What does a TRUMP presidency look like?

[Sophie Scholl]

All of the Republican pandering and more or less Democratic sponsored (old) Republican party ads are like treating Chiang Kai-shek as the leader of all of China after Mao crushed him. The Never Trump movement has immense influence for what, I believe, is a remarkably tiny actual power base.

[Valmy]

All of the Republican pandering and more or less Democratic sponsored (old) Republican party ads are like treating Chiang Kai-shek as the leader of all of China after Mao crushed him. The Never Trump movement has immense influence for what, I believe, is a remarkably tiny actual power base.

I think the polls and election results seem bear this out. The never Trumper conservative movement is loud but ultimately insignificant. I wish it were not so.

At least there is Mitt.

[Eddie Teach]

Do they have immense influence though? I've seen little evidence for this claim.

[Sheilbh]

Once Trump is defeated I suspect a lot of GOP politicians are going to go "Trump?  Trump who?"

Only way I see that happening is if he's absolutely humiliated - I mean losing Texas and Georgia etc.

Otherwise the number of people who identify as Republican has shrunk over his presidency, but he still has 90% approval.

Things may be different at the Governor level because they can be more independent, but at a national level there doesn't seem to be any sort of prince over the water.

[Valmy]

Do they have immense influence though? I've seen little evidence for this claim.

Maybe...but with whom?

[grumbler]

Once Trump is defeated I suspect a lot of GOP politicians are going to go "Trump?  Trump who?"

I think that you and DG are probably correct.  While trump does have his base, the majority of the Republicans polled have, IMO, gotten tired of defending his crazy shit and only back Trump because he has the (R) next to his name on the ballot.

the reactionary wing of the party (evangelicals, for instance) will move on directly, looking for the next candidate who promises to roll back the clock and put down these uppity woman and blacks.

[grumbler]

Do they have immense influence though? I've seen little evidence for this claim.

You really don't think that their influence is immense compared to their size?  The Lincoln Project is like 20 people, and yet every video they put out is linked here within hours.

[Valmy]

Do they have immense influence though? I've seen little evidence for this claim.

You really don't think that their influence is immense compared to their size?  The Lincoln Project is like 20 people, and yet every video they put out is linked here within hours.

Well I guess we will see what their overall impact is on political results. Being linked and celebrated by people who already do not like the President is not much of an impact though.

[crazy canuck]

Do they have immense influence though? I've seen little evidence for this claim.

You really don't think that their influence is immense compared to their size?  The Lincoln Project is like 20 people, and yet every video they put out is linked here within hours.

Well I guess we will see what their overall impact is on political results. Being linked and celebrated by people who already do not like the President is not much of an impact though.

Elections are all about getting the vote out.  Reinforcing over and over again why one needs to vote has an impact.

[Sheilbh]

You really don't think that their influence is immense compared to their size?  The Lincoln Project is like 20 people, and yet every video they put out is linked here within hours.

But we're their market - we're not the market for Republicans.

And I think there's a lot of truth to Ross Douthat's review of one of their books:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/11/opinion/trump-republicans-lincoln-project.html

The Revolt of the Republican Strategists
What the Trump era has revealed about the people who used to run Republican campaigns.
Ross Douthat
    Aug. 11, 2020

Last week I found myself reading "It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump," the new book by Stuart Stevens, the longtime Republican operative and chief strategist for Mitt Romney's losing 2012 campaign for the presidency. Stevens belongs to one of the notable sects in the church of NeverTrump, consisting of figures who once held prominent posts in Republican campaigns — Steve Schmidt, John Weaver and Rick Wilson, most notably — and now have reinvented themselves as the Trump-era party's would-be scourges.

The sect's institutional embodiment is the Lincoln Project, which runs ads against the president and his Republican enablers and finds itself mixed up in two running arguments at the moment — an intra-liberal argument about whether to welcome or shun the ex-Republican strategists and the political tendency they represent, and an intra-conservative argument about whether rejecting Trump requires a "burn it all down" approach to the rest of his political party.

