In light of the GOP Establishment's refusal to investigate Joe Biden's theft of the 2020 election in a constitutional manner back in December, then-President Trump reportedly authorized $5 million to fund efforts to purge disloyal party members he stumped for in battleground states. Since 2016, the Democrats' hard leftward pivot features a dangerous obsession with race. As a result, it rejected its historic hardline opposition to illegal immigration through a shared endorsement of amnesty with a Republican establishment, which blatantly disregards depreciating wages for American workers. With the blessing of many Republicans (most especially Sen. Mitch McConnell), the Biden administration's pending rapprochement with China will feature some manner of 'détente,' including the full restoration of trade and outsourcing of American jobs from the nation's heartland. For the Democrats, this schism may seem advantageous, but this is merely superficial. The party's alliance with the Lincoln Project significantly compromised any further leftward pivot. The organization, which played a critical role in stealing the election for Joe Biden, is operated by Never Trump Republicans.
The neocon Republicans' collaboration with Democrats to end Trump's political career is happening through a second impeachment. The waning Bush/McCain/Romney wing seeks to reestablish the ancien regime that had operated for decades inside Washington D.C.'s 'swamp. Today, the Democratic Party is their ticket back to power, as the new Trump-dominated GOP rejects Globalism and heavy military interventions that characterized the Bush/Clinton/Obama foreign policies. The last weeks of 2020 saw breathtaking defiance instances by the party's ruling 'wine-and-cheese' class: former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, for example, pledged to challenge a potential Trump candidacy in 2024, donuts and all. Then there was McConnell, ex-leader of the GOP's erstwhile Senate majority, who quickly congratulated Joe Biden after the night of November 3 on winning the election. An election that happened under a system he says "works" while intimidating his subordinates in the Senate to fully support Biden and reject calls to investigate irregularities in the six states which denied Trump's reelection. Those screams of execration intensified after the Capitol took on the life of the Bastille on January 6, when many Republicans distanced themselves from Trump. Some of them had previously been loyal to him. On Tuesday, now-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell denounced Trump on the Senate floor. Accusing him of intentionally inciting the crowd, he alleged were "fed lies… by the President and other powerful people, and… tried to use fear and violence to stop a specific proceeding of the first branch of the federal government, which they did not like."
The fallout from McConnell's support for a Senate trial to convict Trump as a sign of 'unity' with the Democrats has led to an existential crisis for the GOP. Last week, McConnell's junior colleague from Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul warned that McConnell and the establishment "will destroy the Republican Party if leadership is complicit in impeachment, or if leadership votes for impeachment, they will destroy the party" on the Laura Ingraham Show. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has since urged Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to denounce the House's second impeachment push against President Trump as "unconstitutional." Graham warned McConnell that if he doesn't 'stand up and fight back' against the Pelosi-Schumer impeachment efforts, "the Republican Party, as Rand Paul said, will crack up." Sen. Paul estimated that "If Republicans go along with (the impeachment trial)… a third of Republicans will leave the party." As a result, many Republicans, like former Trump ally Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), have articulated their intentions to call on McConnell to stand down as party leader in the Senate due to standing with the new Democrat Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY).
Sen. Rand Paul on Lockdowns, Security in D.C., and Impeachment – Jan. 15, 2021
Yet the damage done is possibly irreparable because the best thing that could happen for the GOP is to convict Trump for the reasons Schumer advocates: to prevent Trump from ever legally running for the presidency again. Maybe that's why the new Senate Majority Leader suddenly appears willing to delay Trump's impeachment trial. This comes a few weeks after learning that Senate Republicans told The Hill's Alexander Bolton that a conviction wouldn't happen, let alone the vote on a disqualification. McConnell reportedly proposed delaying Trump's impeachment trial until mid-February. In his own words, Republicans in the Senate were "united behind the principle that the institution of the Senate, the office of the presidency, and former President Trump himself all deserve a full and fair process that respects his rights and the serious factual, legal, and constitutional questions at stake." Which, translated, means he wants his subordinates to have more time to create new narratives disguised as legal arguments. On the Democrat side, NBC's John Heilemann told MSNBC's Joe Scarborough that both McConnell and Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) were making political calculations on how they could retain their positions and build a more substantial base moving forward. Their assessment appeared to be that the best way to do that was without Trump—in effect, to "strike at the fallen king." Now that Trump has left office, legally eligible to run again in 2024, in any shape or form, nothing can stop him. This certainly validates Mark Halperin of Newsmax's report from January 19 that McConnell and establishment Republicans' latest move to support new Democrat Majority Leader Chuck Schumer's Senate trial may only be to bar him from holding office again. The Republican National Committee will therefore be torn at handling "The Donald" moving forward. Its situation, though, is an impossible option to addressing a destructive relationship. In his farewell address, Trump stated that the MAGA movement is only "just the beginning" and he "will be back in some form." A push by Republican leadership to block Trump from running again in 2024 could very well succeed given most of the party views him analogously to another, more famous literary bloodsucker in Dracula whenever faced with a crucifix by a would-be foe. The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump allegedly spoke to various confidants about the possibility of forming his own political party—a "Patriot Party." This idea sparked the interests of independent voters, the increased number of blue-collar Democrats losing their jobs (70,000 in one day) beginning with Biden's executive order shutting down the Keystone XL pipeline, and those who feel betrayed by the GOP. As one might gather, the party is mortified: many Republicans understand a "Patriot Party" would have real appeal and rip apart the Republican Party due to Trump's popularity among Republican voters. Some believe a split would further push back the conservative movement. Yet many young conservatives feel they no longer have a place in the party of "old white men," who hang out at the local country club (sipping their mint juleps served by cheap foreign valets, no doubt). Young conservatives are enthused by the idea of a "Patriot Party" whose symbol of a lion had already gained traction on social media even before Trump's farewell speech. Their "official" Instagram page for this newfound party was taken down with almost 100,000 followers, while its Facebook page has so far amassed 17,000 followers.
