The Power Grab Behind the Unfittest Candidate

Underneath all of the campaigning and commentary and polling and panic of the 2024 election cycle, there is a truth that we are collectively unable to plainly state: Donald Trump is unfit to be President of the United States. 

He is unfit in his temperament: childish and thin-skinned, easily distracted and baited, quick to react with anger to perceived slights, whiny and recalcitrant when he does not immediately get his way. He is unfit in outlook: Trump has few sincerely held beliefs and no understanding of or interest in the details and nuances of policy, frequently frames the purpose of government as a protection racket, and reaches for violence—through either the police or the military—when met with even peaceful disagreement. He is unfit in judgment: routinely accepting unvetted information and outright propaganda from fringe extremist groups, embracing specious and uninformed arguments if they flatter his ego, fill his coffers, or affirm his beliefs, rejecting important and actionable facts if they contradict his worldview, and coordinating with bad actors from foreign despots to domestic terrorist organizations. And even if one were to treat this litany of offenses against decency and common sense as a matter of opinion, Donald Trump has rendered himself unfit for any office of public trust at any level of government in the United States for his actions from November 3, 2020 to January 6, 2021, wherein he betrayed his oath to the Constitution in his prolonged and corrupt efforts to overturn the will of voters in five state elections and install himself as dictator, culminating in whipping up a lynch mob and sending them to capture and kill his vice-president and any resistant member of Congress.

Yet none of this is the focus of our endless election season. The press condense and rewrite Trump’s disturbing and unhinged statements, and downplay his advanced age, despite expressing concerns about the sitting president’s age-related health and mental acuity. Instead, Trump’s manifest unfitness is not the subject of breathless speculation or insider scoops, nor are there any questions to officials or voters as to how they can support someone who does not meet the barest requirements for conduct as night manager at a truck stop Dairy Queen let alone Commander-in-Chief of the most expensive military and the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. This is not because Donald Trump has some secret talent for distraction or imperviousness to reality, no matter how reporters who cover the campaign will insist otherwise. We don’t talk about the obvious fact of Trump’s disqualification because the Republican Party provides him with cover.

Whenever Trump breaks a norm, crosses a line, or undermines democracy, elected and appointed Republicans are right there to protect him. He is always to be taken seriously but not literally, or literally but not seriously; he is forever two weeks away from a plan or a program or an idea that will solve whatever problem he is pretending to care about. For Republican officials and voters, there is nothing that Trump could do that would earn their scorn. He disgorges an outrageous and deliberate lie; Republicans either repeat it or feign ignorance. He attacks fellow citizens for their race, their ethnicity, their religion, their political ideology—all protected as equal under the Constitution—and the entire GOP normalizes and accepts this new standard of Trumpian politics. Trump violates his sacred oath to the Constitution, betrays the country and the people it serves, attempts to murder and supplant Congress, and ignores pleas to stop the violence; Republican senators act confused as to whether they have any right to impose political consequences for his transgressions against the nation and its government.

The chattering classes driving the coverage of politics take this protectiveness for granted as a product of Trump’s takeover of the party, or the result of his powerful cult of personality, or even the legitimate desire of the voters. It is not. Peek behind the shield of subservience they have given Trump, and it becomes obvious that the Republican Party is acting out of self-interest. With him, they are united in service of an incurious, incoherent would-be dictator who is nonetheless capable of nominating judges and signing executive orders. Without him, the GOP is a party that has won the popular vote at the presidential level once in the last three decades, with undesirable and discredited ideas about the economy, the environment, technology, and social issues, and a fractious, inchoate coalition that is more likely to fight among one another than fight for a coherent platform. As long as they can hold the illusion of a functional Trump, they can keep the party itself from unraveling.

With his open defiance of political gravity, Trump papers over cracks that began appearing in the Republican Party more than 15 years ago, with the first election of Barack Obama. His ascendance to the presidency was presaged and accompanied by two Democratic wave elections in 2006 and 2008, the result of voter backlash to four solid years of a GOP governing trifecta—the first since the New Deal. With control of the House, Senate, and White House, Republicans had quickly put their governing philosophy into effect, passing priorities on tax policy, deregulation, foreign policy, education, and stocking the courts with compliant conservatives. The effect would be a disaster for the country, including widespread corporate malfeasance, directionless and deadly wars with no end, and the drowning of a U.S. city due to rank incompetence, topped off with the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. The sitting Republican administration was so deeply unpopular that George W. Bush didn’t even appear at the 2008 RNC in person.

On the same night that Democrats were celebrating the historic inauguration of the first Black man to be President of the United States, Republicans met to determine what their recovery from this political disaster would look like. Under normal circumstances, the options would be reform—changing the policies of the party to better serve the needs and desires of the electorate—or resignation. They could do what Republicans did the last time they had been beaten that badly, and act as the loyal opposition to a Democratic Party that would define the agenda for generations. With GOP leadership collected among the ruins of their governance, they chose neither and went with a third option: revanchism.

From that point, Republicans abandoned their commitment to public service, to acting in the best interests of their constituents, to forwarding policy that improves the well-being of the nation. Instead, the GOP obstructed and denied every effort to repair the damage they had done to the country in hopes the backlash would create a wave that would usher them back into power. That this electoral success would happen at the expense of recovery for millions was immaterial. What mattered most was control over the government.

And they got it.

The power-first philosophy churned up candidates that were unqualified and unprepared, incurious and unserious, and full of bizarre and offensive ideas about the role of government in people’s lives. It cost Republicans control of the Senate in 2010 and 2012, and made governing impossible in the House, where increasingly radical members demanded extreme acts of harm to the basic function of government to force their unviable ideas through the deliberative process. Rhetorically, they began characterizing Democrats as an internal enemy instead of a differing political philosophy. In their words, Barack Obama was a usurper, a Manchurian candidate, someone who didn’t belong to the American project and did not want it to succeed. And in the absence of any existing political figure who could bring together the cruelty that the base had been taught to crave with the bombast necessary to distract from the policy failures, one emerged using hatred of the first Black president to bridge the gap.

It was in this desperate grab for power at any cost that the Republican Party became the property of Donald Trump. They simply didn’t know it at the time. Just as Trump is unfit to serve, the Republican Party is unfit to govern. They have abandoned any obligation to the public interest, dismissed the legitimacy of their political opposition, and rejected popular sovereignty. To admit that Trump is wholly unqualified for the presidency is to reveal the brokenness of the party that would elevate him to run for it. 

Yet Republicans are also trapped by their reliance on Trump, his increasingly erratic behavior, his declining capacity, his diminished persona. Attempts to copy his style or provide substance to his blather—in the likes of GOP Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Matt Gaetz (R-FL), PA State Sen. Doug Mastriano, and incendiary bigot NC Lt. Governor and gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson—have landed the party with multiple duds in key offices, while the last of the traditional Republicans are unable to create any distance between themselves and the top of the ticket, lest they provoke a tantrum. So the party diverts and distracts and denies the headlines, the babbling, the open incompetence, the blood-soaked threats, trying to hold onto the Trump ride one last time, to see if he can lead them into authority that they will never have to relinquish.

For years, our polity has been told to see the fineness of Trump’s appeal, to imagine the details of his plans or the possibilities of a pivot to a more serious, more capable leader. We have been asked to disregard the obvious, deny the blatant, abandon the plain facts of who he is as a person and what he has done to the country. Rejecting Trump will require more from us than seeing him for what he is, open and revealed. We will have to peek behind the overt unfitness of Donald Trump, to see the naked ambition of the Republican Party and what they would expose us to for their own power.