Today is October 7, 2024. And yes it is the anniversary of the Hamas strike on Israel, a terrible day to be sure. You will be seeing commentary and commemoration of that awful event all day today. But if you cast your mind back a bit farther, to this day in 2016, it is the anniversary of the day that the Access Hollywood tape broke and the GOP had a stark choice: Remove their immoral and crass candidate from the ballot or destroy their party and all that it once stood for. They chose the latter course. Stroll down memory lane with Charlie Sykes and see how it all fell apart.
Late on the afternoon of October 7, 2016, I texted an old friend, fellow Wisconsinite Reince Priebus.
The Access Hollywood videotape had just been released, showing the GOP presidential nominee describing his approach to seducing and perhaps assaulting women. “You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them,” Donald Trump said on the tape. “It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” […]
Trump was due to visit Wisconsin the next day for a rally with Speaker Paul Ryan, their first joint appearance of the campaign. Relations between Trump and Ryan had been fraught, with the speaker accusing his party’s nominee of “textbook racism” while Trump derided the speaker as “our very weak and ineffective leader.” The Wisconsin event was the culmination of Priebus’s peacemaking efforts. Like other members of the GOP mainstream, Priebus had been a Trump skeptic, but as chairman of the Republican National Committee he had embraced Trump’s candidacy with apparent enthusiasm. He was also one of Ryan’s best friends, so the joint event would be a symbol of his efforts to normalize Trump’s candidacy and rally the disparate wings of the GOP behind the erratic billionaire. […]
Despite our deepening political differences, Reince and I had kept in touch throughout the campaign. At lunch in Milwaukee in September, we had talked about our lives after the election. He wanted to stay on as RNC chair to pick up the pieces before returning to law or perhaps a cable television deal. I told him that I was writing a book; he said we should stay in touch because, unlike Trump’s campaign staffers, he had never signed a nondisclosure agreement.
So that afternoon when the tape was released, I texted Priebus. He wasn’t going to allow Trump to drop a bomb on Wisconsin Republicans, was he?
Priebus responded quickly: “I am the guy trying to fix this!” he texted. “I am in tears over this.”
Within a few hours, Ryan withdrew the invitation to Trump.
For a moment, it seemed like a turning point. But it wasn’t, or at least not in the way that I thought it would be.
As we later learned, Priebus told Trump he should drop out of the race (for which Trump never forgave him). Across the country Republicans rescinded their endorsements. Ryan announced he would no longer defend Trump.
That’s all well and fine. But you recall how Trump did nothing to apologize or recant and you may recall Ryan saying, a year after Trump was elected: “We’re with Trump. That’s a choice we made at the beginning of the year. That’s a choice we made during the campaign; . . . we merged our agendas.” The GOP merged their agendas to match the pussy-grabber’s agenda. And that’s when the likes of Eisenhower, Lincoln, Reagan, the lot of them began to roll in their graves.
In retrospect, the Access Hollywood video foreshadowed the degree to which the right was willing to surrender its remaining principles and enable many of Trump’s worst impulses. So it should not have come as a surprise when the GOP stuck with Trump as he became embroiled in a growing series of scandals, fired the FBI director, and tried to obstruct the special counsel’s investigation into his conduct. Nor should it have come as a surprise when evangelical Christian leaders gave the president a pass on reports he had an affair with a porn star and paid her hush money. They were merely reprising the moral compromises they had made during the campaign.
And unfortunately, once you make the initial moral compromise, everything falls apart swiftly thereafter. It’s reminiscent of when I was a teenager in high school and the teachers used to say, “Don’t smoke pot, whatever you do.” That’s because pot was a “threshold drug” and if you started with pot, then next it would be cocaine, hallucinagenics, heroin and then death. In similar fashion, Trump was the threshold candidate. Once he was accepted, then the entire moral house of cards for the GOP fell in short order.
That decision opened the door for Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Herschel Walker, Kari Lake, Mehmet Oz, Madison Cawthorn, Mark Robinson, the entire clown car of deviants and misfits, who don’t belong anywhere near a House or Senate seat.
