If Donald Trump is defeated in six weeks and if the Democrats regain control of the senate, I will pop open my best bottle of champagne and I will even allow myself a good amount of exuberance and celebration. I will not, however, be celebrating the end of darkness and the dawn of light. I will be celebrating my renewed faith that victory is indeed possible, albeit far from secured. The outcome of the November 3 election will either be a descend from disaster to catastrophe for the republic — very possibly the end of it — or it will be a significant victory in a yet to be decided war.
Let’s be clear, the war will not be won with a defeat of Donald Trump, nor even if it’s a decisive landslide. It will not be won if the Democrats additionally prevail in the Senate, the House and local contests. All these would be cause for much delight and optimism, but It is the cancer of Trumpism that must be defeated, the authoritarian, anti-democratic forces that are anathema to the tenets of the Enlightenment, still in its infancy, born a short 300 years ago. Just like it was not Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin who needed to be defeated, it was fascism and communism. These were merely despots who stepped into a vacuum created by the complacency of their time and environment. The war will only be won when that complacency has been rectified.
Political strategists are not prone to hyperbole. They are practitioners of political science and, to the extent that they can restrain their subjectivity, they approach their work as scientists, not advocates of particular persuasions. So it’s notable when they step out of that cold-view mindset and sound the alarm. It is even more notable when large numbers of them abandon a political party in droves and apply their talents to defeating their political alma mater, as many Republican political operatives have in the past four years. Two such former Republican strategists, Rick Wilson and Steve Schmidt, recently engaged in a discussion about a post-Trump world on a podcast hosted by David Plouffe, the political consultant who engineered Barak Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign:
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[Edited excerpts]
DAVID PLOUFFE: … I think there is a misguided hope that [after a Biden victory] we will return to some normalcy… I think the reaction to Trump losing is actually going to be sicker than what we’ve seen during his presidency.
STEVE SCHMIDT: You got that right!
RICK WILSON: I think Trump losing is the end of the beginning. I think Trump losing will set off a set of recriminations on the right… there are people around Trump who believe that violence is on their side… there is a temptation of nationalist populism and of authoritarianism that is very congruent with Trump but it is not exclusive to trump. I mean, a guy like Tom cotton is Donald Trump with better degrees and a little more manners … But there are a lot of folks on the right — and they include people like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio and Josh Hawley — who believe they can take Trumpism and run it through the car wash and say “yeah we are just a little nationalist populism, we are just a little bit of authoritarian sadism, we are just a little bit of ethnically defined politics, and I think that is a danger that we are going to face for a long time… we’re going to need to make sure that we go after those people to take them out of the political process in ways that don’t allow this to spread…There’s going to be a Republican member of Congress from the state of Georgia who is an outright believer in Qanon, who really thinks there are cannibalistic humanoids in underground sex dungeons run by Hillary Clinton… I mean, this is not a normal party anymore. They are allowing the conspiracy DNA and the lunacy DNA to become part of their political character and we’re all going to have to fight back against this, and it’s not going to be over If Donald Trump loses in 2020.
STEVE SCHMIDT: … what sustains a democracy is a baked-in belief by the people in the legitimacy of the system. When that collapses, democracies collapse. And so, you’re going to see, with a trump loss, 25%-26%-27% of the country will not accept the legitimacy of the election, and that will fuel extremism in our politics that is alien to anything we’ve seen in our lifetime at a level of critical mass. And that will be the hard-core base of the republican party. You will have conspiracies that emerge out of this… but mostly what will happen to the party — it’s not a consumer product, it’s not like “our new light beer sucks, we better come up with a new formula” — A political party that’s shrinking, like a white star that’s collapsing, becomes more dense as it shrinks and it heats up. And so the extremism is going to heat up, it’s going to get more. And we are going to have an authoritarian cult of personality that numbers in tens of millions of people in this country, and that ideology that they support, is an un-American ideology. And we should understand something, Trump, and Don Jr., and Ivanka, None of these people are going away. They will continue to be an open and infected sore on our politics, and it will continue to metastasize in a direction that is sinister and ugly divisive and very, very dangerous for the type of society we want to have.
RICK WILSON: He will be a presence in our lives for the long intermediate future and he will be tweeting until he is on his death bed.
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I know how draining and exhausting the past four years have been, and I know how much we crave a return to normalcy. The voices of my numerous liberal friends longing for the days of Ronald Reagan, George W, Bush and Dick Cheney are an unrelenting ear worm trapped in my cranium. I know, I know… But this is just the beginning — that’s the reality. Trump must be defeated but moreover, he must be defeated loudly, incontestingly and convincingly because the narrower a Biden victory, the harder it will subsequently be to continue the war against Trumpism. And the more unequivocal the victory, the easier it will be to clean up the mess Trump will have left behind.
(Listen to the entire podcast here, highly recommended:)
