It’s not a political campaign the Republican Party is running; it’s an operation, a plan to put their candidate into office regardless of the vote. At least that’s what it looks like to me.
The clues are many. As one observer has noted: “Trump has transcended the party that produced him. His growing army of supporters no longer cares about the party. Because it did not immediately and fully embrace Trump, (and) because a dwindling number of its political and intellectual leaders still resist him, the party is regarded with suspicion and even hostility by his followers. Their allegiance is to him and him alone.”
These words were penned in May 2016, more than eight years ago, by Robert Kagan, then a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Since then, the former president has gained complete control of the Republican Party.
Richard Conville
Ever since the 2020 election, Trump and his partisans have sounded a steady drumbeat: “You can’t trust elections, except when we win.” The January 6 coup attempt proved Trump will use violence to get what he wants. Do not forget: A mob of his followers broke into the Capitol and interrupted the certification of electoral votes from the states. The president — the commander-in-chief — did nothing to stop them. They beat Capitol police officers, broke into the Senate and House chambers, and rummaged through desks and sacked offices, leaving behind them a trail of excrement and the echoes of their chant, “Hang Mike Pence.” That’s control.
In spring 2022, the former president endorsed Michael Whatley of North Carolina (a leading proponent of his “stop the steal” movement to overturn the 2020 election) and his daughter-in-law Lara Trump (wife of his son, Eric Trump) as cochairs of the Republican National Committee. They were duly voted in, and now he has “his people” leading the party. That’s control.
In 2024, the former president urged Senate Republicans not to vote in favor of the bipartisan border bill (S-4361), and they did his bidding. Conservative Republican Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma told NBC News the bill was “by far the most conservative border security bill in four decades.” Lankford was the bill’s coauthor along with Connecticut Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy. The Arizona Republic quoted Trump: “I think we killed it. I think it’s dead.” Thus Trump showed he could direct Republican Congressional votes. That’s control.
“The big joke on democracy is that it gives its mortal enemies the tools to its own destruction.”
So it would be more accurate to say it is Trump and not the Republican Party who is running not a political campaign, but an operation: one designed to create the Trump Party and to use that party to take power, by violence if necessary.
Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s minister of public enlightenment and propaganda, once observed that “the big joke on democracy is that it gives its mortal enemies the tools to its own destruction.” In America, one of those tools is freedom of speech. Trump has made full use of it.
Daily he degrades, demeans, dishonors, belittles, puts down, denounces, ridicules, slams, excoriates, pans, heckles, shames, humiliates, jeers at, condemns, derides, makes fun of and taunts those he sees as enemies — anyone who stands in his path to power.
Republican Party leaders in Mississippi don’t act like that; they don’t talk like that. But their silence shouts loudly — that they fear Trump, for he will run over anyone standing in his way. They’ve fallen in line, unwilling to risk the retribution of Der Leader. They are cowards.
They have so far been unwilling to stand up for the values most of them would claim as their moral compass, values most of them would claim they got from their Christian faith: respect for other people, simple kindness, fair play, compassion for those in distress, honesty in speech and action, aversion to crude and abusive language. Make your own list. You know what I mean.
Thus they are, by their silence (as well as the silence of rank-and-file Americans in the habit of voting Republican), enabling a wanna-be autocrat. But not your garden variety dictator.
Rather: “We see a cult of the leader and the strong man, the embrace of cruelty and bigotry, the demagoguery and the conspiracism, the weaponization of nostalgia for an imagined and exclusionary past, the eager embrace of lies and propaganda.” That’s from Bill Kristol, neoconservative writer and former chief of staff of Vice President Dan Quayle.
In order to preserve our democracy, I urge Republicans either to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris this year or just sit this one out. Either alternative is preferable to installing a fascist regime in Washington.
Richard Conville is a former professor of communication Studies at the University of Southern Mississippi and long-time resident of Hattiesburg. He can be reached at [email protected].