Both arguments turn, in part, on the question of what the Lincoln Project actually stands for — what ideas would its strategists import into the center-left, were they welcomed there with open arms, and how they imagine rebuilding the Republican Party, were the entire G.O.P. somehow actually burned down?

From following a few of the Lincoln Project men on Twitter and reading the things they write, I have a hard time figuring out the answer to these questions, mostly because it's hard to distinguish their takes from a banal MSNBC liberalism. It's easy to see what they hate about Trump; it's harder to see, for their present personae, what they ever liked about the Republican Party or conservatism.

I turned to Stevens's book because I thought it might supply an answer, since it's billed as an examination of conscience, in which the author takes responsibility for various moral compromises that led to Trump's rise. But the book only deepens the mystery, because "It Was All a Lie" doesn't give you any sense of why its author spent his entire adult life (Stevens is in his 60s) in the service of a party whose supporters he mostly depicts as rotten frauds and hypocrites and racists, just as bad as liberals always suspected, if not worse.

Stevens does not really offer a story of intellectual conversion or gradual ideological disillusionment. He doesn't tell us that he used to believe in supply-side economics but now rejects it, or that he used to be against abortion or same-sex marriage but came to a different view, or that he used to favor welfare reform and tough sentencing laws and now repents.

There is one brief account of rereading a Myron Magnet book on the 1960s and the underclass, once assigned by Karl Rove, after Trump's ascent and finding it more racially obtuse than he remembers. But mostly Stevens presses a critique of Republican voters, activists and operatives — and white religious conservatives above all — that makes its author seem less like a convert with a tale to tell and more like the world's most clueless mercenary, a political veteran who noticed only after several decades that he was fighting for what was, by his own account, transparently the wicked side.

Stevens would probably reply that he was led astray by the fact that the Republicans he tried to get elected, from Tom Ridge to George W. Bush to Mitt Romney, were good and decent public servants who tried to rescue conservatism from its own worst impulses. And one could imagine a more interesting version of this book that leaned into this narrative, portraying an American right torn between its better angels and its devils, and Trump's rise as a defeat in a battle that could have easily gone another away.

But Stevens is so determined to emphasize his party's total depravity that his only answer to the hard question of why Republicans swung from Romney's technocratic decency to Trump's know-nothing flamboyance is that Trumpism was the beating heart of conservatism all along. Which makes the book self-flagellating but also weirdly self-exculpatory: Sure, Stevens and his Lincoln Project friends might have notionally been in charge of G.O.P. campaigns in the pre-Trump years, but you can't really blame any of their strategic choices for bringing the party to this pass, because a race-baiting reality-TV huckster was what the party's voters had always really wanted.

There is another way of reading this history, though, that's suggested by a passage where Stevens is emphasizing the fundamental emptiness of G.O.P. rhetoric on deficits and taxes. "But still the Republican Party continues to push tax cuts the same way the Roman Catholic Church uses incense for High Mass," he writes, "as a comforting symbolism for believers that reminds them of their identity." And then, pushing the analogy further: "Being against 'out-of-control federal spending,' a phrase I must have used in a hundred ads, is a catechism of the Republican faith. But no one really believes in it any more than communicants believe they are actually eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ."

Except that in point of fact, many communicants at a Catholic Mass do believe that they are actually eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ. And this is particularly true among the conservative Catholics whose votes were essential to the Republican politicians Stuart Stevens tried to get elected president.

For Stevens to either not realize this or sweep away a pretty important religious conviction with a nobody actually believes that wave makes me somewhat doubtful of his larger claim to expert knowledge about all the people who voted for Bush, for Romney or for Trump.

It suggests, instead, that at some level Stevens and his fellow Republican strategists regarded their own voters in exactly the way certain populist conservatives always claimed the Republican establishment regarded its supporters — as useful foot soldiers, provincials to be mobilized with culture-war appeals, religious weirdos who required certain rhetorical nods so that the grown-ups could get on with the more important work of governing.

In which case the original sin of the strategist class wasn't moral compromise or racial blindness but simple condescension: a belief that they didn't need to take their own constituents seriously, that they could campaign on social issues and protecting the homeland and govern on foreign wars and Social Security reform and that it would all hang together. Which it did — until a demagogue came along who was ready to exploit the gap between promises and policy, and to point out that the Republican adults supposedly in charge of governing weren't actually governing very well.

