Eric Trump, the former president’s son, declared last week: “There is no longer a Republican Party; it’s theTrump party.” The brazen claim is not simply that Donald Trump is the (as yet) unchallenged leader of the GOP — it is that he is the party, having destroyed the once-great American political institution and remade it in his own image. “He’s fundamentally changed the party,” the younger Trump said.
Actual Republicans — i.e., those who believe in upholding the long-established principles of the Republican Party, rather than indulging the dangerous personal ambitions of a power-hungry individual — cannot allow this claim to be validated.
Whatever the positive attributes of the Trump presidency — having signed the “Never Trump” letter in 2016, I voted for him in 2020 because of the transformative policies of his superb national security team on China and East Asia — his behavior since that election has been subversive not only to the GOP but to American democracy itself.
He started seriously dismantling the party two days before he attacked the constitutional process for electing the president on Jan. 6, 2021, and tried, for the first time in American history, to block the peaceful transfer of power.
On the night of Jan. 4, 2021, he addressed a runoff rally in Atlanta, supposedly to urge Georgia voters to re-elect their two Republican senators and retain the GOP’s 52-48 majority. With Joe Biden’s election to the White House and the House of Representatives firmly in Democratic hands, the Senate would be the only moderating force for Republicans.
Instead, Trump paid brief lip service to the GOP Senate candidates and used the event to disparage Georgia’s voting system and undermine voter confidence, to the point that many voters did not bother to turn out. Both incumbents lost narrowly and control of the Senate flipped to the Democrats, giving them the executive branch and both chambers of Congress. The legislative and regulatory excesses of the past two years that both Trump and non-Trump Republicans excoriate can be laid squarely at the feet of the former president.
Trump has remarked that Democrat Stacy Abrams might be a better governor for Georgia than the incumbent Republican, Brian Kemp, because Kemp refused to interfere in the 2020 election by illegally “finding” the votes Trump needed to defeat Biden.
Trump spurned any lesson from his 2021 campaign behavior. Later that year, he escalated his narcissistic approach to elections, telling Virginia voters in the campaign for governor that they should boycott all elections until the 2020 result was reversed and he was unconstitutionally returned to the presidency.
Republican Glenn Youngkin managed to keep his distance from Trump and his incessant rants without alienating his supporters by assuring Virginia voters that elections still matter. His sensible, moderate conservatism won him the governorship.
The Youngkin formula for electoral success in the Trump era could be replicated in this year’s midterm elections — but Trump, once again, has undermined GOP prospects by helping to defeat seasoned, qualified GOP primary candidates in favor of people with little or no loyalty to the Republican Party, only to Trump himself.
As with the Georgia runoff, some suspect that Trump does not want Republicans to win control of Congress this year because then he would not be the indispensable man, the savior of the GOP cause, to the extent he cares about it. He prefers to assert, as he did in 2016, “I alone can fix it.”
Trump’s behavior toward this year’s non-Trump GOP candidates lends credence to the sabotage theory. He has called GOP nominee Joe O’Dea in the Colorado Senate race a “RINO,” his favorite political epithet. Because of his destructive, anti-GOP conduct, I once called Trump “the ultimate RINO.”
But Eric Trump’s remarks make clear that his father is not a “Republican in Name Only” — he is not a Republican at all, because there is no longer a meaningful entity called the Republican Party, just a Trump party.
Even if a “red wave” were to enable the Trump-anointed candidates to defeat their Democratic opponents in November and sweep into office in January, they are more likely to focus on purging Congress of Trump opponents, defined as anyone who does not slavishly march to the Trump tune. Denying Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) the majority leader position would probably be their first goal, triggering a bitter and divisive intra-party battle whose effects would linger for the next two years and paralyze Congress from implementing a positive GOP agenda.
The effective destruction of the Republican Party and the emergence of a Trump party would then be realized — and it would be a grievous blow to the health of America’s political system, imperfect as it is even without Trump’s sullying.
The responsibility for this dire scenario does not lie alone on Trump’s head. He had powerful, destructive allies in the Democratic Party and its donors, who flooded financial contributions and political advertising into states with open primaries to support Trump-designated candidates and defeat superior Republicans who would be tougher opponents in November.
This consummately cynical ploy, which can be described as fundamentally unpatriotic, suits Trump’s anti-Republican purposes, whether his people win or lose.
An influx of Trump loyalists into Congress also can have a deleterious effect on an important national security issue that heretofore has been bipartisan, but on which Trump has a checkered record: U.S. support for Ukraine against Russia’s invasion.
As the flow of U.S. aid has increased, even while the economy has faltered and individual Americans are feeling the effects of inflation, some Republicans in Congress have questioned U.S. priorities and want greater accountability. Others believe that European countries should increase their contributions. Fifty-seven members voted against the Ukraine aid package in May.
Overall, congressional support for Ukraine has been overwhelming and truly bipartisan, in the finest tradition of Sen. Arthur Vandenberg, who rallied Republicans to join with the Truman administration in 1947 as the Cold War with the Soviet Union intensified. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Vandenberg urged that “Politics stops at the water’s edge.” (I am on the advisory board of the Vandenberg Coalition, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to a strong, broadly-based U.S. foreign policy.)
As a new cold war has emerged, waged by “no-limits strategic partners” Russia and China, in collaboration with North Korea and Iran, the existential threat to the United States urgently requires bipartisanship to present a united front against America’s adversaries. Trump and many of his followers instead advocate for an “America First” policy that sometimes veers into pure, archaic isolationism, as if America can escape involvement in challenges from abroad by simply ignoring them.
History has painfully demonstrated the dangerous folly of that approach. Genuine Republicans need to be part of a more sober and serious strategy.
Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He served in the Pentagon when Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia and was involved in Department of Defense discussions about the U.S. response. Follow him on Twitter @BoscoJosephA.