Donald Trump is currently outpolling his closest competitor in the GOP primary by more than 40 points. The Republican front-runner has retained this overwhelming advantage in the face of a civil court finding him liable for sexual abuse, various grand juries indicting him for state and federal crimes, and his own decision to skip a nationally televised primary debate. At this point, Trump is less likely to lose renomination to Ron DeSantis than to a heart attack.
This is a dispiriting state of affairs for conservatives who disdain uncouth insurrectionists but despise liberalism all the more. These anti-anti-Trumpers spent much of the 2016 primary cataloguing the GOP front-runner’s myriad demerits as both a conservative and human being. Then it became clear that a critical mass of Republican voters did not care (or else believe) that Trump was an abusive con man, vicious misogynist, or worse, a supporter of the auto bailouts. And then Trump proved less unelectable than the conservative intelligentsia had wagered.
“Never Trump” conservatives responded to these developments by defecting to blue America. But the anti-anti-Trumpers decided that preserving unborn life and low tax rates (and/or their movement sinecures) was more important than opposing an authoritarian demagogue. So they refocused their intellectual energies on rationalizing their support for the party of Trump. This involved, among other things, celebrating a more respectable version of Trumpian nationalism, portraying mainstream Democrats as proto-Bolsheviks, and blaming liberals for the Trump’s nomination.
This last bit may seem bizarre. Why would Democrats be responsible for the outcome of an election in which only the GOP’s core supporters could participate? Yet as Jonathan Chait has written, casting Trump’s ascent as a by-product of liberal malfeasance — rather than a reflection of the conservative movement’s pathologies — helps anti-anti-Trumpers resolve their own cognitive dissonance.
If the Democratic Party is fundamentally responsible for the GOP’s transformation into a personality cult, then the contradiction between ostensibly loathing Trump and actually fighting tirelessly to disempower his primary opposition is much reduced. From this perspective, Trump’s various grotesqueries don’t make the case for the Democratic Party so much as they underscore its odiousness: The worse Trump is, the more vile it was for the Democrats to foist him upon the GOP.
Perhaps more important, pinning Trump on blue America is useful for short-circuiting any self-reflection about the conservative intelligentsia’s own responsibility for its political movement’s authoritarian turn.
In any case, the notion that Democrats imposed Trump upon the GOP electorate has never looked less plausible. Opposition parties do sometimes try to meddle in primaries to aid the less electable candidate. But the impact of such efforts is generally marginal. You can’t “ratfuck” a party into nominating someone by 40 points.
Nevertheless, Trump’s overwhelming lead has increased conservative intellectuals’ appetite for “the Democrats made us do it” narratives. Faced with another one-to-five years of doing apologetics for an incompetent, egomaniacal sex offender, anti-anti-Trump conservatives have redoubled their efforts to pin Trump’s political success on his opponents.
This narrative has taken a few different forms in recent days. The most prominent version holds that Democratic operatives cajoled and coerced state and federal prosecutors into indicting Trump for several crimes in a Machivallean plot to ensure Trump’s renomination. After all, nothing would be more certain to galvanize Republican support for Trump than a deep-state plot to destroy him.
The problem with this narrative: There is literally no evidence to support it. Under Merrick Garland’s leadership, the Justice Department did not go out of its way to indict Trump but rather to avoid doing so. Even after Trump had illegally retained classified documents for months, the DOJ gave him the opportunity to escape prosecution by simply returning the illicitly held files (a luxury it has historically declined to extend to ordinary officials who mishandled classified information). Trump’s recalcitrant criminality, not Democratic treachery, birthed his legal woes.
Even if this were not the case, we would have zero evidence that Democratic bigwigs had made the (counterintuitive) calculation that indicting Trump for federal crimes would help his campaign rather than hurt it. And even if we had such proof, there would still be the inconvenient fact that Trump already boasted a formidable lead over DeSantis before the indictments came down.
More recently, Commentary’s Noah Rothman and National Review’s Dan McLaughlin have condemned Biden for covertly aiding Trump by reminding voters that the GOP front-runner is responsible for ending Roe v. Wade. The context here is that Trump recently reiterated his opposition to the six-week abortion ban DeSantis enacted in Florida, while refusing to commit to even a 15-week federal ban. Amid the ensuing buzz about Trump’s “moderation” on abortion, Biden noted that Trump’s governing record is likely a better guide to his stance on reproductive freedom than his recent remarks are:
Given that a segment of GOP primary voters would theoretically be off-put by Trump’s triangulation, anti-anti-Trump DeSantis supporters interpreted the president’s post as an in-kind contribution to the Trump campaign. “Biden still doing what he can to prop up Trump in the primary,” McLaughlin wrote in response. Rothman, meanwhile, declared Biden was assuring “confused voters Trump is maniacally focused on promoting pro-life policies (wink wink).” He continued, “They’re eagerly promoting Trump in ways now that jeopardize even the patina of plausible deniability even as the polls suggest he’s legitimately competitive in a general. Then they’ll fundraise off the threat to democracy they’re actively inviting. Gross.”
