By Jeff Greenfield
As the carnage of World War I widened, Barbara Tuchman recounts in
“The Guns of August,” a German leader asked a colleague, “How did it all
happen?”
“Ah,” replied the other, “if only one knew.”
A century later, there is no mystery to the carnage that Donald Trump has wrought.
Everything we have seen in these first 140
days—
the splintering of the Western alliance, the grifter’s ethics he
and his family embody, the breathtaking ignorance of history,
geopolitics and government, the jaw-dropping egomania, the sheer
incompetence and contempt for democratic norms—was on full display from
the moment his campaign began. And that’s not just what Democrats
think—it’s what many prominent Republicans have said all along.
Once Trump was elected, his foes began to indulge in a series of
fantasies about how to prevent his ascendancy or how to remove him from
power. The electors should refuse to vote for him (which would have
thrown the election into the House, which would have chosen Trump); the
Cabinet and the vice-president should use the 25th Amendment to declare
him unable to exercise his duties (a scenario, as I have
written here earlier,
that works just fine on TV melodramas like “24” and “Scandal”);
Congress should impeach him (which would require 20 GOP House members
and 19 Republican senators to join every Democratic lawmaker).
So this may be a good time to remember that in a key sense, Trump
happened because a well-established, real-life mechanism that was in the
best position to prevent a Trump presidency failed. That institution
was the Republican Party.
It is not entirely true that Trump engineered a “hostile takeover”
of the GOP, provided that the party is defined more broadly than elected
officials and party insiders. As Conor Friedersdorf
wrote
last year in the Atlantic: “the elements of the party that sent
pro-Trump cues or Trump is at least acceptable’ signals to primary
voters—Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Ben Carson, Chris Christie,
Breitbart.com, The Drudge Report, The New York Post, Bill O’Reilly, Sean
Hannity, Ann Coulter, Jeff Sessions, Rick Scott, Jan Brewer, Joe
Arpaio—are simply more powerful, relative to National Review, Mitt
Romney, John McCain, and other ‘Trump is unacceptable’ forces, than
previously thought.”
What is true, however, is that the governing wing of the party was
fully aware that Trump was not to be trusted with the levers of power.
In January of last year, National Review devoted an entire issue to a
symposium where 22 prominent Republicans and conservatives detailed
their militant opposition to the candidate Texas Governor Rick Perry—who
is now Trump’s energy secretary—called “a cancer” on the American
political system. Until his nomination was all but assured, Trump had
the backing of a lone Republican senator, Jeff Sessions (who is now his
embattled attorney general).
More broadly, the whole idea of a disparate party coming together at
a convention was, for decades, rooted in the “vetting” process; those
experienced in the mechanics of politics and governments would decide
which of the candidates were best equipped to win an election and carry
out the party’s agenda in Washington. It’s beyond obvious that in the
decades since primaries replaced power brokers as the delegate-selecting
process, this role has attenuated. But it survives today as an
“In-Case-Of-Emergency-Break-Glass” tool. And the question is: Why didn’t
the Republican Party employ it?
Explanations have ranged from the fragmented nature of the
opposition—no early consensus choice as with George W. Bush in 2000—to
the underestimation of Trump’s appeal (the establishment candidates like
Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Chris Christie spent their time and money
attacking each other, while Ted Cruz was constantly praising Trump,
hoping to ride in his wake when he collapsed).
But one often overlooked reason—and one for parties to remember if
they hope to avoid future Trumps—is that the rules of the GOP greatly
benefitted Trump. The party allows winner-take-all primaries by
congressional district or statewide— which in many states hugely
magnified Trump’s delegate totals. Trump won 32 percent of the South
Carolina vote, but all 50 delegates. He won 46 percent of the Florida
vote but all 99 delegates. He won 39 percent of the Illinois vote, but
80 percent of the 69 delegates. By contrast, Democrats—who abolished
winner-take-all primaries more than 40 years ago, insist on a
proportional system, much like parents cut the cake at a children’s
birthday party. The result is that an intensely motivated minority
cannot seize the lion’s share of delegates.
Another rule may well have stayed the hand of Republicans who saw in
Trump an unacceptable nominee. The Democratic Party gives more than 700
people seats as “super delegates.” Every senator, every House member,
every governor and a regiment of party officials are, by rule, unbound.
They make up 15 percent of the total votes at the convention.
Republicans only have some 150 “automatic” delegates—7 percent of the
total—and they
must vote the way their state’s primary voters did. Thus, the whole idea of an emergency brake is almost nonexistent in the GOP.
Whether such tools should exist is a matter of debate. Many
Democrats on their party’s left disdain the idea of such backroom
politics (although toward the end of the 2016 primary season, Vermont
Sen. Bernie Sanders’ backers were urging super delegates to vote for him
on the grounds that the was the more electable candidate in November).
If a candidate comes to the convention with more votes than anyone else,
but with more voters having chosen a different candidate, what’s the
“right” thing for an unbound delegate to do? The famous assertion by
Edmund Burke, that “your representative owes you, not his industry only,
but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he
sacrifices it to your opinion” is very much out of fashion among the
populist movements on left and right.
But either by cluelessness or willful design, the Republican Party
had put itself in a position where one of the most significant functions
of a party—the “vetting” of its prospective nominee—was rendered
impotent.
And we are living with that institutional failure every day.
Jeff Greenfield is a five-time Emmy-winning network television analyst and author.
