"Trump F---ed the Party": After Georgia Loss, the Republican Fissure Grows Even Deeper

By Eric Lutz, Vanity Fair

06 January 21

Republicans’ primary reason for sticking with the president—because it was a good political strategy—has begun to evaporate. Still, some are clinging on regardless.

our years ago, Donald Trump asked Republicans to make a deal with the devil. It took some longer than others, but most eventually came around, normalizing and enabling and often outright participating in the depraved horror show of his presidency all in exchange for tax cuts, some judges, and, perhaps most importantly, access to his enthusiastic base. The pact must have seemed worthwhile for a time, especially for a party whose objections to Trump tended to be more stylistic than substantive. But if they’d bothered to read the fine print, they’d have known this would be where things were headed. Offer up your soul to Trump, and he’ll eventually come to collect.

He’s doing that now, as he mounts what will hopefully be a last-ditch effort to overturn his loss to Joe Biden. More than a hundred Republicans in the House, and about a dozen in the Senate, have pledged to protest the election results on his behalf—a cynical political ploy for some, a delusion for others, a dangerous assault on democracy for all. Trump is pushing for more: He’s encouraging protesters, including the often violent Proud Boys, to converge on Washington Wednesday when lawmakers meet to tabulate the election results, and pressuring his dutiful deputy Mike Pence to smash through the bounds of his ceremonial role as the overseer of that process and unilaterally declare those results invalid.

But as he does, he’s getting a degree of pushback from Republicans that he has rarely, if ever, received. Many GOP officials who previously had his back appear to have reached their limit, creating a fissure within the party. “We have sworn an oath under God to defend the Constitution. We uphold that oath at all times, not only when it is politically convenient,” Liz Cheney, the prominent conservative senator from South Dakota, tweeted on Wednesday, becoming one of the most prominent Republicans to speak out against Trump’s attempted coup. “Congress has no authority to overturn elections by objecting to electors. Doing so steals power from the states & violates the Constitution.”

Perhaps most importantly—if cynically—it no longer feels politically expedient to back the president. Raphael Warnock, who defeated Kelly Loeffler in Tuesday’s Georgia runoff elections and will become the state’s first Black senator, and Jon Ossoff, who is on the cusp of beating David Perdue, ran strong campaigns, and were buttressed by the grassroots work of Stacey Abrams and others to turn out Democratic voters. And Loeffler and Perdue didn’t exactly make a strong case for themselves to remain in office. But Trump’s selfish crusade to undo his own loss in the state almost certainly undermined the GOP candidates he was ostensibly supporting, first by falsely declaring the electoral process as a whole and those races specifically “illegal and invalid”—a bogus claim that seemed destined to depress his own side’s turnout—and then by hanging his erratic effort to thwart the will of the people around the incumbents’ necks.

Perdue and Loeffler wore it proudly: He paid lip service to Trump’s plight and suggested he would object on Trump’s behalf if he landed in the Senate for the certification process Wednesday; she went all in during a Trump rally Monday, announcing to a crowd of MAGA faithful that she planned to join the Senate protest led by Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley. But hewing close to Trump isn’t exactly paying off for them. Democrats are coloring a longtime red state blue, and are now poised to control both chambers of congress and the White House. If their morals aren’t keeping them from going all in on Trump, at least some Republicans may begin to see after Georgia the limits of his political benefits to them. “Trump is the cause of this, lock, stock, and barrel,” a Republican strategist told Politico Wednesday.

“Trump f---ed the party. He f---ed the party with his conspiracy theories and pushing females and independents away from the party,” a Trump adviser told Bloomberg’s Jennifer Jacobs. “The bleeding needs to stop. He needs to go.”

A great many will continue to stand with him, believing MAGA to be the path to enacting their agenda. Others won’t care, seeking to fulfill the true promise of Trumpism: to burn it all down. They may be rewarded for doing so, as the massive, frenzied crowds converging on D.C. ahead of the Biden certification underline. But with his behavior no longer merely threatening democracy, but their own political ends, other Republicans seem ready to hop off the Trump Train. Even as they do, Americans would be wise to remember how long they were willing to ride it, how much they plowed through, and all the damage they left in their wake.