional order is becoming less and less representative. With the gerrymandering permitted after recent Supreme Court rulings, Democrats may have to run some 4 percent ahead of Republicans for a bare majority in the House. This is undemocratic and even dangerous. We can have a party in power that doesn’t respond to public opinion and is just constantly caught up in its own propaganda and paranoia; Yet another reason to bring up the dictatorships of the past when looking at Trump and his party. For now, the penalty for disobeying Trump looks way higher than obeying—bad stuff if you are worried about Republicans doing something illegal come midterm time.

The big hope now is that the Trump dictatorship within the GOP is simply punished by the voters in November. It’s happened before: Trump has been kind of a Catch-22 for the GOP in the past, where they can’t win without him—can’t get out of a primary without MAGA—but can’t win with him—the MAGA candidate fucking sucks and loses. But if the penalty isn’t high enough, party-dictatorship may become a structural and systematic feature of our politics and the Trumpzeit will linger on, perhaps long after his death.