What would happen to the Republicans after Donald Trump? That has been one of the pundits’ favourite themes in the past few months. Maybe the GOP could run against Joe Biden’s massive spending and borrowing splurge, some pondered; or go after some low-hanging woke excesses on the left; or exploit the huge influx of illegal immigrants at the southern border that Biden is bringing about so swiftly; or warn of inflation, or the generosity of pandemic relief holding back the recovery; or find some new young faces to appeal to minorities who moved ever so slightly to the right in the last election. And some Republicans have indeed made gestures in that direction.
But gestures are all they have tried, because of one overriding fact. For the Republicans, there is no ‘after Trump’. He may have absconded to Mar-a-Lago; he may be banned for a bit longer from Twitter; he may be all but absent from television, but the reality is that in 2021, there is no Republican party to speak of. There is the Trump party. And there are a mere handful of Republicans not completely beholden to him whose careers are over. Even though Trump lost his own re-election, along with the House and, more spectacularly, the Senate, this massive, deranged loser still has absolute command of almost the entire voting bloc on the right. The Republican agenda remains Trump’s: keep insisting that the 2020 election was stolen, insist that revenge is necessary and rig the system against the left so that 2020 can never happen again.
Polling shows that a big majority of Republicans still believe the last election was stolen or rigged. And it is impossible to get any Congressional Republican to say publicly that Biden won fairly.
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