Donald Trump was impeached twice, incited an insurrection, is facing multiple state and federal indictments—and looks like the future of the Republican Party. Don’t expect any real alternatives Wednesday night in Milwaukee: The GOP debate stage is a sea of faded mimeographs of the OG. The guy running perpetually in second place, Ron DeSantis, is so far unsuccessfully selling “Trump without charisma,” while everyone else is stuck in single digits. “Historic dominance” is how Axios put it Wednesday morning ahead of the 2024 also-rans taking the stage.
While Democrats obsess about their next-generation leaders, the Republican base seems oddly confident that their bench can be made up of one 77-year-old forever. And the GOP elites—whether in conservative media, the donor class, or the Senate—seem to be completely lacking in the vision that is needed to win back the party from Trump. I checked in with some people steeped in Republican politics, yet clearly not in Trump’s thrall, to see if there’s any way forward.
“It’s like asking the survivors in a radioactive dystopian hellscape to imagine returning to the days of grocery stores and air-conditioning,” former GOP strategist (and my former podcast cohost) Rick Wilson offered. Republicans “spend every day trying to fight off the mutant cannibal horde. There is no better future for them.”
Are Republicans so busy fighting off mutants that they’re not able to envision a post-Trump future or is there more to it? I texted a conservative media executive friend as to why Republicans seem stuck on Trump. “Every politician [and pundit] is trying to appeal” to the base, he said, knowing “they’ll need a leader when Trump dies.” One can be “as Trumpy as possible” or simply “follow the base,” he said, but “changing the mind of the base is a nonstarter.”
How we got here is no mystery; it’s due to a toxic mélange of globalization, racism, and more broadly, a collective lack of faith in our institutions that’s been driven by attacks from the right. “It’s because of what I call epistemic collapse,” the media exec adds. “The base has lost faith in every institution in American life. You’re full-MAGA people don’t trust schools, doctors, reporters, PhDs, elected officials, military brass, or CEOs. I understand why: All those people are now people with graduate degrees, often from urban areas. Trump showed up and released them from thinking everyone was truthful but leaning left and said: It’s all lies. Trump became the center of their truth universe. If reality contradicts Trump, reality is wrong. When he dies, though, they won’t go back to trusting doctors and The Wall Street Journal and the Republican Party. They will just believe no one.”
Just take a look at a recent CBS News-YouGov survey showing that 71% of Trump voters trust him to tell them what’s true, which is pretty stark when you look at the rest of the tabs and find that only 42% of respondents trust their religious leaders. It’s a bleak and depressing situation: Reality is what Donald Trump says it is.
But it tracks with what former GOP congresswoman Barbara Comstock told me over email, “So many Republicans remained silent and enabled Trump and failed to speak of a post-Trump future for so long that now it’s a cult that worships the 4x indicted, 2x impeached sore loser. People like Mike Pence and Franklin Graham legitimized him to evangelicals to the point where many in the base trust the 3x married, cheating with a porn star, foulmouthed Trump more than their pastor or family. Many conservative lawyers like Jeff Clark legitimized his crackpot legal theories despite their being rejected by his own selected judges. And so on. They’ve been losing with Trump for 7 years (he’s lost the House, Senate, and White House) but since he tells them he’s winning, sadly the cultish fever may not break until they lose again and go down on the ship with him. And don’t ignore that many craven Trump consultants are making lots of money on these losing campaigns and Trump himself is using his campaign to pay his legal bills. All those folks are fine with the status quo lining their pockets despite the losses. Many of us will continue to warn, but there aren’t many who want to hear the sad truth that Trump has scammed them.”
Miles Taylor, a former Trump administration official turned critic, also faults GOP leaders. “When a political party has been run for years like a Mafia, you can’t expect the mobsters to wake up one morning and grow a conscience,” he told me. “Most Republican leaders—even those who privately despise the ex-president—remain beholden to Donald Trump and his movement because [they] fear that any display of political courage will cost them their future. The irony is that by groveling to the man to protect their careers they may end up costing all of us our country.” Former Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger, too, faulted the party’s standard bearers. “They want a post-Trump future, but have no courage to make it happen,” he said. “And everyone is just hoping the other guy is riding in on a white horse and to save the party. But they’ve shot all the horses.”
Even if GOP elites coalesced around one candidate, they no longer have the same sway over their base voters. Republicans’ inability to imagine a post-Trump future is quickly becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. If something happens to Trump, his flock will have nowhere to go. These people wanted a savior. They thought they got it. Instead of realizing the emperor, or in this case, the real estate developer turned reality star, had no clothes, they decided it was the rest of the country that had no clothes. Trumpism is much stickier than we thought. The base wants their delicious orange-flavored Kool-Aid and seem convinced the guy promising to “Make America Great Again,” before leaving the White House in disgrace, can magically transport them back to the 1950s. A post-Trump future won’t come into focus when looking backward.