G.O.P. Civil War

The Real Case for the Trump Presidency

By Joe Raedle/Getty Images.

After last night's New Hampshire primary, we’ll likely be losing Chris Christie, who heads home to New Jersey and to possible legal reckonings. But after causing the circuitry of Marco Rubio to misfire in front of debate watchers everywhere on Saturday, he deserves a nation’s thanks and a full presidential pardon. Rubio, who finished fifth last night, will stick around for now. Party programmers will huddle around him to iron out the bugs, recompile, give him a few kicks, and hope Rubio.exe runs smoothly from here on out. But the Rubio Moment (which for a while, as the writer Michael Brendan Dougherty pointed out, was every moment) appears to have been withstood.

It’s been a bitter week for the establishment wing of the Republican Party. After the Edsel-like rollout of Jeb, Rubio seemed so promising, so good-natured and pliable. But voters had different ideas. Now it’s back to the rebellion of Donald Trump, which the party establishment—still enamored with the policies of its last president, minus that indiscretion in Iraq—continues to view as a fatal disorder.

It's not just defiant Republicans that see virtues in Trump. This week, Jonathan Chait argued in New York that even liberals should hope for Trump to be the Republican nominee, a wish that looks ever likelier to be granted. “The Republican Party in its current incarnation needs to be burned to the ground and rebuilt anew,” Chait wrote. “Trump is the only one holding a match.” What’s more, even a Trump administration, Chait added, “would probably wind up doing less harm to the country than a Marco Rubio or a Cruz presidency.”

Chait’s case is hardly as contrarian as it might seem. Where establishment candidates generally wrap themselves in populist rhetoric and then quietly return to corporatism after winning elections, Trump threatens to follow through on his promises to negotiate drug prices or build border walls. His supporters seem unconcerned with government size, supply-side theory, capital gains taxes, or Russia’s role in the Syrian civil war—and they are warm to entitlements. Such indifference, even hostility, to traditional Republican commandments poses the biggest threat to the party's power structure in decades.

Still, Chait is asking for a serious mental commitment here—bipartisan rooting for Trump, at least until the primaries are over. The main trouble, as I see it, is the assumption that Trump would be transformative in defeat as well as victory—that he would re-invent the Republican Party in a healthy way simply by winning the nomination, regardless of whether he made it to the White House. I wonder.

After elections, lessons get learned, but 9 out of 10 are often wrong. The New Republic used to run a “Recriminations” cover after Democratic presidential defeats, inviting a crowd of sundry commentators to weigh in. The setup was an ironic nod to the blindness involved. Losing parties will always have unresolvable fights, most of the we-went-too-far/we-didn’t-go-far-enough variety. (Rare is an explanation that is as universally accepted as the one Rubio offered yesterday: “I did not do well on Saturday night.”) The winning side is frequently no wiser: it doesn’t stop to think, and it mistakes grudging acquiescence for full-throated endorsement.

To be fair, recriminations arguably worked for Democrats in the 1980s, when the party moved to the right and set the stage for Bill Clinton. But analogous transformations have not taken place within the G.O.P. In 2005, they believed they had a mandate to do big things, such as Social Security privatization, and they found themselves thrown out of Congress a year later. In 2012, they decided that the defeat of John McCain four years earlier had been a fluke and that voters would find Mitt Romney irresistible. In 2013, they decided that Romney had proven to be resistible only because of a failure to win the Latino vote—a belief with a rickety empirical foundation—and designated Rubio to be the face of a massive bipartisan immigration bill, which would have led to larger Democratic majorities. Conservatives began to join liberals in using the term “party of stupid.”

For those who hope to see Trump truly transform the Republican party, four possibilities must be considered: (1) The G.O.P. could nominate an establishment candidate (let’s call him Jeb, as shorthand) and win the presidency. (2) It could nominate Trump and win. (3) It could nominate Jeb and lose. (4) It could nominate Trump and lose.

So what would it learn from each outcome? In scenario one (a Jeb victory), the party would learn nothing and write off Trumpism as a momentary delirium. In scenario two (a Trump win), the party would be panicked and find itself dragged into a new identity, as Chait envisions. In scenario three (a Jeb loss), it would engage in all the traditional recriminations: e.g., we needed a better candidate for our great message; we needed a better message for our great candidate; we should have nominated Trump; we got burned by the presence of Trump. And in scenario four (a Trump loss), the party would presumably tell itself, “We should have stuck with Jeb.”

In short, the odds favor minimal learning. Like most parties, the G.O.P. resists contemplation or change. If Trump gets nominated but loses the White House, the result might well be the opposite of rebellion and instead a return flight to establishment safety. We could see years and years (and years) of Rubios.

What would a smarter party learn? It would come to see that loyalty to the donor class is likely to cost it election after election. Republican voters resent what they see as double-crossing on social issues (especially immigration), and many are enjoying the punishment being administered by Trump, who is like a bat to the G.O.P. piñata.

A wiser G.O.P. would also learn to accept the rise of populism in some form. At this moment, we have a candidate in each party trying to resurrect the New Deal coalition; both Trump and Bernie Sanders sound popular themes of nationalism over globalism and commoners over elites. Whoever does this best stands a good chance of winning the White House and becoming the leader of a populist party. If that person is Trump, then perhaps G.O.P. elites will join forces with the Democratic Party elites, creating a socially liberal party with a global approach to economics, leaving Republicans looking more like Europe’s right-wing parties, which favor tight borders and a preserved welfare state. Massive shifts of this sort, once unthinkable, are now increasingly likely. But they will involve a lot of painful change—again, nothing a party likes to do if it can avoid it.

So, yes, there’s a strong liberal case for cheering on Donald Trump during the primaries, but it’s not a seamless case. If your highest hope is to see a new G.O.P., regardless of attendant risks to everyone, then you should probably support Trump for not just the primaries but also the general election. (And he’d have to win.) If your highest hope is to see a Republican re-invention under a Democratic president, then you should probably hope Jeb wins the nomination and loses to Clinton. (But he’d have to lose, and attendant soul searching would have to follow.) And if your highest hope is just to see Democrats win, well, then, Ted Cruz is probably your man.

Ultimately, though, Rubio may have summed things up best: “2016 is a referendum on our identity.” “2016 is a referendum on our identity.” “2016 is a referendum on our identity.” “2016 is a referendum on our identity.” O.K., that was an unworthy joke. It just seems like time might be running out to make it.