During the first trial of Donald Trump, some 13 months ago, the former president commanded near-total fealty from his party. His conservative defenders were ardent and numerous, and Republican votes to convict him — for pressuring Ukraine to help him smear Joe Biden — were virtually nonexistent.
In his second trial, Mr Trump — no longer president — received less ferocious Republican support. His apologists were sparser in number and seemed to lack in enthusiasm. Far fewer conservatives defended the substance of his actions, instead dwelling on technical complaints while skirting the issue of his guilt on the charge of inciting the 6 January riot at the Capitol.
And this time, seven Republican senators voted with 50 Democrats to convict Mr Trump — the most bipartisan repudiation ever delivered in an impeachment process.
Yet the great majority of Republicans refused to find Mr Trump guilty, leaving the chamber well short of the two-thirds majority needed to convict him.
Even Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who startled his party last month with a sharp denunciation of Mr Trump’s conduct, voted to acquit, relying on thin procedural arguments. Mr Trump’s acquittal stands as a defining moment for the party he molded into a cult of personality, one likely to linger in the eyes of voters and leave a deep blemish in the historical record. Now that Republicans have passed up an opportunity to banish him through impeachment, it is not clear when — or how — they might go about transforming their party into something other than a vessel for a semiretired demagogue who was repudiated by a majority of voters.
Defeated by Mr Biden, stripped of his social-media megaphone, impeached again by the House of Representatives and accused of betraying his oath by a handful of Republican dissenters, Mr Trump remains the dominant force in right-wing politics. Even offline and off camera at his Palm Beach, Florida, estate, and offering only a feeble impeachment defense through his legal team in Washington, the former president continues to command unmatched admiration from conservative voters.
The determination of so many Republican lawmakers to discard the mountain of evidence against Mr Trump — including the revelation that he sided with the rioters in a heated conversation with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy — reflects how thoroughly the party has come to be defined by one man, and how divorced it now appears to be from any deeper set of policy aspirations and ethical or social principles.
After campaigning last year on a message of law and order, Republican lawmakers decided not to apply those standards to a former commander in chief who made common cause with an organised mob. A party that often proclaimed “Blue Lives Matter” balked at punishing a politician whose enraged supporters assaulted the Capitol Police. A generation’s worth of rhetoric about personal responsibility appeared to founder against the perceived imperative of accommodating Mr Trump.
Lanhee Chen, a Hoover Institution scholar and policy adviser to a number of prominent Republican officials, said the GOP had to redefine itself as a governing party with ambitions beyond fealty to a single leader.
“When the conservative movement, when the Republican Party, have been successful, it’s been as a party of ideas,” Chen said. “So long as we focus on personalities, we’re going to be talking about Marjorie Taylor Greene and Trump and this person or that person.”
Mr Chen lamented that too many in the party were still pursuing a Trump-first approach to politics: “Many Republicans are more focused on talking about him than about what’s next, and that’s a very dangerous place to be,” he said.
Agent of political chaos
Mr Trump’s tenure as an agent of political chaos is almost certainly not over. The former president and his advisers have already made plain that they intend to use the 2022 midterm elections as an opportunity to reward allies and mete out revenge to those who crossed Mr Trump. And hanging over the party is the possibility of another run for the White House in three years.
It remains to be seen how aggressively the party’s leadership will seek to counter those efforts. Mr McConnell has told associates that he intends to wage a national battle in 2022 against far-right candidates and to defend incumbents targeted by Mr Trump.
But by declining to convict Mr Trump, Mr McConnell invited questions about whether he will be any more willing to fight Mr Trump openly on the campaign trail than he was on the Senate floor.
Liz Cheney was one of 10 Republican House Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump.
Getty
Only a few senior Republicans have gone so far as to say that it is time for Mr Trump to lose his lordly status in the party altogether. Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the highest-ranking House Republican to support impeachment, said in a recent television interview that Mr Trump “does not have a role as a leader of our party going forward.”
Ms Cheney may be emerging as the de facto leader of anti-Trump forces in the House, and she is certain to face a fierce challenge from the right in her home district next year. While she beat back an effort from Mr Trump loyalists to remove her from her leadership position, five dozen of her Republican colleagues voted to depose her even after a plea from Mr McCarthy to keep her in her post.
Among those hard-line members, it may have been Ms Greene, the extremist Georgia freshman, who best summed up Mr Trump’s place in the GOP: “The party is his,” she said in a news conference earlier this month.
Still, Senator Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, a longtime Trump ally who has been critical of the former president since the November election, told reporters in the Capitol on Friday that he believed Mr Trump would be weakened by the impeachment trial, even if the Senate opted not to convict him. (Mr Cramer, who previously described the trial as “the stupidest week in the Senate,” voted for acquittal.)
“He’s made it pretty difficult to gain a lot of support,” Mr Cramer said of Trump. “Now, as you can tell, there’s some support that will never leave, but I think that is a shrinking population and probably shrinks a little bit after this week.”
An even more categorical prognosis came from Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, a maverick Republican who is up for reelection in 2022. The evidence of the trial, she said this week, was damning. “I just don’t see how Donald Trump will be reelected to the presidency again,” Ms Murkowski said.
Even in places where Mr Trump retains a powerful following, there is a growing recognition that the party’s loss of the White House and the Senate in 2020, and the House two years before that, did not come about by accident — and that simply campaigning as the Party of Mr Trump is not likely to be sufficiently appealing to win back control of Congress next year.
In Georgia — the site of some of the party’s most stinging defeats of the 2020 campaign — Jason Shepherd, a candidate for state party chair, said he saw Republicans as grappling with the kind of identity crisis that comes periodically with “a loss after you’ve had a big personality leading the party,” likening Mr Trump’s place in the party to that of Ronald Reagan.
Republicans, Mr Shepherd said, had to find a way to appeal to the voters Mr Trump brought into their coalition while communicating a message that the party is “bigger than Donald Trump.” But he acknowledged that the next wave of candidates was already looking to the former president as a model.
“Republicans are trying to position themselves as the next Donald Trump,” he said. “Maybe, in terms of personality, a kinder and gentler Donald Trump, but someone who will stand up to the left and fight for conservative principles that do unite Republicans.”
