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As a historian, I am always interested in origin stories, and we should never forget the GOP’s early steps towards its own destruction, when it embraced candidate Donald Trump. It is easy to turn away from the dispiriting daily parade of ritual humiliations, loyalty tests, self-debasements, and performances for an audience of One that now passes for GOP politics, but that would be a mistake. The conversion of the GOP into an openly authoritarian party in its domestic and foreign policies is one of the biggest stories of the 21st century.
So here is an abridged and edited version of an article I published in the New York Review of Books on August 12, 2020. It looked back on the GOP’s early embrace of Trump, who was testing the system’s tolerance for extremists —testing how much lawlessness they were comfortable with, meaning how much they would let him get away with due to their spinelessness.
This was why he made that January 2016 boast that "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters.” It was not exactly a typical campaign speech, and the media did not really know what to do with it.
I was walking through a park when I saw that speech on my phone, and I had a sinking feeling: this was all too familiar to me as a historian of Fascism. So I watched very carefully what happened next, and who came forth to kiss the ring after that gangster audition.
Many more pivotal moments with Trump awaited the GOP: the death threats for disloyal votes on impeachments, the putdowns on national television, having to lie that Trump won the 2020 election, and the final shocks of Trump sending a violent mob after them on January 6 and then asking them to praise their attackers as patriots. That broke the party for good.
You are nothing, I am everything, the strongman tells his faithful, until they believe both parts of the equation.
Let’s travel back in time to the moments when different decisions, or cracks in the code of omertà, would have interrupted the rise of Trump and the assault on American democracy that we are living through today.
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While some authoritarians create their own parties (Mussolini’s Fascism and Bukele’s “New Party” come to mind), Trump had no ready-made political vehicle for his ambitions. He had to win over the Grand Old Party to gain credibility and access to its political machine. Cooptation is the term political scientists use for the way authoritarians bind individuals and groups to them. It can also be considered as a form of corruption, given the ethical compromises and changes in personal and professional practices that cooperating with amoral and violent individuals entails.
The Republican party, and the robust media universe that supported it, were ready for a far-right, rule-breaking, and polarizing personality like Trump. A 2012 assessment by the political scientists Norman J. Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann captures key elements of an illiberal move that by 2016 had primed Republicans to accept Trump’s candidacy:
The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.
By the time Trump started his candidacy, the Republican party was a party of white supremacist zealots, gun-rights extremists, and leaders like McConnell who had long approved of subverting voting rights and other bedrocks of democracy. This is why Trump’s many actions that promised a decidedly anti-democratic future for America were not deal-breakers: the retweets of neo-Nazi memes, the dark allusions to having his political opponent, Hillary Clinton, shot, and much more.
Jeff Sessions: Used and Discard
Still, the aspiring President needed access and credibility at the start from established figures like former Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL), who joined the ranks of history’s first-hour enablers. These individuals back the extremist when he most needs it. “I have a man who is respected by everybody here…I’m becoming mainstream,” crowed Trump as he introduced Sessions as a surprise guest at a February 2016 event.
No matter that just weeks before, Trump had boasted about “shooting someone” and still keeping his followers – shorthand for saying that if elected he would consider himself above the law. Sessions beamed and dutifully donned the red MAGA hat handed to him as he left the stage. A year later, he resigned from the Senate position he’d held for twenty years to take up the Attorney General position that was the reward for his loyalty.
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These first-hour enablers are often later discarded when they cease to be useful, and such was the fate of Sessions. During his confirmation hearings for Attorney General, Sessions behaved in conformity with the Trump code of loyalty, swearing under oath that he had no contacts with Russian officials during the 2016 campaign. When the news broke that he had met twice with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, contradicting his testimony, Sessions recused himself from Robert Mueller’s special investigation into Russian interference with the election.
Sessions lasted as Attorney General until late 2018, but Trump repeatedly ridiculed him, including calling him a “dumb Southerner,” and the statement Sessions released to explain his recusal, “I do not and will not break the law,” only made him look worse in Trump’s eyes. By the time Sessions handed in his resignation, Trump was already looking for a more suitable co-conspirator. He would find it in William Barr, a man who Trump called “my Attorney General.”
Now forced to run for the Senate seat he’d held for so many years, Sessions entered the most delicate phase of the authoritarian leader-follower drama: the quest for forgiveness and a return to grace. “Out of the 100 Senators I was the first to stand with @realDonaldTrump and I will keep fighting for him and his agenda,” Sessions tweeted in November 2019.
For Trump, this display of weakness warranted further humiliation. He loudly endorsed Sessions’ opponent, former Auburn University football coach Tommy Tuberville, and in May 2020 dealt Sessions a death blow by tweet: “Alabama, do not trust Jeff Sessions. He let our Country down.” “I did my duty & you’re damn fortunate. It protected the rule of law and resulted in your exoneration,” Sessions responded sourly. On July 14th, Sessions lost the primary, ending his political career.
Kevin McCarthy: Truthteller Turned into Lackey
Trump also needed people who would lie for him and keep his secrets. Corruption is a process as well as a set of practices. It involves gradual changes in ethical and behavioral norms that make things that were illegal or immoral become acceptable, whether election fraud, lying to the public, treason, or sexual assault, and staying silent about the leader’s incompetence and illegal actions.
Paul Ryan, then Speaker of the House, and Kevin McCarthy, then House Majority Leader, set the tone here. “I think Putin pays Trump,” McCarthy commented in a private meeting of Republican luminaries in June 2016. Ryan shut down the conversation immediately, swearing everyone to secrecy about the “Russia question” – the original sin of the Trump presidency. A month later, Trump was awarded the GOP nomination.
When the exchange leaked a year later, McCarthy’s spokesperson claimed it was a “failed attempt at humor,” but tragedy is the only genre that captures all that has followed as the Trump administration has gone to lengths extraordinary in democracies (but normal in autocracies) to keep its secrets.
The multiple purges (FBI director James Comey, diplomats, Inspectors General), the targeting of American intelligence and the press, the attempt to manipulate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that led to Trump’s impeachment by the House in 2019– all of it was made possible by the careful enforcement of a pact of omertà taken by the GOP leadership. McCarthy, as House Minority Leader, had a role in this, since his real job was “making the President happy,” including by voting 97.7% of the time in accordance with Trump’s wishes.
Over at the Senate, fear of running afoul of Trump motivated the near-unanimous vote against impeachment (Mitt Romney was the exception). Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a man with “no ideology except his own political power,” as his biographer John Dyche puts it, once again steered the ship to save Trump’s Presidency.
Even the June 2020 revelation that Trump knew Putin was putting a bounty on American soldiers in Afghanistan and said nothing– the ultimate betrayal by a Commander in Chief – did not move the needle. The GOP had chosen Trump over the American people.
“Is there no bottom?” legions complain on Twitter, citing the President’s latest lies, incitements to violence, and flattering comments about murderous autocrats. It is precisely this absence of a bottom that draws many to leaders like Trump, who make the unthinkable possible.
Yet it would be a mistake to conclude that Trump somehow hijacked the GOP. The GOP was already becoming a Trumpian party when Trump appeared to complete its self-destruction. Enticing and intimidating individuals into becoming their worst selves is what authoritarians do best. On this count, Trump has succeeded magnificently.
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