But the idea that Biden’s post was aimed at “propping up” Trump makes little sense. For one thing, Trump scarcely needs propping. His lead over DeSantis is now comparable to Biden’s lead over Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (in the latest polls of each race, Biden bests RFK Jr. by 48 points, while Trump beats DeSantis by 47). When Republicans attack Biden as excessively liberal today, does anyone believe their intention is to shore up his support in the Democratic primary? Or is it more likely that such Republicans have simply read the polls, concluded that the president is all but certain to be the Democratic nominee, and begun calibrating their attacks against him for a general-election audience? I doubt Rothman or McLaughlin would have difficulty seeing that the latter is more plausible. Yet they apparently cannot comprehend that the GOP primary is not remotely competitive and that thus both Trump and Biden are now tailoring their abortion talking points to the general electorate’s tastes.
Incidentally, though in this context anti-anti-Trump conservatives insist liberals are helping Trump win the GOP nomination by attacking him (knowing conservative voters will reward any candidate who attracts liberal ire), they will argue in other contexts that liberals helped Trump win the 2016 nomination by praising him.
Apparently, whether liberals are praising Trump or disparaging him, they are definitely single-handedly causing Republican voters to support him.
Anyhow, the fundamental premise of McLaughlin’s and Rothman’s arguments — that Democrats would much rather face Trump than DeSantis — is not obviously true. This might have been the case at the campaign’s outset, but now that DeSantis has spent months portraying himself as more virulently ant-LGBT+ and anti–abortion rights than Trump, it’s far from clear that Democrats would benefit from the latter’s nomination. Right now, DeSantis looks like Trump but without the charisma or ideological opportunism. That does not seem especially menacing.
Finally, there is a separate narrative that Democrats brought about Trump’s rise through their smearing of Mitt Romney in 2012. The idea here is that Republicans tried nominating a nice, respectable Mormon candidate only to see Democrats and the liberal media smear him as a job-killing, dog-torturing ghoul. As a result, GOP voters entered the 2016 primary looking for a “fighter” above all else, and they found one in Trump.
There are a couple of problems with this story. One is that it simply isn’t true that Romney was treated exceptionally poorly. Major-party presidential candidates are more or less always targeted for character assassination. In 2004, conservatives baselessly accused John Kerry of fabricating his war record. In 2012, they alleged that Barack Obama was deliberately trying to destroy the United States by running up the debt in a nefarious bid to punish the West for colonialism. Democratic primary voters did not respond to either of these events by nominating cartoonishly racist reality stars.
More critically, though, there is simply no evidence that Romney’s defeat was a necessary precondition for Trumpism. Thanks to his promotion of birtherism, Trump was already a power broker in Republican politics by 2012. Romney famously felt compelled to fly out to Las Vegas to formally accept his endorsement.
In fact, Trump actually led in some early polls of the 2012 GOP primary. At the time, pundits dismissed these results as by-products of pure name recognition; surely, upon scrutiny, GOP voters would reject Trump.
Of course, we now know this assumption was wrong. In hindsight, it seems quite plausible that Trump could have won the nomination in 2012 if only he had run. The advantages that his subsequent campaign revealed — his celebrity cachet, unashamed xenophobia, ideological flexibility on Social Security, and talent for insult comedy — all would have been at his disposal four years earlier. And he would have boasted the additional distinction of running as America’s foremost besmircher of Obama’s legitimacy.
Further, the notion that Romney’s loss taught GOP primary voters to prioritize fighters who would stick it to the libs won’t scan to anyone who remembers when the tea-party wave crested. By 2012, the Republican electorate was already demonstrably eager to nominate bomb-throwing extremists.
The reality is that no Democrat ever forced or tricked Republican voters into loving Donald Trump. Rather, the conservative movement and its aligned media spent decades cultivating cultural grievance, racial paranoia, social distrust, and partisan hatred. For a while, the GOP’s traditional elite leveraged these dark forces to perpetuate their own power. Then a sociopath came along and turned red America’s seething alienation against the Bush family and its associates. Now, the nation is at serious risk of reelecting an insurrectionist, and former Bushites want you to know that the only political organization capable of preventing this outcome is to blame.
