The Right is sick of stupid Will Republicans turn on Trump?

Britain’s 1783, like its 2022, was a chaotic year of three prime ministers. The second of their number, the Duke of Portland, presided over a ramshackle alliance between two factions which had, till recently, despised each other. George III soon shoved aside the Fox-North Coalition in favour of his poodle, Pitt the Younger; in the general election that followed, the poodle won handily. The incongruity of the Fox-North enterprise was partly to blame. A book, bearing the title The Beauties and Deformities of Fox, North and Burke, denounced the Coalition as a “MONSTER of the most alarming kind”. To reveal the monster for what it was, all the book had to do was compile some of the insults which Charles James Fox had hurled at Lord North, before the pair had tucked themselves into the same political bed. North was a “blundering pilot who had lost a whole continent”; he was guilty of “every species of falsehood and treachery”. And so it went on and on.

I have often thought that some enterprising American hack of our own times should attempt something similar (a British equivalent, for that matter, could make light work of Zahawi, Jenrick, and whoever else jumps ship to Reform). Such a book might commend itself to the Resistance Lib for good bathroom reading, much as the 191 blank pages of that gimmicky The Achievements of Kamala Harris are to be met with in MAGA homes. The Beauties and Deformities of Trump, Vance, and Rubio would, of course, include Vance calling Trump “cultural heroin” and “America’s Hitler”; Trump’s attacks on “Little Marco”, not least for his prodigious sweating; Rubio returning the volley by calling him a “con artist”; and much else besides. It would contain lots of grandstanding, lots of backpedaling, and little dignity.

Some of the select quotations would have the added beauty and deformity of being occasionally prescient, even vindicated. “The delegitimization of the election results is something that I worry a ton about,” said Vance, beardless and cherubic, back in October 2016: “the delegitimization of the media and so forth, that really, really worries me.” Another good one resurfaced recently, for inauspicious reasons. “We’re liable to wake up one morning,” Ted Cruz warned the American electorate around the time Trump was calling his wife ugly, “and Donald, if he were president, would have nuked Denmark”.

It happens in cycles: the Republican bigwigs denounce Trump, with good reason, and then they fall lamely back in line. The coalition limps ever onward. 2016 was one long year of this agonising process, crescendoing with the hullabaloo over the Access Hollywood tape, when several senior Republicans resolved to throw in the towel and sit the election out; it was easy enough back then, when he seemed to have no chance of actually winning. One presidency later, January 6 saw a repeat of the dynamic, in miniature, and again with the apparent security that Trump was finished for good. You could put together a Beauties and Deformities from that day alone. “There is nothing patriotic about what is occurring on Capitol Hill,” tweeted Rubio, presumably quaking in his boots in some underground bunker; “this is 3rd world style anti-American anarchy.” Today, he belongs to an administration which, as its first order of business, extended an unconditional pardon to those anti-American third-world anarchists. The administration’s position, blasted across its official channels, is that the election in 2020 was stolen, that Mike Pence was a traitor, and that the people who ransacked the Capitol had right on their side.

Now, some Republicans are pushing for full-scale annexation of Greenland: Randy Fine, a corpulent Floridian who calls himself the “Hebrew Hammer” and has earned plenty of groyper opprobrium as a result, has introduced a bill to this effect. Others, though, have done their best to keep their heads screwed on and their feet on the ground. “I’m sick of stupid”, says Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who has the distinct advantage that he will not be seeking re-election later this year. “Stupid”, in the form of slavish loyalty to the whims and passions of the President, might sometimes be an indispensable vote-winner, in GOP primaries especially. But even Tillis can’t bring himself to criticise Trump personally, preferring to do what court sycophants have always done — blame the advisors. 

Both houses may move to block Trump from taking Greenland by force, with some congressional Republicans going as far as to warn him that this would mean the end of his presidency. Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska sums it up: “This is appalling. Greenland is a Nato ally. Denmark is one of our best friends… the way we’re treating them is really demeaning and it has no upside.”

