Debate exposed the fractured soul of the GOP

Rarely in the manicured and stage-managed world of modern politics do voters get the chance to see who their presidential candidates truly are. They got that chance in spades at last night’s NewsNation-hosted fourth Republican presidential debate, where America finally got its long-brewing slugfest over the soul of the Republican Party.

Wednesday’s debate offered something we’ve never seen before: a two-on-two tag team battle between the GOP’s dominant MAGA extremists and its faltering conservative establishment. It was also a belated birthday present for President Joe Biden, whose name barely came up once. The few mentions Biden earned were quickly drowned out by a Republican presidential field that has clearly grown to loathe each other.

For much of the evening, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Ambassador Nikki Haley locked arms against sustained and often viciously personal attacks from businessman Vivek Ramaswamy and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. At one point, Ramaswamy even held up his notepad with “NIKKI = CORRUPT” scrawled across the page. This is the fractured and fractious Republican Party that Donald Trump now dominates by a 50-point margin. What will be left of it when Trump is gone?

Whatever happens next year, Trump won’t be around forever. What yesterday’s debate showed the nation — and what Republicans have tried to keep quiet for years — is that there is no such thing as a post-Trump GOP. Broad Republican support for Trump is now the only thing holding together a party rife with deep ideological clashes. The divisions run the spectrum from disagreements over Ukraine and Taiwan policy to the legality of banning gender-affirming care to touting the white nationalist ‘Great Replacement’ theory as DeSantis did with his remark about Europe “committing suicide with the mass migration.”

The Old Guard GOP represented by Haley and Christie and the new, radicalized party represented by DeSantis and Ramaswamy are fundamentally incompatible in theory and in practice. In Haley and Christie’s vision, the Republican Party’s role is to pump the brakes on democratic change. DeSantis and Ramaswamy’s twisted version dispenses with democracy entirely in favor of outright MAGA dominance.

Ramaswamy is particularly hot on rolling out some next-gen authoritarianism. “The president will not ask Congress for permission or forgiveness,” he said while  crowing about his plan to unilaterally dissolve the FBI, IRS and other federal agencies. “This is what the leader of the executive branch gets to do.” That’s a view shared by Trump. The former president’s allies are already working to enact it through Trump’s loyalist recruitment effort Project 2025.

For a sense of where the post-Trump GOP is headed, new Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) offers a perfect example. A Freedom Caucus lifer, Johnson represents the merger of extremist MAGA ideology with the Christian nationalist movement cultivated by establishment Republican leaders dating back to the days of Ronald Reagan and the Moral Majority. Johnson has spoken about how America is facing an imminent “Red Sea moment,” a paradigm shift not just in our politics but in the identity of the country itself. For many Christian nationalists, that change is the restoration of Trump to power — and his final victory over a corrupted and ungodly democracy.

The future of the MAGA Republican Party will look a lot more like Johnson and DeSantis than it will the badgering and bullying Ramaswamy. It will be Trumpism at political maturity, with leaders capable of sugar-coating its most indefensible excesses in a way the impulsive and easily bruised Trump never could. Even if establishment Republicans eventually agreed to make terms with that insurgent movement, they would find themselves deemed too impure by MAGA faithful and booted out anyway.

Haley and Christie resemble adults. They speak the way we expect politicians to speak. They offer each other professional courtesy, measure their jabs and (mostly) stay on message. That might be worth something in less dire times for democracy, but the GOP needs more than reliable politicians right now. It needs leaders with an actual plan to rescue the Republican Party from the illiberal extremists now in charge. Neither Haley nor Christie is that leader.

Wednesday’s debate debuted the battle that will bedevil Republicans long after Trump has departed the political scene. It’s a debate that concerns not just Republicans but every single American, because the stakes aren’t just political. They now include a serious debate about whether democracy is the proper system for the America we have become. It’s critical that we answer correctly.

Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.