“THEY’RE
THINKING ABOUT THEIR OWN POLITICAL SELF-INTEREST”: AFTER BIDEN’S WIN, HOW FAR
WILL REPUBLICANS GO TO PLACATE TRUMP?
A few have (barely) acknowledged Biden’s
victory, but the remainder, including Mitch McConnell, are tacking close to the
president to avoid pissing off his base. “You can’t ever discount the fact that
they’re absolutely terrified of Trump,” says a senior congressional Democratic
insider.
BY CHRIS SMITH
NOVEMBER
13, 2020
Spinelessness masquerading as strategy: ladies and gentlemen, your
Republican United States senators.
Sure, in the past week we have seen a handful of GOP senators
acknowledge that Joe Biden handed President Donald
Trump a decisive beating. Utah’s Mitt Romney, take a
bow. Maine’s Susan Collins: an artful statement of
congratulations on Biden’s “apparent victory.” Lisa Murkowski, of
Alaska, and Ben Sasse, of Nebraska—profiles in courage.
Oklahoma’s James Lankford and Missouri’s Roy Blunt have
edged tentatively toward the line by agreeing that Biden should be receiving
classified intelligence briefings, though Blunt claims Trump “may not have been
defeated at all.”
The other 47 Republicans, however, have
emulated Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson, who tossed a there’s “nothing
to congratulate [Biden] about” over his shoulder while fleeing reporters. That
refusal to publicly accept reality has largely been interpreted as a scheme to
avoid antagonizing Trump voters in Georgia, where two runoffs in January will
determine whether Republicans retain a Senate majority in 2021. The Georgia
calculation is indeed part of the dynamic. But there is a whole lot more
gutlessness on display at the moment.
“This is pure political cowardice,” says Chris
Van Hollen, a Democratic senator from Maryland. “This is much more
about their fear of Trump putting them on the wrong end of a tweet storm.
Republican senators know that Trump lost the vote in their states. That’s what
makes it even worse. It was bad enough that they wouldn’t stand up to his abuse
of power before the election. The fact they are still cowering after he’s lost
is a clear sign that Trump, through his followers, still has a grip on the
Republican Party.”
Chris Murphy, a
Democratic senator from Connecticut, sees some ideological motivation at work
too. “What Trump is doing in attacking the election results plays into a
broader Republican project of delegitimizing government as a mechanism to
smooth out the rough edges of the economy. If people don’t think elections
are fair, they are also going to be less willing to believe that government
actions are legitimate. The Republicans are in a strange position today where
their ideas are not very popular, which is why they’re increasingly reliant on
the Supreme Court to effectuate their policy agenda. So elections are often
pretty inconvenient for Republicans.” Even with that big-picture analysis, he’s
still astounded at the hypocrisy of his GOP peers. “I’ve had dozens of
conversations over the last four years with Republicans in which they complain
privately about how out of control this president is, and then they do nothing
about it publicly,” Murphy says. “Their conduct over the last 10 days has been
no different. They’re in the business of placating this president.”
Biden spent 35 years in the Senate and claims
that his capacity to reach across the aisle will be a strength. But he
understands that there’s little to gain in pressing his former colleagues to
publicly disavow Trump. Instead, Biden has been taking the high road,
projecting confidence in math and Democratic lawyers, talking about his plans
to battle the new wave of COVID-19 when he moves into the White House, coolly
needling Trump, and giving the current president plenty of room to spin out.
“You’ve got one president, and it’s not the person in D.C. right now,” a Biden
ally says.
Which is progress, at least tonally.
Meanwhile, Biden’s old pal Mitch McConnell has been trying to
delegitimize his election. McConnell is ruthlessly, relentlessly determined to
stay in power as Senate majority leader, so he has encouraged Trump’s vain
attempts to question the results, believing it will help stoke Georgia’s MAGA
voters to show up for incumbents David Perdue and Kelly
Loeffler. And most of the Senate Republican caucus is taking its cues
from McConnell. Yet there is a large and important subset of McConnell’s
membership that cares a whole lot less about Georgia in January than it does
about the Iowa Republican caucuses in February 2024. Arkansas senator Tom
Cotton, Missouri’s Josh Hawley, South
Carolina’s Tim Scott, Texas’s Ted Cruz, and
Florida’s Marco Rubio and Rick Scott all
dream of becoming the GOP’s next presidential nominee. “Mitch kind of sets out
a marker on issues, and Republican senators can go further or less than him,” a
senior congressional Democratic insider says. “So yes, they’re thinking about
Georgia. But they’re thinking about their own political self-interest in the
coming two to four years. That means, why piss off the Trump base immediately? You
can’t ever discount the fact that they’re absolutely terrified of Trump. And if
you’re running for president, why do you want to be the one who first
pronounced Donald Trump dead?” And why, for the next four years, do anything to
cooperate with President Biden?
