Blocking Trump’s Path Back to Power
A response to critics who say I propose no solutions
How politically radical could the base of the Republican Party become over the 17 months between now and the 2024 presidential election? There’s really no way to know. We are heading into uncharted and turbulent waters.
These are the closing sentences from an op-ed I wrote for the New York Times last Thursday, just after news broke of the federal indictment of former president Donald Trump. My point was pretty simple: This is bad. It’s bad that a former president has been indicted, facing trial and possible jail time. It’s bad that he’s being prosecuted by a special counsel appointed by the current president, who is the head of the country’s other major party. It’s bad that the indicted former president is in the midst of a political campaign to return to the White House—and that he’s running against the current president.
And most of all, it’s bad that the former president is a rabid populist whose political strength derives from treating the people and institutions of the political, legal, and cultural establishments as self-interested political actors whose high-minded rhetoric about the rule of law conceals a much baser motive—namely, a desire to destroy, by any means possible, both him and the Republican voters he champions.
An American Tragedy
None of this means the special counsel, Jack Smith, should have turned a blind eye to Trump’s actions. I argued in several posts here and in the NYT last August that indicting the former president at the federal level would be a mistake best avoided through prosecutorial discretion. Yet I recognize that the behavior alleged in the indictment made public on Friday is so egregious and the evidence pointing in the direction of guilt so overwhelming that allowing Trump to elude prosecution in this case would also have been a mistake.
When individuals and communities confront a range of options, all of which are likely to lead to bad consequences, that’s a tragic situation. I think that’s where the country finds itself today—in the midst of an unfolding tragedy. The proper response to such a situation is sobriety and honesty about the dangers that lie ahead.
The point of my op-ed was to encourage both. Yet some critics have claimed that’s no point at all. If my analysis is right, these critics wondered, what are we supposed to DO with this information? I neglected to lay out a course of action, and that supposedly made my essay pointless.
I obviously disagree. I see value in encouraging those who do formulate plans of action to do so in full awareness of the risks involved. But for the sake of today’s post, I’m going to take this criticism to heart and lay out what I take to be the best possible response to our national predicament. That doesn’t mean there’s even a modest chance of this scenario coming to pass. Events almost certainly won’t unfold along the lines I’ll lay out below. But the country would be well served if they did.
The GOP needs to be turned into a rump party incapable of reaching the pinnacle of political power in the United States. And the only way to make that happen is for those Republicans who recognize the truth about the danger Trump poses to American democracy to act on it.
Problem #1—GOP Primary Voters
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