Republicans, you may have heard, are due for a reckoning.
They should’ve reckoned with their support for former President Donald Trump when he got impeached the first time. Or after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Or, failing even that, after the midterms. The GOP needs to “fight” about Trump “out loud, in public,” erstwhile Trump adviser and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie told The Wall Street Journal in November. “If there was ever a time for the last sensible Republicans to remember that they are the party of Lincoln, the man who saved the Union and its Constitution, and to declare a war against their seditionist wing,” wrote The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols in December, “this is it.”
And just moving on to another standard-bearer, perhaps Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, doesn’t count, argued Alan Elrod at Arc Digital: “Although DeSantis has not shown a willingness to go to the anti-democratic extremes that Trump has, it is hard not to see the current rally ’round the Ron happening in the GOP as an attempt to find a new strongman rather than to reckon with much of anything the party has done over the last six years.”
ADVERTISEMENT
That’s probably true, and I’d also like to see the GOP having that loud, public debate and landing—for real this time—on the side of constitutional constraints and the rule of law. But this demand for a reckoning is unrealistic.
Worse, it’s political self-sabotage, productive only in its capacity to rally flagging Republican support for the party’s de facto leader. As much as I want to see the GOP reject Trump and recognize the ethics and effects of allying with him in the first place, I suspect it’s no exaggeration to say banging on about a reckoning is delaying Republicans’ progress toward leaving him behind.
The case for demanding a reckoning begins to fall apart when we consider what, exactly, it would mean. First, consider the numbers: There are around 95 million self-identified Republicans in this country, and Trump got nearly 63 million votes in 2016 and just over 74 million in 2020.
How many of those people need to repudiate their decision for the reckoning to have happened? And as they can’t undo their votes, what should they do? If they stop being Republicans and abandon the party to the MAGA crew, is it still a Republican reckoning? Or what if they vote for someone else in 2024? Per Elrod—and he’s hardly alone in this contention—that’s not enough (especially given the likely slate of candidates, which is stacked with former Trump sycophants and subordinates).
So should Republicans make some kind of public statement? Have a national day of… what, red squares on Instagram? Trump pics with apology captions? If not that, then what? What does the reckoning entail?
And specifically, what does it entail for the millions of voters whose reason for casting a ballot for Trump amounted to: He was the Republican candidate, and I’m a Republican. I have a duty to vote, and I always vote the Republican party line.
It’s easy for those of us who are very online, observing equally online Trump supporters, to assume that every Trump voter is aware of and therefore accepting of everything the former president has said and done. Yet for many Americans, voting for Trump didn’t mean signing on to all the scandals we discussed for days on end, either because they doubt he really said and did that stuff, or—perhaps more often—because they never heard about it.
What’s an adequate reckoning for them? Promising to become an avid Twitter user? To subscribe to The New York Times?
Even if we limit the reckoning only to Republican leadership, the prospect is little better.
This isn’t the era of the party boss. It’s not as if the national committee can simply announce Trump is done. The base is running the show. Key pro-Trump figures like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) need only to hang on to one overwhelmingly GOP district to retain their national prominence, while those “last sensible Republicans” have mostly been run out of Washington by the new guard. What few anti-Trump Republicans remain in national office—figures like Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah)—have already made their views clear, to little effect. No meaningful reckoning is on offer.
Still, as Trump begins his third consecutive campaign with a plausible shot at victory, it’s easy to imagine one concrete result all these reckoning demands could have: They could push wavering Republicans toward a reflexive defense of Trump.
He has, after all, already laid the groundwork for that response, telling Republicans that any attack on him is actually an attack on them and their values. “In reality they’re not after me; they’re after you,” said a meme he tweeted in 2020. “I’m just in the way.” If simple partisanship weren’t enough to produce a defensive reaction to the reckoning talk, this personal identification of Trump and his base—which he kept up in 2022, and which Greene and other Trump acolytes have reinforced—just might do it.
The question, then, isn’t whether we want a Republican reckoning or not. It’s whether we want the dream of mass public repentance for bringing Trump to power or the reality of Trump remaining out of power.
That’s not a very satisfying choice if, like me, you find the Republican (and, for that matter, Democratic) alternatives to Trump unappealing. A post-Trump GOP, as Elrod concludes, will still be a GOP moving into illiberalism. But the possibility of taking Trump’s personality out of the equation is no small thing, and however unsatisfying, it seems this is the choice we get.
