The Republican Coping Goes into Overdrive

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Americans claim to dread a Trump-Biden rematch, but some Republicans seem more stunned than anyone else that Trump is back on the ballot. Now they are desperately trying to rationalize supporting their nominee.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

• Trump’s money problems are very real and very bad.
• The anti-abortion movement’s attack on wanted pregnancies
• The cystic-fibrosis breakthrough that changed everything

“A Psychological Necessity”

Saturday Night Live during the 1980s was at the height of its satirical powers, skewering both Republicans and Democrats with surgical efficiency. (In one of the greatest of all such skits, Phil Hartman played Ronald Reagan as a multilingual genius running the Iran-Contra plot faster than his hapless staff could follow.) The current political situation, however, reminds me of a 1988 debate parody with Dana Carvey and Jon Lovitz. After Carvey’s George H. W. Bush plows through a string of non sequiturs and repeats “stay the course” and “a thousand points of light” a few times, Lovitz’s Mike Dukakis is asked for a response. “I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy,” he says.

Democrats, eyeing Joe Biden’s soft polling numbers against Donald Trump, probably feel the same way. But many Republicans seem to be wondering: How did we end up with this guy again? As the primary season approached, Trump’s capture of the nomination was, as I have written before, inevitable. (Whether he could have been stopped earlier, say in 2021, has been irrelevant since … well, since 2021.) Former hopefuls, including Nikki Haley and putative Trump-Lite replacement Ron DeSantis, seem unable to believe they lost to Trump, and now they have to figure out how to support a man who incited an insurrection against the government of the United States.

Haley bowed out of the race earlier this week with a statement that was superficially graceful but emblematic of the Trump fear that has enveloped so many GOP elites. “It is now up to Donald Trump,” she said, “to earn the votes of those in our party and beyond it who did not support him, and I hope he does that … This is now his time for choosing.”

Earn votes? A time for choosing? This, as the wags on social media might say, is pure “copium,” the magic self-medication that helps people accept painful things. My friend Jonathan V. Last is one of the few people who can match my curmudgeonly ire, and he was spot on in his disgust with Haley’s exit statement:

If there’s been a more cowardly statement over the last year, I can’t think of it. Haley refuses to acknowledge that she was supported by a broad coalition of voters—Republicans, independents, and Democrats. She claims that she is rooting for Trump to win over only the Republican voters who supported her. And instead of leading and standing for the Constitution, she fobs off all questions of agency to Trump. It’s not time for Nikki Haley to choose. Oh, no. It’s time for Trump to choose.

Astonishingly, Haley was also talking as if no one knows who Trump is or what he’s done. She challenged him to “choose” as if he were a newcomer to politics who needs to introduce himself to the public.

Toward the end of her run for the nomination, Haley finally began to make the case that Trump was profoundly unfit for office. Perhaps she thought that a political Hail Mary pass could create enough Nikkimentum to bring her to the floor at the GOP convention with a fair number of delegates, or maybe she was merely positioning herself (as DeSantis is reportedly doing) for 2028, in which the supposedly normie Republicans will somehow return once Trump and his circle have finished gorging themselves on the power of the presidency one more time.

At least she didn’t endorse Trump. (Yet.) Other Republicans are grasping at even more desperate coping mechanisms, trying to depict Biden and Trump as equivalent evils and thus to evade the moral stain of supporting Trump. The difficulty for Republicans, however, is that they must try to depict Biden as functionally the same—or worse—as their nominee, a man who is a flaming Catherine Wheel of odious statements and whose speeches sound like a game of fascist Mad Libs.

The conservative-media ecosystem is already on the job. The day before Super Tuesday, Rich Lowry at National Review wrote of his deep concern that the legitimacy of the 2024 election was being undermined not by Trump, but by Special Counsel Jack Smith and his “woefully misconceived” prosecution of the former president. Other commenters have resorted to panicky moral equivocation: Another National Review writer, Dan McLaughlin, posted on X that the choice for conservatives boiled down to “do you help Trump destroy the party, or do you help Biden destroy the country?” Because, you see, Trump is merely a threat to Republicans, but Biden is a threat to the republic—a sentiment written as if the past eight years never happened.

Ross Douthat, meanwhile, is preparing the ground with learned Republican helplessness, blaming the Democrats after Super Tuesday for leaving Trump in “arguably … a more politically commanding position in American politics than at any other point in the past eight years.” “Arguably” is doing a lot of work there, considering that for half of those eight years, Donald Trump was the president of the United States. But Democrats, Douthat writes, protected Biden from a challenge and engaged in “liberal lawfare” and, gosh, what can be done? You can almost see the gentle and regretful shrug of the shoulders as Douthat ponders whether Biden can really prevent a Trump victory.

This is all coming from people who clearly know better, and none of it is based in a rational appraisal of politics. Republican elites are desperate to separate Trump’s selfish attempt to seek refuge in the presidency from what they think is still a viable right-wing political party; they know that Trump is shrinking the GOP, that he has made conservative a meaningless word, and that he could end up yet again hurting down-ballot Republicans. As the conservative Never Trumper Charlie Sykes suggested to me earlier today, these rhetorical dodges are now a “psychological necessity” among people who cannot fathom having to defend Trump as the choice in a general election for the third time.

One of those people is Mitch McConnell, who, after announcing plans to lay down his beloved Senate-leadership mantle, was asked whether he’d support the return to power of the man who encouraged a mob that put McConnell’s life in danger (and who took racist jabs at his wife). Imagine being McConnell and trying to summon the will to say, just once as you face the end of your long career, that you will break free of the mental prison of your institutional loyalties and that you will finally defend your family, your country, and the Constitution. And then you hear yourself say the words: “As nominee, he will have my support.”

Such is the lot of people who feel compelled to place their careers—and their party—over their country.

Related:

• Mitch McConnell surrenders to Trump.
• How Donald Trump became unbeatable

Today’s News

1. President Joe Biden will deliver his State of the Union address tonight, when he is expected to announce U.S. military plans to build a pier off the Gaza coast that would allow ships to deliver food and aid.
2. Sweden officially joined NATO, ending the country’s long-standing history of neutrality in armed conflicts. It first applied to join the military alliance shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.
3. Last night, Alabama’s governor signed a bill into law that provides civil and criminal immunity for in vitro fertilization patients and providers.

Dispatches

• Time-Travel Thursdays: Amy Weiss-Meyer explores what the Oscars were created for and the awards’ lasting influence on the film industry.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Tech Fanboys Have a New Hero

By Ross Andersen

Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos have each taken a turn as technology’s alpha dog, but none of them can claim that title now …

At the top of the tech world, a vacancy now looms like a missing tooth. In the months after ChatGPT was released, in November 2022, it seemed as though it might be filled by Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI—but he doesn’t yet have the requisite longevity. (Zuckerberg was in a similar position in 2010, before he acquired Instagram and WhatsApp.) The AI boom has, however, produced another contender in Jensen Huang, the 61-year-old CEO of Nvidia. Rather than manufacture chatbots or self-driving cars themselves, Huang’s company develops the fantastically intricate chips that make them possible.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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