As the imperious neocons join the neoliberals to slander the President as mentally unstable, Yoram Hazony notes there's now an "unbridgeable ideological chasm… opening between two camps that were once closely allied," which "Mr. Trump's rise is the effect, not the cause, of this rift." This is due to two principal catalysts he identifies as, "first, the increasingly rigid ideology conservative intellectuals have promoted since the end of the Cold War." Secondly, "a series of events—from the failed attempt to bring democracy to Iraq to the implosion of Wall Street—that have made the prevailing conservative ideology seem naive and reckless to the broader conservative public." Trump successfully redefined Republican orthodoxy to embrace a new form of right-wing populism by embedding it with a variation of the old left-wing conflict theory's 'corporate-skeptic' and 'pro-worker' to Turning Point's Charlie Kirk. Any 'Patriot Party' platform will fully embody all the traits of "Trumpism" by combining 70 percent Reaganism―i.e., strong defense and a realist foreign policy that stopped most optional military interventions that didn't provide a clear cost-benefit advantage for the U.S. or regional stability; and deregulation, smaller government, tax cuts, energy growth, and stars-and-stripes traditionalism―with "the unorthodox 30 percent which excited his base, and won Trump the 2016 election" by redefining "illegal immigration, in the manner of 1960s and 1970s lunch-bucket Democrats and Cesar Chavez as a threat to the wages and viability of U.S. workers, especially those most vulnerable entry-level laborers," according to Victor Davis Hanson..Before, the Bush-McCain-Romney Republicans failed to attract the white working class in the Rust Belt after the Reagan years, black men, or the near-parity the Trump GOP enjoys with the Hispanic electorate. Trump's strategy successfully energized between 4 million and 6 million voters in swing states. Voters who had either given up on Republicans or elections altogether. Trump didn't view the middle class as spent, addicted, eroding, and doomed, much less deplorable, clingers, irredeemable, dregs, and chumps as the mainstream media and popular culture portrayed them. Trump didn't see them as poor whites without much influence or as privileged due to their genetics and therefore condemned to pay reparations for their ancestors' supposed sins. Even if the Republican ancien regime successfully purges the MAGA movement, this won't necessarily draw the Never Trumpers. It will also not draw back the Lincoln Project to the GOP. The disaffected ex-Republican neocon Jennifer Rubin echoes Mr. Biden's subordinates' pledge to confront dissenters by calling for companies to 'blacklist' Trump supporters from 'polite society.' Meanwhile, the MAGA-inspired' Patriot Party' movement could theoretically draw 72% of Trump's supporters from 2020 away from the GOP to vote in retaliation—effectively destroying the nation's second-largest party.
Liberty Hangout’s farewell to the Trump presidency.
Trump's move would be a formal declaration of war against the D.C. political cartel formerly called 'the swamp.' He's often compared to Ross Perot, but with a far larger following. Sinking the 'Uniparty' can't happen too soon, or at any cost, even if its goal is to drive the electoral college into the House of Representatives, where Trump will play the role of 'kingmaker.'
Article originally published on The Conservative Historical Review
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About the Author:
Jonathan P. Henderson (B.A. in History, Minor in Pol. Sci.; Univ. of Tennessee, 2012) is a resident of Knoxville, TN. He is Owner/Administrator/Editor-in-Chief of The Conservative Historical Review and a blogger/columnist for PolitiChicks and Intellectual Conservative.