Lindsey Graham has spoken the truth, though I’m quite sure he isn’t aware of how much truth he has told.
In an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News Thursday night, Senator Graham made it clear that without Donald Trump the Republican Party is literally nothing.
“I would just say to my Republican colleagues, can we move forward without President Trump? The answer is no. I’ve always liked Liz Cheney, but she’s made a determination that the Republican Party can’t grow with President Trump. I’ve determined we can’t grow without him.”
Let me say categorically that I agree with Lady Lindsey. What he doesn’t understand is that Liz Cheney understands this, too. Senator Cheney has made a bigger decision. She understands that it is America itself that can’t grow with Donald Trump as a serious part of the conversation. The Republican Party will most assuredly suffer without him, but that is the cost of holding on to the founding principles that the country embraced at its inception. Lindsey thinks Cheney believes she is trying to build the party. She isn’t. She’s trying to save the country.
Graham’s calculus is accurate. If elections are fair and the unethical practices of voter suppression and gerrymandering aren’t maintained, the Republican Party is a dinosaur and the meteor has already hit. Cheating to win is all that is left and the numbers bear this out. Democratic registrations make up 31% of the American electorate while only 25% identify as Republicans. When independents are included in the question of how the electorate leans, 50% either identify or lean Democratic and only 39% identify or lean Republican. It is a large and decisive advantage for the blue team that has been undermined by dirty election tactics.
The Republican side is fully aware of this reality, and the fact is Graham was speaking to this truth directly with his utter fealty to Donald J. Trump. The 45th President has no identifiable ethical center, no moral compass of any kind. It turns out that Coach Lombardi was wrong. Winning isn’t the only thing. Winning without a core morality is simply corruption, but Trump has mastered the pursuit of winning without rules, without consequence. It has worked for him for a lifetime, and it allowed him to overwhelm the Republican Party. When it wasn’t enough for the Party to win in 2020, Senator Graham and the rest of the party knew that the only hope was to double down on dirty politics and election fraud. In fact, they have known this for some time.
In March of 2020 the reality of the seriousness of the Corona-19 virus had begun to become clear, and a Democratic push to reform election regulations to make voting safer in America began to take root. Vote-by-mail, early voting and other adjustments to state election regulations were being forwarded and many of them garnered bi-partisan support in state legislatures and state supreme courts. On the federal level some of these measures were suggestions for the forthcoming stimulus bill but were successfully shot down by the the majority Republican senate. Donald Trump inadvertently admitted to why these ideas were unacceptable, and it had nothing to do with helping the American voter cope with an unprecedented emergency. Not remotely.
In an appearance on Fox and Friends on March 30, 2020 Trump revealed what was really at stake if Americans were actually encouraged to vote. “The things they had in there were crazy. They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” That was what was really at stake. It wasn’t the sacredness of each citizen’s vote, it was the possibility that voters wouldn’t vote Republican and no matter what it took, no matter what ethical lines might have to be crossed, that was not acceptable.
As far back as 1980 Paul Weyrich, a consequential conservative activist, new exactly what was at stake. “I don’t want everybody to vote” he famously said. “As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
One year after Trump’s disgusting admission on Fox, Arizona found itself defending its voter restrictions in a pair of consolidated cases challenging a state law prohibiting ballot collection and a policy of tossing ballots cast in the wrong district. Newly seated Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked the attorney defending the Arizona restrictions, Michael Carvin, what interest the Arizona Republican National Committee had in keeping them in force. His answer was curiously straight forward and deeply disturbing. “Because it puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats. Politics is a zero-sum game, and every extra vote they get through unlawful interpretation of Section 2 hurts us. It’s the difference between winning an election 50-49 and losing an election 54-50.” Carvin’s definition of an unlawful interpretation was anything that disadvantaged the Republicans. The Court will rule on this case sometime this summer, but oddsmakers are giving Arizona a good chance of winning their case to suppress the vote.
Which brings us back to this week. Lindsey Graham is exactly right when he says that Trump, or at least the lack of ethics and moral foundation that he represents, is the very key to a continuation of the Republican Party at all. So much of the groundwork has already been done to allow this strategy to succeed by refusing to allow a Democratic president to seat his choice of a justice for the Supreme Court. Mitch McConnell invoking the nuclear option to allow a simple majority vote to seat nominees to the entirety of the federal court led the way to a series of unqualified but deeply partisan judges filling vacant posts. Hundreds of them. It seems less and less likely that the courts will be the cure to a conservative coup of the United States.
Graham attacked Liz Cheney for her one crime against the Republican Party. She spoke the truth. She has refused to support The Big Lie, and The Big Lie has become the very core of the Republican Party. The GOP has no other issue, no other platform, no other plank to a platform. The Big Lie started with Donald Trump, was perpetuated by Donald Trump and is now the basic campaign strategy for any candidate supported by the RNC. It has expanded into an entire platform that includes many lies on many topics including masks, vaccines, economic policy, Biden’s mental competency. Lies expand to conspiracy theories that are encouraged to grow, and it has been more effective than we all want to acknowledge. The first Q candidates won seats in Congress, outright unhinged conspiracy supporters that now have votes in our national government.
The majority of Americans are as appalled by these turns of events as you probably are reading this.
What Donald Trump, Lindsey Graham and the Republican Party have realized is that doesn’t matter at all.