"What does a center-right party in America stand for?" Stevens asks, in the closest thing to an ideological statement his book contains. "Once this was easy to answer: fiscal sanity, free trade, being strong on Russia, personal responsibility, the Constitution."

In fact, this list neither distills the issues that conservative voters cared most about before 2016 nor accurately describes the major challenges facing the United States when Stevens was trying to get Mitt Romney elected president. All it distills is a cloistered center-right elite consensus, hawkish and globalist and fatally naïve, whose failures in Iraq and Afghanistan and China and domestic political economy mattered at least as much to the rise of Trump as the crankish or bigoted aspects of conservatism that Stevens spends his book decrying.

A strategist is not a statesman, but there should be some nodding acquaintance between the two professions. And statesmanship requires two qualities: a basic sympathy for people you aspire to lead, so you can guide them toward the best political expression of their principles; and a realistic assessment of the challenges they face, so that you can justify your own power by doing something to address them.

The Republican Party became Donald Trump, in the language of Stevens's subtitle, not because of conservatism's inherent depravity but because its would-be statesmen failed these tests — failed at governing, in the years of George W. Bush, and failed at campaigning, in the doomed runs of John McCain and Romney.

Those failures brought dark things to the surface, and I have no quarrel with what the strategist class has to say about the particular depravity of Trump or the moral compromises of his admirers. Nor do I object to their attempts to cut ads that they think will bring him down.

But the book I want to read from figures like Stuart Stevens isn't about how Republican voters failed them, but how their own strategic choices failed their voters — and pushed them, in the process, toward the temptation that was Trump.

Absent that kind of self-scrutiny, whether the rebel strategists end up on the center-left or some reconstructed center-right, it's hard to imagine any case for ever giving them political responsibility again.

[Valmy]

Elections are all about getting the vote out.  Reinforcing over and over again why one needs to vote has an impact.

Hey if it turned out they had a big impact nobody will be happier than me.

[Sheilbh]

Elections are all about getting the vote out.  Reinforcing over and over again why one needs to vote has an impact.

Hey if it turned out they had a big impact nobody will be happier than me.

I'd be astonished if it had a big impact on Republican voters. It's impact will be on the ex-Republicans which is a category that has grown a lot during Trump's time in office.

[crazy canuck]

Elections are all about getting the vote out.  Reinforcing over and over again why one needs to vote has an impact.

Hey if it turned out they had a big impact nobody will be happier than me.

I'd be astonished if it had a big impact on Republican voters. It's impact will be on the ex-Republicans which is a category that has grown a lot during Trump's time in office.

The non Trumpist electorate is made up of a lot of groups.  A well funded social media effort like the Lincoln project helps get the vote out generally.  There may be a few voters who care that the Lincoln project is produced by people more like them but I think the main impact is that it is another constant reminder to vote this election.  Can't have too much off that.

[The Minsky Moment]

And I think there's a lot of truth to Ross Douthat's review of one of their books:

Seems like a confused rant to me.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/11/opinion/trump-republicans-lincoln-project.html

The Revolt of the Republican Strategists
"What does a center-right party in America stand for?" Stevens asks, in the closest thing to an ideological statement his book contains. "Once this was easy to answer: fiscal sanity, free trade, being strong on Russia, personal responsibility, the Constitution."

In fact, this list neither distills the issues that conservative voters cared most about before 2016 nor accurately describes the major challenges facing the United States when Stevens was trying to get Mitt Romney elected president. All it distills is a cloistered center-right elite consensus, hawkish and globalist and fatally naïve, whose failures in Iraq and Afghanistan and China and domestic political economy mattered at least as much to the rise of Trump as the crankish or bigoted aspects of conservatism that Stevens spends his book decrying.

