How much longer can the GOP sit on the sidelines?

Posted by Pointman on November 30, 2020 · 3 Comments 

Unless you live inside the DC belt chain or the bubble of unreality created by fake news, it’s impossible not to see the GOP is facing its biggest crisis since 1861. Too many of its elected officials are still thinking and acting in a pre-Trump and pre-Steal fashion. Just let Trump and his mob of deplorables battle away against the Steal, but in the meantime, just stay quietly neutral. If Trump wins, everything will go back to some sort of congressional normality. If he loses, make a deal with Biden’s puppeteers and the Swamp will once more reign profitably supreme.

In the meantime, say nothing, don’t commit, play the wait and see game. Whoever’s left standing when the dust settles, admit you were always hoping they would but for various reasons couldn’t act at the time.

In the current situation you can forget that as a survival strategy. As in 1861, this is a war situation that’s polarised into two distinct camps because it’s now grown into something way beyond your usual appraisal that it’s just another Trump versus the establishment thing. It’s about the Steal and not recognising the anger that’s caused. You’re either for letting the extremists get away with the Steal or you’re determined it won’t succeed. You can persist in effectively steering a policy of strict neutrality, all the while with your win-win Plan Bs cooking away in the background, or you can come out fighting. Not the most light-footed of you will be able to dance in the middle ground until the decision.

Quietly helping from the sidelines in your own cute little way or reloading muskets for others to use in the fight simply won’t cut it any longer. That’ll be remembered. Trump is going to win and when he does, it’ll give him a mandate of 80 million Americans to clear out a lot of GOP deadwood sitting in congress and elsewhere.

If he doesn’t win, do you seriously expect him to quit and walk away? He’ll simply grind on with his multiple legal assaults to delegitimise the administration ruling by ruling but in the meantime your determined inactivity opens up a typically Trump move to catch everybody on the wrong foot and arguably to his benefit. Since the party was of no help to him, and truth to be told acted for four years like sniffy hauteurs having to suffer the indignity of taking orders from a commoner, what’s he got to lose by dumping the old GOP and carving a new party out of the carcass?

The answer is nothing. You’ll be viewed as in on the coup that cheated him out of a second term and more seriously, to cheating everybody else who voted for him of their rightful say in who would govern them. I suspect he’d take most of the GOP big hitters and the local-level organisation with him, not to mention a huge chunk of what can only be called the new Republicans – the disaffected party faithful determined not to do your rollover to the Steal and reach an accommodation, the whole new Republican demographic he’s attracted, the Democrats who’ll won’t have a home in a party they no longer recognise and all the workers and various ethnic groups who definitely did well under Trump.

Where’s his downside? Not much really. Does he actually need the GOP for another shot at the presidency? He did it without their whole-hearted support the first time, so he’d find it much easier leading a party composed of loyal followers and not having to watch his back against his own party all the time. No loss there. Given that the result of the next general election will be irrelevant because nobody will believe it, it’d be much easier to mobilise and lead an opposition to the coup at the head of a political party.

With that move and the popular support he’s already got, he could through a campaign of lawfare and civil disobedience bring the illegally elected administration to its knees until a new, lawful general election was held. In that eventuality, your glittering career in Washington, or anywhere else, will have come to a permanent end.

There are without a doubt some fine men in the party who’re leading a high profile fight against the Steal. I’m thinking here of people like Jim Jordan amongst many others. Like Trump, they see it as the only way of preserving the Republic, and like him, see it as a must win because the next step if it fails is the one development to be avoided at all costs. The extremists running the Democrat party simply don’t care about that. They’re by nature for pulling down things, not building them. Nihilists rather than constructors.

As a final thought to you professional politicians waiting it out in congress, remember Trump never quits and he’s inordinately good at exacting revenge years down the line, as Obama found out after he’d crossed Trump. What were previously considered safe Republican offices, and their go along to get along occupants, would soon be in play if a Trump party candidate was run against them.

©Pointman

Related articles by Pointman:

An analysis of the Trump election victory 2016.

Click here for a list of all articles in the Stop the Steal series.

Click for a list of other articles.

Filed under Article · Tagged with GOP, Stop the Steal