ANTI-TRUMP REPUBLICANS SHOULD BE ROOTING FOR THE RIGHT-WING MEDIA TO LOSE, TOO

Politico Playbook tells us today that some Republicans who are publicly loyal to Donald Trump are secretly hoping he'll lose:

Some of the Republicans wishing for a Trump loss include long-standing GOP figures throughout the nation who bleed red and wouldn’t dare to say this publicly but who are more than ready to move on from the Trump era.

We're told that free-market conservatives don't like Trump's protectionism, abortion opponents don't like his reproductive-rights flip-flopping, and defense hawks don't like his opposition to internationalism. Elsewhere at Politico, Jonathan Martin makes the Trump haters' case: Republicans are likely to win the Senate this year, which would constrain a Kamala Harris presidency; it would be easier to run as a Republican in 2026 with Harris in the White House; and Trump is really annoying:

He’s incoherent on abortion rights, unable even to appear at a cemetery without creating a political mess and is so bothered by those who’ve suffered the wounds of war that he slights Medal of Honor recipients. And, running against a female opponent, he’s pushing blowjob jokes about her and his last female opponent.

And that’s just the last two weeks.

This is to say nothing of Trump’s routine self-sabotage, mocking his advisers’ attempt to keep him on message, refusing to learn the basics of issues over nine years after he entered politics and making little effort to appeal to those in his own party who are uneasy with him.

The counterargument is so obvious that even Chris Cillizza gets it:

There is zero interest among the party base to abandon the national populism of Trump.... The party is all about sticking it to the man and giving the finger to the media these days. And the base seems to like it just fine thank you.

It amazes me that almost a decade into Donald Trump there are still Republicans out there who think that somehow this is a blip, an anomaly — that all they need is one more election and then everything is going to go back to “normal.”

THIS is normal now for the Republican party. And will be until Trump dies — and possibly much longer than that.

And besides, the Republican Party is the way it is right now for reasons that go way beyond Trump. Martin is wrong about this:

Republicans vastly underperformed a promising midterm in 2022 in part because of below-replacement-level figures [Trump] elevated. And they may lose winnable races again this year — think the Senate race in Arizona and governor’s race in North Carolina — because Republicans have become overly captive to candidates in his image.

The Republican Senate candidate in Arizona is Kari Lake, who positioned herself as a Trump clone in her failed gubernatorial race two years ago and is doing the same this year in a Senate race she seems to be losing. But the party's gubernatorial candidate in North Carolina is Mark Robinson, whose rise to prominence had nothing to do with Trump.

Just after the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida, Robinson delivered an angry pro-gun speech at a city council hearing in Greensboro, North Carolina. Here's what happened then:

... a clipped version of his speech exploded across conservative messaging apps and social-media feeds.... Mark Walker, a Republican who represented Greensboro in Congress, shared the video on Facebook and racked up millions of views, which Robinson estimates helped his own following double overnight. Within the week, a private car was chauffeuring Robinson to Winston-Salem for an interview with Ainsley Earhardt and Brian Kilmeade on Fox & Friends. “How can we follow you on social media,” asked Earhardt, “and will you ever run for office?” Robinson replied blushingly that he and his wife, Yolanda Hill, had discussed a bid for elected office, but for now he was focused on completing his bachelor’s degree in history from the University of North Carolina-Greensboro.

That calculation began to shift after the National Rifle Association cast Robinson in a commercial featuring video from his speech. “Anyone who is concerned with holding onto the Second Amendment, I absolutely think they should join the NRA,” he said solemnly. The organization flew him to Dallas for its May convention, where President Donald Trump was a speaker. The commander-in-chief did not stop by Robinson’s green room, but Robinson flew home dazzled and started to parlay his underground celebrity into appearances where GOP voters might take notice.... Robinson was fêted by conservative media and gun groups so often — the World Forum on Shooting Activities flew him to Nuremberg, Germany, and gave him an award — that he quit his job at Davis Furniture, a manufacturing plant in nearby High Point.

He ran for lieutenant governor, and won -- but now he's trailing in the governor's race and is on the defensive about multiple scandals and his own inflammatory remarks.

Trump didn't make Mark Robinson a star. Institutions that pre-dated Trump made him a star: Fox and the rest of the right-wing media, along with the NRA and the rest of the gun lobby. And that's the GOP's real problem.

Donald Trump isn't the sole reason that the Republican Party is extreme and unpalatable to many middle-of-the-road voters. The party began its modern era of intolerance in the days of Ronald Reagan, but the extremism metastasized under the influence of talk radio and then Fox News. Now add the podcasts, news and opinion websites, and social media accounts (as well as entire social media platforms), and you've got a well-oiled rage-inducing machine that urges GOP base voters to hate everyone who isn't a right-winger in good standing (whatever that means at the time). Politicians who tap into the rage inevitably succeed, at least in Republican primaries and deep-red states and districts. But normal people are alienated. Republicans can win nationally under these conditions, but just barely.

Trump won't go away no matter what. Martin writes, again incorrectly:

... the more decisively Vice President Kamala Harris wins the popular vote and electoral college the less political oxygen he’ll have to reprise his 2020 antics; and, importantly, the faster Republicans can begin building a post-Trump party.

But Joe Biden's popular-vote win in 2020 was by the second-largest margin of any presidential election in this century. It didn't matter. Even if Harris exceeds Biden's vote margin, Trump will say the election was stolen, and the majority of his voters will believe him. They'll believe him because the right-wing media will amplify his message.

Republicans who are tired of Trumpist tactics should seek to deprive their own media outlets of oxygen. I don't know how that would work, but it's clear that those outlets will continue practicing the politics of rage, paranoia, and conspiratorialism long after the next president is inaugurated. That means Donald Trump or a Trump imitator as the 2028 GOP nominee, and it means more Mark Robinsons in other races. That's the future, unless serious changes are made.