Will America choose Donald Trump over its ‘sacred cause’?

2024 marks a moment when our political institutions, voters and even the foundations of our republic face a stern test. 

With the Supreme Court poised to determine whether Donald Trump is qualified to run for president, given the clear disqualification requirement outlined in Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, the court, the Republican Party and the voters face an existential challenge.  

The immediate test the Supreme Court faces is even greater than its controversial decisions in Bush v. Gore and Dobbs v. Jackson. Never before has the court faced a situation where an ex-president has been accused of plotting to “overturn the legitimate results” of an election “by using knowingly false claims of election fraud to obstruct the federal government function by which those results are collected, counted and certified.” 

Whether the court adheres to the text of the Constitution or rules in favor of Trump, it will be subjected to accusations that it is, in the words of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a “bunch of partisan hacks.” 

Whatever the decision, there is much for voters to ponder. While many dread a Biden-Trump rematch in 2024, this is a very different Republican Party from 2020. As former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) notes, the GOP is no longer the party of Ronald Reagan, the Bushes or even her father — namely, a conservative party that pledges its fidelity to the U.S. Constitution. 

After a memorable confrontation with Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) in which Cheney reminded him that the GOP was the party of these forebearers, McCarthy, always subservient to Trump, said, “This isn’t their party anymore.” 

Instead, the Republican Party is busily erasing the visages of its former leaders from its collective memory and is rewriting history.  

Start with Jan. 6, 2021. 

Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) describes that violent day as a “normal tourist visit.” The Republican National Committee has characterized the events of that day as “legitimate political discourse.” Others wrongly blame Antifa, Black Lives Matter, left-wing Democrats or the deep state for the Capitol riot. Donald Trump calls those imprisoned for disrupting the official certification of the 2020 election “hostages,” and promises to pardon “a large portion” of them should he return to office.  

This Republican-inspired historical revisionism hasn’t stopped with the attack on the Capitol. 

Answering a voter’s question in New Hampshire about the causes of the Civil War, GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley said they were, “basically how government was going to run, what you could and couldn’t do, the freedoms in what people could and couldn’t do.” When her inquisitor followed up, saying it was, “astonishing” she failed to mention the word slavery, Haley tartly responded, “What do you want me to say about slavery?” 

As the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln became the adopted party of the Old Confederacy, it embraced the narrative of the “Cult of the Lost Cause” that the South waged a war against a materialistic North that was “grasping for wealth and power.” Beginning in the early 20th century, nearly 700 statutes were erected in the South that celebrated its “noble but doomed struggle” while also reminding African Americans of white supremacy.  

Then New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu confronted those lies as he began a torturous process of removing the Confederate statutes, a movement that has spread to other states and sparked violence — notably, in Charlottesville, Va., where a riot ensued after the removal of Robert E. Lee’s monument — an act Donald Trump called “foolish.”  

It is this transformed Republican Party remade in the image of Donald Trump — whether he remains on the ballot or not — that will present itself to the voters in 2024. Joe Biden likes to say, “This is not your father’s Republican Party.” And 2024 will not be an election primarily focused on traditional policy differences between liberals and conservatives, but whether voters will embrace a Republican Party engaged in promoting lies and rejecting constitutional norms, or whether they reject that party and give it a chance to return to its founding principles. 

2024 marks nearly 10 years since Donald Trump rode down the escalator in 2015 to declare his presidential candidacy. Since then, he has dominated, challenged and changed our politics perhaps like no leader before. 

As the Republican Party becomes a personality cult in the service of, as Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.) puts it, “the orange Jesus,” it has cast aside its founding principles in favor of Trump’s momentary whims.  

Prior to assuming the presidency in 1861, Abraham Lincoln resisted entreaties to compromise on the issue of slavery, saying, “By no act or complicity of mine shall the Republican Party become a mere sucked egg, all shell and no principle in it.”  

Today, Joe Biden sees the essential issue of our time as whether democracy is “still America’s sacred cause.”  

Whatever becomes of Donald Trump, or his hostile takeover of the party he created, is for historians to write. As we enter a year that either brings the Trump era to a close or gives it renewed strength and power, it is worth remembering that at the entrance to the U.S. House of Representatives stands a statute of Clio, the Greek muse of history. 

Clio was watching over the House on Jan. 6, 2021, and she will be watching once more to see what we as a country decide and who we say we are on Nov. 5, 2024. 

John Kenneth White is a professor of politics at The Catholic University of America. His forthcoming book is titled “Grand Old Unraveling: The Republican Party, Donald Trump, and the Rise of Authoritarianism.” He can be reached at johnkennethwhite.com.