36 United States The EconomistOctober 12th 2019
A
mericans weretreated to the novel sight of Donald Trump’s
Republican colleagues deserting him in droves this week.
Even Mitch McConnell had had enough of Mr Trump’s latest derel-
iction of “American leadership”—which Lindsey Graham, usually
one of the president’s staunchest defenders, declared “just un-
nerving to its core”. They were protesting against Mr Trump’s deci-
sion to abandon America’s Syrian Kurdish allies, not the foreign-
policy scandal for which he will probably soon be impeached: his
effort to coerce Ukraine into launching a bogus corruption investi-
gation into Joe Biden. Even so, such an impassioned uprising
against Mr Trump suggested to some that his Republican firewall
may not be as solid as is generally assumed.
There is little reason to think that. Republican senators have
criticised Mr Trump’s foreign policies before, even as they have ex-
cused his rule-breaking closer to home. And though, as many have
noted, there is bad news for Mr Trump in public opinion —always
the likeliest predictor of political change—it is so far too modest to
augur a dramatic shift. Polls suggest a big rise in support for im-
peaching the president among Democrats, a significant one
among independents, and a modest uptick among Republicans.
That is ominous for Mr Trump’s electoral prospects; having never
had a 50% approval rating, he cannot afford to lose voters. But it is
not grounds to imagine many Republican senators deserting him
in the impeachment trial that now looks inevitable.
The heat Mr Trump took from his party on the Kurds therefore
does not suggest his hold on it is weakening. Rather it helps indi-
cate why, after many presidential misdeeds, it remains so strong.
Implicit in most criticism of Republicans’ acquiescence to Mr
Trump is an assumption that it is tactical—that they would behave
differently unconstrained. They are said to be opportunists who
suffer the president’s rough edges because they love his policies.
They are said to be cowards, who fear a condemnatory tweet or
primary challenge. And some—such as Mr Graham, a national-se-
curity hawk—are said to have made nice with Mr Trump to remain
influential on a cherished issue. This is all fair enough, yet it is not
the full story. As the Kurdish episode illustrates, Republican poli-
ticians dislike a lot of the president’s policies, are not always in-
timidated by him, and no one can expect to influence him for long.ThefervourRepublicans such as Mr Graham display in their de-
fence of Mr Trump—even after he has admitted most of the wrong-
doing in Ukraine he stands accused of—also suggests something
more than tactical. Notwithstanding his shaken core, the South
Carolinian, once an eloquent proponent for impeaching Bill Clin-
ton, proceeded to dismiss the apparently stronger case against Mr
Trump as dangerous left-wing nonsense: “They’re about to destroy
the nation for no good reason!” Some see in this doubling down by
Mr Trump’s defenders a desperate effort to avoid facing up to their
party’s debasement. Republicans “have now dug themselves into a
position that they can’t leave without admitting that they sold out
morally,” suggests Jonathan Haidt, a (centrist) social psychologist.
Another explanation, conversations on and off the Hill suggest, is
that even in their secret hearts Mr Trump’s Republican defenders
object to his abuses much less than their critics suppose.
The most generous explanation for this is the one they offer:
that Mr Trump’s rule-breaking is mostly hot air. When Marco Ru-
bio dismissed the president’s invitation to China to investigate Mr
Biden as being “not a real request” he was representing that view.
And, to be sure, a president who ponders shooting the legs from
under illegal immigrants or nuking hurricanes or buying foreign
countries often strains credulity. Yet given the damage Mr Trump
has actually inflicted on norms and institutions—as documented
in the 448-page Mueller report and nine-page Ukraine whistle-
blower’s complaint, neither of which many Republicans admit to
having read—this is not a defence that withstands scrutiny. It is an
example of the moral contortions politicians are especially good at
executing, as Mr Haidt has also shown, to reach a desired position.
The other big Republican contortion involves believing that,
whatever Mr Trump has done, Democrats have done worse, or
would do if they succeeded in their dastardly plot to steal power
from him. This fundamental conviction among Republicans—al-
most the party’s animating principle—predates Mr Trump, en-
abled his takeover and is even more damaging than he is.
The danger of such extreme right-wing partisanship is its end-
less capacity to turn standard political grudges—against Demo-
crats’ hypocrisy on executive overreach, for example, or the me-
dia’s liberal bias—into an apologia for more egregious
rule-breaking. Partisan Republicans accuse their opponents of do-
ing the same thing, and offer examples to prove it. But just as the
right has played an outsized role in driving partisanship generally
(a dynamic termed “asymmetric polarisation”), so its rule-break-
ing is more conspicuous and arguably worse. The Democrats’ re-
cord on gerrymandering is dire; Republican attempts to suppress
non-white voter turnout are a terrible stain. They also hint at a
gloomily defensive apprehension, which has no counterpart on
the ascendant left, that a Republican Party backed by a shrinking
minority of mostly white voters cannot win power by fair means.Contortion extortion
It seems many Republican voters have already settled on that con-
clusion—though they would put it slightly differently. Shortly
after Mr Trump’s election, two in three agreed with the statement
that America needed a leader “willing to break some rules if that’s
what it takes to set things right.” Mr Trump’s current standing with
his party suggests even more would agree with it now. When arti-
cles of impeachment against Mr Trump are presented to them, Re-
publican senators will essentially be asked whether they do, too.
Their answer will decide more than the president’s fate. It will de-
termine whether theirs is now the party of rule-breaking. 7Lexington The rules of the game
Institutional conservatives would condemn Donald Trump. Republicans probably will not