Last Sunday, Ross Douthat ran a column, “Three Paths to Containing Trump”, acknowledging in a fairly straight-forward manner that Donald Trump was a monster, that the danger that he would be the Republican nominee in 2024 was a real one, and that a “strategy” was therefore needed to forestall this danger.
The three strategies Ross identifies are liberal Democratic, moderate Democratic, and moderate Republican. After having done so, he then concludes with a near shoulder shrug:
This is the point when I’m supposed to tell you which of these three approaches will actually Stop Trump and which will ignominiously fail. But the frustrating truth is that as adaptations to the unprecedented weirdness of the Trump phenomenon, all three attitudes — maximalist, moderate and deliberately inactive — seem somewhat reasonable.
Which means, in our era of guaranteed surprises, that all three will probably be rendered irrelevant by some turn of events between now and 2024.
Well, it seems that a number of people called him on this je ne sais quoi insouciance, to the extent that Ross rather quickly wrote a follow-up, “Are We Destined for a Trump Coup in 2024?” to defend himself against charges of passivity, made specifically by substacker Jeet Heer, to wit:
None of the three measures seems plausible. The maximalist approach could work but it is being roadblocked by moderate Democrats. The moderate approach, even if it leads to a Biden re-election, does nothing to slow down GOP radicalization. Joe Biden’s current push for bipartisan outreach is no more likely to tame the GOP’s extremism than Barack Obama’s similar effort in his first term. The deliberately inactive approach doesn’t even seem like a tactic, just an apologia for surrender.
Ross’s response is to say, hey, we Republicans aren’t that bad!
The Republican leadership is still doing what it did throughout Trump’s presidency, trying to talk about anything other than his sins, excesses and potential crimes. That desire to change the subject is why Cheney lost her job and why the Jan. 6 commission lost its vote; it’s also why Trump survived his impeachment in 2019 and countless lesser scandals throughout his four years. But in 2020, the Republican desire to change the subject did not translate into a willingness to foment a constitutional crisis to steal an election from Joe Biden. So why assume that this willingness will suddenly materialize in 2024?
“But in 2020, the Republican desire to change the subject did not translate into a willingness to foment a constitutional crisis to steal an election from Joe Biden”? Excusez-moi? After the January 6 storming of the Capitol, a majority of the Republicans in the House voted to dispute the awarding of Arizona’s electoral votes to Joe Biden, by a margin of 121-83. They obviously were willing to foment a constitutional crisis to maintain in the White House a man who had lost the popular vote by a margin of more than 7 million.
Douthat continues his deliberate distortion of the historical record in his discussion of state-level “reform” of election laws by Republican legislatures:
The Republican-backed bills that purport to fight voter fraud are obviously partially sops to conservative paranoia — but as such, they’re designed to head off cries of fraud, claims of ballots shipped in from China or conjured up in Italy. That sort of heading-off strategy may fail, of course, but for now, exercises like the Arizona audit have mostly divided grass-roots conservatives against one another rather than set up some sort of Tea Party wave that would sweep out all the quisling legislators who failed to #StopTheSteal in 2020.
This isn’t laughable. It’s disgusting. The National Review, not exactly a left-wing outfit, identifies the following faults in the Republicans’ “clean elections” bill in Texas:
The Texas legislation creates more opportunities to challenge whether signatures on ballots and registrations match. While signature verification is a safeguard, it is also one that is prone to subjectivity and delay. …
States should not lower the bar for challenging [election] outcomes, and they should not empower elected officials such as state legislatures to overturn election results. The Texas bill allows a court to overturn an election without proof that illegal votes actually changed the outcome. It instead provides, “If the number of votes illegally cast in the election is equal to or greater than the number of votes necessary to change the outcome of an election, the court may declare the election void without attempting to determine how individual voters voted.” That standard (already part of Texas law) is likely to spawn more mischief than it will solve; the legislature should consider tightening it instead.
… [L]egislatures should refrain from overcriminalization. While the integrity of the ballot is a serious issue that in some cases must be dealt with by the criminal process, many of the new election laws [being proposed by Republican legislatures] are too expansive in creating batteries of new felonies that could be misdemeanors, and misdemeanors that could be civil offenses.
This is the precise opposite of a supposed “heading-off” strategy. Provisions like these are specifically intended to allow state legislatures to invalidate election results at will and, ultimately, claim plenary authority to apportion the state’s electoral votes as they please, exactly what they were prevented from doing in 2020.
“The deliberately inactive approach doesn’t even seem like a tactic, just an apologia for surrender.” Yeah, that’s almost correct. But in Ross’s case, I’d change it to “deliberately hypocritical”.
Afterwords
Joe Biden and the other Democrats accuse the Republicans of wanting to go back to the Jim Crow era. That’s not quite correct. Republicans don’t hate black people so much as they hate democracy. The real point of Republican “reform” is to allow state legislatures to overturn Democratic wins whenever they please. It’s “interesting” that Texas Republicans feel compelled to pass such disgusting legislation despite sweeping the board in the 2020 elections, once more crushing Democratic dreams of “flipping” the Lone Star state. Republicans simply have no faith in their ability to win fair elections.
