As GOP leaders get in line, the outlook for democracy looks grim—in Ukraine, and even in America.
In 2016, Republicans could profess some uncertainty about the kind of president Donald Trump would be. Maybe the office would change the man? Maybe the party elite could bend Trump to its will?
But in 2024, there’s no uncertainty. Trump’s party is signing up for the ride, knowing exactly what the ride is. Pro-Ukraine senators are working to elect a president who will cut off Ukraine, knowing that he will cut off Ukraine. Pro-NATO senators are working to elect a president who will wreck NATO, knowing that he will wreck NATO.
Many top Republicans have been hoping for a way out of their Trump dilemma. That’s why Nikki Haley has raised tens of millions of dollars and Ron DeSantis has raised hundreds of millions. It’s why, even now, more than half of the Republican senators have not endorsed a primary candidate. And that’s why so many conservatives get twitchy when told that the 2024 presidential race is already a binary choice between Trump and Joe Biden. It’s also why the lopsided nomination contest will continue its fictional progress for some while longer.
But the exits are blocked. The many criminal and civil legal processes against Trump were too slow to rescue his party from him. The thesis that Trump might be disqualified under the Fourteenth Amendment awaits a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. The Republican contest will be over within weeks.
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That heralds potential disaster for American allies, for the United States’ standing in the world, and above all for the invaded democracy of Ukraine. The risk is apparent already from House Republicans, who have blocked Biden’s request for emergency aid to Ukraine, to Israel, and to border enforcement for nearly 100 days, since October 20, 2023. But until now, the Republican Party in the Senate has tried to keep its distance from Trump’s pro-dictator foreign policy. The ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has been an especially stalwart friend of Ukraine. Senator James Risch has voted for every assistance package for Ukraine—and criticized the Biden administration for not sending more, faster.
Risch has warned that America’s global stature depends on the outcome of the Ukraine war:
If you think Xi [Jinping] isn’t watching every single thing that goes on as far as our commitment to see this thing through, you’re badly mistaken. He is watching this—and I have reason to believe that for a fact—very, very closely, and watching every utterance that comes out of the United States Congress, out of the administration, and out of the American people as to what kind of a stomach we’ve got to see this thing through.
Thanks in large part to Republicans such as Risch, U.S. aid to Ukraine flowed in 2022 and 2023. The impending Trump renomination signals that pro-democracy Republicans such as Risch are losing the argument inside their party. Last week, Risch endorsed Trump for the GOP presidential nomination, the 26th Republican senator to do so.
When so-called Team Normal Republicans submitted to Trump’s nomination in 2016, they tended to take refuge in wishful thinking: The system would constrain him; things wouldn’t be so bad.
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Eight years later, there can be no illusions. Risch himself called the events of January 6, 2021, “unpatriotic and un-American in the extreme.” He had reason for disgust: His own Senate suite was trashed that day by the attackers. One of them defecated on the floor in a room adjacent to Risch’s office.
Soon after Risch’s endorsement, Senator Marco Rubio followed. Unlike Risch—whose outward appearance is all business, unemotional—Rubio has made clear that he personally detests Trump. In 2016, Rubio called Trump a con man, an embarrassment, a friend of dictators and a threat to allies, and “the most vulgar person ever to aspire to the presidency.” Yet now Rubio praises Trump as a candidate who will defy special interests and accomplish domestic reforms—praise that would have forced a hollow laugh or pained grimace from Rubio in 2016.
None of this is hard to explain. Republicans who get crosswise with Trump lose their career. There aren’t many volunteers to follow Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, or Mitt Romney.
Still, if this is not hard to explain, it’s hard to face: After the Iowa caucus, the Republican Party is all but certain to renominate Trump for the presidency. He will be the GOP’s first three-time nominee since Richard Nixon (in 1960, 1968, and 1972)—and the first ever Republican former presidential incumbent to be renominated after losing reelection. Defeated incumbent George H. W. Bush did not get a third chance. Defeated incumbent Herbert Hoover did not get a third chance. Defeated incumbent Benjamin Harrison did not get a third chance. But defeated incumbent Trump will.
Even after Trump consolidates the nomination, the choice will not literally be binary. Republican-friendly donors will support third-way choices—the super PAC for anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy received $5 million, more than half its total fundraising through June, from a single GOP mega-donor—not because any can win, but in hope of draining votes from Biden for Trump’s benefit. But the choice will be binary in that only one of two people can plausibly be the next president: Biden or Trump.
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From then on, the true center of the story will be not the choice, but the chooser.
What kind of people are Americans, anyway? Trump has made clear, without illusions, that his ballot issue in 2024 is to rehabilitate and ratify his attempt to overturn the election of 2020. He is running to protect himself from the legal consequences of that attempt. But even more fundamentally, he is running to justify himself for attempting it. In 2016, Trump opponents warned that he might refuse to leave office if defeated. In 2024, Trump himself is arguing that he was right to refuse to leave office when defeated, and he is asking Americans to approve his refusal.
If he should return to the presidency in 2025, we have no reason to expect him to leave in 2029. So maybe the issue on the ballot in 2024 is not a choice at all, but a much more open-ended question. We know who Biden is. We know who Trump is. Who are we?
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