No upside, indeed. Any talk of invading Greenland — whether or not it be followed through — is enough to spook America’s allies, indelibly cheapen its word, and upend decades of diplomacy and strategy. Trump’s erstwhile fans in Britain and on the continent — including, to his credit, Nigel Farage — are no less appalled by the whole spectacle. That it is nonetheless being cheered on in some quarters of the American Right, whether as a meme or in earnest, is as sure a sign as any of its intellectual degeneration. Indeed, such degeneration appears to be located at the very heart of the MAGA project: Stephen Miller, who has long been feted even by Trump’s European admirers as the brains behind the administration’s robust immigration policy, also appears to be the principal architect behind this belligerent and self-sabotaging turn in Trump’s foreign policy.

The online catchphrase “You Can Just Do Things” has seemed to become a licence for doing things which are, as Rep. Bacon has put it, “dumb”. There are lots of things which an American president, with all his colossal might, can “just do”. He can threaten to send the gunboats to Greenland; he can bring back measles; he can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory for the Conservative Party of Canada; he can keep on pretending that 2020 was stolen, and perhaps the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize to boot. All these things are perfectly possible. But all these things are dumb.

Musk’s X has turbocharged the dumbness. It often seems now as though the entire administration is built atop a foundation of mocking and memes. Trump cannot escape the Boomer’s insatiable appetite for AI slop: hence he posts videos showing him dumping shit on the “No Kings” protestors from a fighter jet. The hardline Zoomers charged with running the Twitter account of the Department of Homeland Security appear to have defter hands. There you will find a torrent of videos on the more extreme end of edgy internet humour.

Dumb, also, because unpopular; and here, again, the dynamics of X, which reward loyalty to Trump and Musk and which encourage ever more radical and eyeball-grabbing slogans, ideas, and memes, are partly to blame. Following the killing of Renée Good in Minneapolis, the Trump administration went all-in on a George Floyd Culture War Round 2, tasking JD Vance with defending the indefensible. Only 28% of Americans think her shooting was justified; 53% think the ICE agent should face criminal charges. Trump’s designs on Greenland, meanwhile, have even less popular backing. The President gazes through a White House window upon a picture of Greenland; “tap to monitor the situation,” tweets the official White House account, to 16 million views and 31,000 likes. Only 4% of those polled think it would be a good idea for the US to take Greenland by force. Trump, personally, is now extremely unpopular; it can’t be politically expedient, to give one recent example, to declare, after the murder of a beloved film director, that this was the result of “the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME”. Nothing in fact could have better vindicated Rob Reiner’s view, expressed back in 2017, that Trump was “mentally unfit” for office.

The President has a mandate. The election wasn’t just a rebuke of Harris (though lacking in achievements) and Biden (though senile); nor was it solely a matter of some post-pandemic anti-incumbency swing, or the automatic product of an economic input (by the time of the election, in any case, inflation had abated and the economy was strong). Culture wars were in play, in which Democrats had often taken the wrong side. Clearly there was a great desire to secure the border and crack down on immigration, if not quite to the point of executing middle-aged mums in the street; clearly there was a desire to make America strong again, if not to the point of bullying friendly nations with tariffs or worse. But, since obtaining that mandate, much of the American Right has memed itself into positions which are as untenable and unpopular as they are stupid.

One year, now, of the MAGA restoration; three more, at least, to go. There seem now to be some quickenings of sanity, even in the Republican Party; and for the Right in Europe, one gets the impression that this Greenland business has been something of a wake-up call. Still, more than mere murmurings are needed to start people from their stupor. Senior Republicans will have to remember what “beauties and deformities” they once hurled at Trump, and consider that they might still be true. The coalition will have to splinter; or, like Fox-North, risk being crushed under the weight of its contradictions, swept aside (the 25th amendment beckons), or, if it comes to it, forcefully rebuked by the electorate. The people in power will have to be “sick of stupid”: and, this time, they’ll have to mean it.

---