By any measure, the makeover was remarkable. Until Trump, Republicans were members of a party that insisted that character matters. But goaded into a tribalism that treats ideas, facts, truth, and basic decency as expendable, the GOP seems a party blanched of any fixed principles. “It’s more than strong; it’s tribal in nature,” Corker told the Washington Examiner. “People who tell me, who are out on the trail, say, ‘Look, people don’t ask about issues anymore. They don’t care about issues. They want to know if you’re with Trump or not.’ ” Republican voters shifted so far that loyalty to Trump in the days after the release of the Access Hollywood tape became a litmus test in GOP primary elections in 2018. Campaign ads excoriated Republicans who had withdrawn their endorsements after the release of the tape.
Because the GOP has cast its lot so thoroughly with Trump, he has succeeded in a remarkably short period in moving the window of acceptability in our politics, especially on the right. As a result, the rules of the game have changed in ways that are still hard to grasp, as conservatives accept behaviors and ideological shifts that would have been unacceptable a few years ago. Although optimists continue to insist that our system of checks and balances is holding up well, many of our norms turn out to be based on an honor system rather than hard and fast rules. And when we no longer have honorable people in power, those norms turn out to be more fragile that we had imagined.
The Overton Window gets expanded as a matter of course as the years go by. But in the era of Trump, it has been smashed to shards, perhaps irrevocably. Now we have an overtly fascist candidate in Trump, one who declares he will be a dictator — while softening it with a “for one day” modifier — funny ha ha, and he gets standing ovations at rallies when he talks of incarcerating and deporting massive numbers of The Other, namely “migrants” the scourge of civilization this time out.
The consequences of the right’s capitulation are likely to be far-reaching and of long duration. Tainted by association with Trump, Republicans are shedding support among young voters, who disapprove of the president by a margin of more than 40 points in one poll. For many of those voters, the face of conservatism will continue to be ignorant, bigoted, and cruel, and polls suggest that the right could face a generational political tsunami as a result. At the same time, Republicans are embracing hardline immigration policies (travel bans, deportations, a wall) and nativist rhetoric that alienate moderates and drive minority voters away from the party, perhaps for a generation or more.
Again I predict:
- Trump will lose on November 5;
- When he loses the GOP will abandon him and it will be a remake of the Nazis abandoning Hitler post WWII, “I was never really a Nazi/MAGA. I just went along to get along;”
- After Trump is abandoned in droves, then what’s left of a sane and normal Republican party will somehow rally and form some new party, or revamp the platform of the existing one;
- Or, alternatively, there will be a MAGA/Anti-Democracy party, very likely headed by J.D. Vance, and there will be the old school GOP, in some new configuration. And what America will look like with a political triangle like that, I have no idea.
We’ll have a lot of answers on November 7, that we currently do not have right now, today.
I choose #4
With the vote on the right-wing side split between a far right and a far, far right, (actually fascist) The ‘conservative’, now more accurately described as ‘reactionary’ vote is reduced to it’s true size. Thus leaving the real party of the center the Democratic Party, to live up to it’s name as the upholder of democracy and governance by the people, for the people, instead of the unstable oligarchy the other side prefers.
Dems could be in power for some time, implementing actual popular policies that work better for everyone and the nation and the world.
We shall see what happens. will orangeman concede or will his supporters start an uprising worse than January 6th. Then, and only then, will we know the direction that will be chosen. First Vice President Harris has to be elected President!
“will orangeman concede or will his supporters start an uprising worse than January 6th?” Well, if he doesn’t and they do then they will likely find out how many of the rest of us have had it up to here with their whiny, petty, grievance filled bullshit and believe me – It Will Be Wild!
There is talk of civil war, suggesting an uprising by an organised force. Has that force been identified? And its leadership? General Trump would be the figurehead but where are the strategic leaders? Trump soundly trounced in the vote/electoral college counts (with, let us pray) that momentum changeing Congress numbers will lead to a lot of “not me” ass-covering by GOP figures. To me, the more likely scenario resulting might be localised outbursts of dissension venting frustration, potentially guerilla/terrorist actions for a period. Probably not sustained as legitimate forces, legal and military, are brought to bear on the anti-democratic defectors.