My response is: huh?  Stevens' list is a pretty decent summation of key programmatic elements in the GOP platform for many decades.  The party long defined itself in terms of support for fiscal probity, free trade, strong national defense, personal responsibility and a formalist-literalist view of the Constitution. I don't think it is "elitist" to make the obvious point that the GOP defined itself in significant part by those principles and policies and express anger or betrayal at their abandonment. 

The Democratic party stands for things like a strong response to environmental threats and climate change, a humane immigration policy, racial justice, improving access to health care and promotion/representation of democratic values of overseas. If the Democratic party abandoned all those policies and principles I would expect there to be some justifiably pissed off Democrats.

It's notable that while Douthat mocks Stevens as some out-of-touch elitist, he doesn't propose an alternative list of what the GOP really does stand for, i.e. "the issues that conservative voters cared most about before 2016".  Douthat is deafeningly silent in explaining what these are.  I don't know what "issues that conservative voters cared most about before 2016" - what I do know is that there don't seem to be very many conservative voters around anymore to matter.  Whatever such people cared about before 2016 what they care about now are punitively cruel policies on immigration,  authoritarian suppression of free expression, and increasingly openly racism.  That is an identifiable set of principles and it certainly is not "elite".  But is entirely understandable why a principled Republican might find such ideas hard to swallow.

[Sheilbh]

I mean Douthat wrote an entire book about this a decade ago:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Grand-New-Party-Republicans-American/dp/0307277801

The core thesis of their book "Grand New Party" is that the working class in America the non-college-educated half of the electorate continues to ping-pong between the parties and is there for the taking by any group that can seriously and directly address its concerns. The authors note: "Since 1968, these voters have provided the 'silent majority' that elected Nixon, the 'Reagan Democrats' who gave the Gipper his landslides and the 'angry white men' who put the Gingrich G.O.P. over the top in 1994. ... Yet after each Republican triumph, this working-class constituency ... has become disillusioned with conservative governance and returned to the Democratic column."

Why have the two parties been unable to turn periodic hookups with this key group of voters into an enduring marriage? For Democrats, it is in part that they have misread working-class anxiety this is a new body of voters, no longer the union-dominated industrial workers or toilers on family farms, but people employed in services like education, health care or office administration, with two-earner households stretched thin. Their problems will not be solved by "stronger unions, more food stamps, a war on Wal-Mart or the nationalization of a major industry or two."

Democrats have disdained so-called social issues as distractions from real economic problems. Douthat and Salam say to the contrary that the social issues are a major part of working-class insecurity. "Safe streets, successful marriages, cultural solidarity and vibrant religious and civic institutions make working-class Americans more likely to be wealthy, healthy and upwardly mobile. Public disorder, family disintegration, cultural fragmentation and civic and religious disaffection, on the other hand, breed downward mobility and financial strain which in turn breeds further social dislocation, in a vicious cycle that threatens to transform a working class into an underclass."

What about the Republicans? The authors say they blew their chances to capitalize on their opening to these voters "by confusing being pro-market with being pro-business, by failing to distinguish between spending that fosters dependency and spending that fosters independence and upward mobility, and by shrinking from the admittedly difficult task of reforming the welfare state so that it serves the interests of the working class rather than the affluent." If the right cannot find a way to address voter insecurities and needs, then some combination of the populist left and the neoliberal center, of Denmark-style social democracy with Clinton-style free-market centrism, will be likely to fill the void.

Trump - populism in general - is a symptom more than a cause. But I suppose the other points are that he doesn't mention social issues and he doesn't mention immigration which were both big issues before 2016 among conservatives. And surely we can call a man who was in senior positions on several Presidential campaigns a part of the centre-right/left (depending on party) elite consensus without needing quote marks. In the same way I think it's okay to call Rahm Emanuel or David Axelrod as part of the centre-left elite consensus. I don't think anything Douthat says in that piece is not stuff that people have been pointing out about the GOP since at least Bush II.

I think Trump's biggest skill in away is his instinct for weakness. In the phrase by Amis, that "crocodilian nose for inert and preferably moribund prey." He's very skilled at spotting and taking advantage of prey that's not strong enough or lithe enough to evade him - and what he did isn't alien or that surprising. It's stuff that anyone paying attention to the right in the US could see coming.