Could Mitch McConnell Get to Yes?
Why the
Republican leader should be tempted by the Senate’s opportunity to bar Trump
from running for president again.
By Ross Douthat
Opinion
Columnist
- Jan. 16, 2021
The day before the Capitol Hill riot,
Jonathan Last of The Bulwark wrote a dark
valediction for Mitch McConnell’s attempts to “manage, contain and outlast
Donald Trump.”
As a master of institutional power,
McConnell probably believed that he had the upper hand over Trump, because only
institutional power can actually turn political passions into policy and law.
But what if, Last wrote, your voters
“don’t really care about policy outcomes anymore?” Well, “then institutional
power has nothing to give them and popular power is everything.” And since
Trump has popular power and McConnell doesn’t, it doesn’t matter that the
president will soon be out of office and the Senate’s soon-to-be minority
leader will remain institutionally in charge: The party will still belong, soul
and body, to Trump and only Trump.
Last takes a
darkest-timeline view of American conservatism, and the events of the last two
weeks have tended to validate his point of view. But those same events have
also presented an interesting opportunity for McConnell — a last and unexpected
moment of true institutional leverage, where his power in the Senate matters
more than Trump’s resilient popular support.
That’s the best way to think about why,
notwithstanding the fact that Trump will be out of office and the vast majority
of Republican voters will still be resolutely opposed to his impeachment,
McConnell might conceivably extend himself to rally 17 Republican votes for a
Senate conviction.
The point wouldn’t be to punish Trump
or alter the majority leader’s public reputation or create a moment for the
history books. It would be to use a power that Senate Republicans have now, and
will presumably never have again — the power to guarantee that Trump cannot be
a candidate for president four years from now, which can be accomplished by a
simple majority vote following a Senate conviction.
As a political move this would be a
gamble whose costs can be easily foreseen. It would cast Trump as a martyr to
the perfidious Republican establishment, and so struck down, he could
potentially emerge more influential (with some of his supporters, at least)
than before. Some of the scenarios I wrote
about earlier this week, where the aftermath of the Jan. 6 riot actually breaks the
G.O.P., could follow from Trump’s conviction by the Senate: A surge of
grass-roots rage, a raft of Trumpist primary campaigns against reality-based
Republicans, and eventually the nomination of Don Jr., and a real schism, in
2024.
However, one of the striking things
about Trump’s popular power is that it hasn’t been easily shared or
transferred. There are various Trump-y figures flitting around the House of
Representatives (from Matt Gaetz to Marjorie Taylor Greene, the QAnon
congresswoman) and various senators and governors who have adopted bits and
pieces from the Trumpist potpourri. But there’s nothing like a coherent Trumpist
movement in the party, the way the Tea Party movement existed for a time as a
reasonably coherent force. Trump’s inner circle has retained the misfit-toys
quality that characterized his closest support in 2016, and lately it has
shrunk enough to barely fill a presidential helicopter.
Meanwhile, long
before his electoral defeat most of the Trumpist policy agenda had been
diminished or discarded, reducing Trumpism’s animating purpose to its leader’s
mere occupation of the White House — which enabled his supporters to “win”
against a baffled, freaked-out liberal establishment by simply holding power in
defiance of every norm and expectation.
But is this kind of appeal adaptable to
a world where Trump himself cannot legally hold power any more? Some adaptation
is imaginable: The Q realm can doubtless spin stories where Trump is secretly
the president, or where he has ascended to a higher plane of power, governing
as a pantocrator for whom the presidency would be a demotion. And one can
imagine more grounded scenarios in which voting for members of his family is
interpreted as a way to let him rule from exile, with a Trump son or daughter
playing the role that Lurleen Wallace played for George Wallace when he was
term-limited out of the Alabama governor’s mansion and she got elected in his
place.
That kind of scenario, though, demands
a level of Machiavellianism that Trump has — at best — inconsistently
displayed, and a willingness to publicly subordinate himself and build up
others that he has almost never shown. Does Trump actually want an heir, a
successor to whom his legacy belongs? (Ask Mike Pence.) Does he want to live in
a world where a
son he used to disfavor — to say nothing of someone who isn’t his flesh and
blood — is nominated for president instead of him?
At the very least, we can say that the
inability to hold power himself would weaken some of Trump’s
appeal to some of his supporters, and also weaken some of his own
appetite for the political fray. If he intends to remain a dominant figure in
the Republican Party, being banned from high office would require more
adaptation from the soon-to-be ex-president, more creativity, more
institutional exertion — all tougher “asks” for a septuagenarian than just
running another primary campaign.
And, of course, the ban will
definitively make it impossible for him to rule the Republican Party from
inside the White House again, to combine popular power with institutional power
(however weakly exercised) as he has these last four years.
Whereas as much as Republicans want to
believe in the “just fade away” narrative, if Trump can be the nominee in 2024,
he really might be, and even the shadow of that
possibility will shape and warp the G.O.P. effort to leave the events of Jan. 6
behind.
What McConnell has before him, then, is
an opportunity to exert agency, to wield power, that is entirely unique to
early 2021, and will be long gone by 2024. There is no guarantee that using it
will work, but at a moment when every Republican scenario looks bad, it seems
more likely to leave Trump weakened than just doing nothing and hoping that
some kind of wasting disease will carry his political potency away.
My expectation is
that the lure of doing nothing and hoping for the best will still prevail, as
it has for Republicans so often in this era. But there is a chance, at least,
that a man who understands institutional power so well will see the opportunity
before him, the chance to actually prevail over Trump and not just manage and
contain him — and for all of our sakes, take it.
