Newsletters

Donald Trump’s Strength Might Also Be His Fatal Political Weakness

Plus a thought for the day on institutional sin

By David French
(Photo by Eva Marie Uzcategui/Getty Images)

Unlike the large majority of national political writers and journalists, I’ve spent every second of the last six years of Trump-dominated politics living in the heart of Trump country. In 2016, my home county—rural Maury County, Tennessee—voted for Trump in the primary and then voted overwhelmingly for him in the general election. He beat Hillary Clinton by almost 40 points.

By 2020, we’d moved one county north, to suburban Williamson County, where Trump won by “only” 26 points. According to the New York Times neighborhood political calculator, I live in a particularly thick Republican bubble. Roughly 85 percent of my neighbors vote Republican.

So I never struggled to understand why Republicans supported Trump. I didn’t just watch his political and spiritual takeover of the GOP. I lived it. I experienced friends and family members moving from disgust, to acceptance, to holding their nose and voting, and then to celebrating the man they once reviled. And if you were there, you could often sense the change before it was apparent in the polls or in the press.

And now I’m sensing another change. Ordinary Republicans are starting to pry themselves apart from Trump, and the reason is interesting: Trump’s base is starting to tick people off. They’ve had enough.

There’s the Republican mother in Williamson County who rolls her eyes at Moms for Liberty, the far-right group that, among other things, is using the state’s so-called anti-CRT law to complain about the inclusion of Norman Rockwell’s painting The Problem We All Live With in a young-elementary textbook.

There’s the Republican father who’s engaged in hours of debate with friends and family about everything from vaccines to the stolen election and asks, “What happened to them?” He can’t understand how it came to be perceived as “liberal” to get a lifesaving vaccine.

From day one, Trump’s base has been his great political strength. In a multicandidate primary, it made him unbeatable. In any two-party general election, it makes him formidable. And when you’re a Republican facing a Democrat, Trump’s base can seem like an asset. Your candidate doesn’t just fight; he leads an entire army of political warriors—people who unleash hell on their political opponents.

But what happens when the two-party fight fades and the intraparty squabble flares? What happens when the pet causes and defining characteristics of Trump’s base conflict with ordinary Republican voters’ desire for a degree of normality or a measure of decency?

The toxicity of national politics has leaked into local politics. It’s leaked into personal relationships. It’s leaked into local party committees, and it has certainly leaked into churches. And legions of even stalwart Republicans now have had a similar experience: Disagree with the MAGA base about anything at all, and the response is likely to be extreme. They’ll attack you. They’ll insult you. Some of them will lie about you. They might even threaten you.

And make no mistake, people hate to be subjected to this kind of behavior. It’s exhausting. It’s painful. Do you wonder why so many Republican dissenters refuse to run for reelection? It’s not just because they’re concerned they’ll lose their primaries (though that’s certainly a factor); it’s also because they don’t want to be miserable. They don’t want to be subjected to the smears, the cruelty, and the threats that accompany any public Republican critique of Trump.

Republicans tend not to have a problem with Trumpism inflicted on Democrats. That’s wrong. It’s also human nature. We have a distressing tendency to be far less concerned about the well-being of our political opponents. But there are Trump voters who are now experiencing a thought process like this: Wait, you’re inflicting Trumpism on me? A Republican? Because I got the vaccine? Because I want my friends to get the vaccine? Because I supported mask mandates before the vaccines? Because I don’t think the election was stolen?

What is going on?

I’d suggest there are few better measures of Republican division than the internal conflict over vaccines. Earlier this month, the Kaiser Family Foundation released a demographic breakdown of vaccination statistics, and the results were both thoroughly unsurprising and revealing:

Two things were true: Republicans were far less likely to be vaccinated than Democrats, but a solid majority of Republicans had still gotten at least one dose. A quarter said they would “definitely not” get a vaccine. But behind the colors and numbers on that chart is an ocean of personal hurt and pain.

The vaccine question has turned parents against kids, neighbor against neighbor, and friend against friend. And in my experience there is a high correlation between vaccine refusal and political intensity on a host of other MAGA measures. In many ways, vaccine refusal is the ultimate expression of contempt for the establishment.

And it comes with a cost—principally in lives lost, secondarily in relationships destroyed.

A second measure of internal conflict has been the civil strife in the Southern Baptist Convention. The nation’s largest Protestant denomination is overwhelmingly Republican, and it is extraordinarily divided. It’s not a fight between moderates and conservatives (there are few “moderates” in the SBC). It’s far more a fight between more traditional evangelicals and a neo-fundamentalist movement that is highly political and deeply Trumpist. And in a key showdown this summer, the evangelicals prevailed. They narrowly defeated the fundamentalist candidate in the race for SBC president and instead elected a pastor who shuns partisan politics and is deeply committed to racial reconciliation.

But that was a mere battle won. The internal conflicts continue to rage, in the Church and beyond. In fact, the cost of those internal political conflicts are so profound, and the personal consequences so serious, that I truly believe the MAGA movement is in a race against the clock. It thrives mainly in the “binary choice” environment, where it can win over reluctant Republicans with negative partisanship—you’re with us or you’re with the Democrats. It starts to die when Republicans turn on each other.

The Republican primaries in 2022 will be immensely important. Trump has targeted specific Republicans for political destruction. These Republicans—Liz Cheney and Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, most notably—aren’t Never Trumpers. They vocally supported Trump, but they refused to help him steal the election. And now they both face Trump-backed challengers.

The outcome of their races will have much to say about the destiny of the party, and while Cheney is an underdog and Kemp’s future is in doubt, don’t assume that either of them will lose. There are months to go before votes are cast, and if neighborhoods in Georgia and Wyoming are anything like neighborhoods in Tennessee, MAGA’s fanaticism and ferocity are alienating regular Republicans, and Trump’s political warriors just might fight their way right out of political dominance, even in the GOP.

A thought for the day …

It’s not often that I come across moral insight in the pages of a Supreme Court amicus brief. But the brief of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty filed in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization contains this thought-provoking sentence: “Institutional sins are often the hardest to repent of, because they require later-arrived institutional actors to make themselves accountable for their predecessors’ errors.”

The Becket Fund is arguing that Roe v. Wade was the Supreme Court’s institutional sin, but that same insight applies to institutional racism. One of the reasons why people recoil against the idea of institutional racism is they blur institutional and individual accountability. How can I be responsible for something I didn’t do? they ask themselves.

But when we slide into institutional roles, we inherit institutional responsibilities, even if we’re individually innocent of prior institutional misconduct. It’s a concept we recognize in corporate law. If a company pollutes the environment, the corporation remains liable for the damage even if all the individual actors responsible for the pollution are fired. The next CEO—innocent as he or she may be—still has to pay for the cleanup.

And so it is with our governmental, corporate, and religious institutions grappling with the legacy of more than 300 years of slavery and Jim Crow. Institutions inflicted great harm. Many of those institutions still exist. And while the individuals in those institutions obviously weren’t part of the Confederacy and did not perpetuate Jim Crow, the damage still lingers, and so does the profound responsibility to ameliorate the harm.

So thank you, Becket (and Mark Rienzi, the counsel of record). Your statement helps us make sense not just of the institutional responsibility for Roe, but of an institution’s responsibility for all its wrongs, including the original sin of America’s racial repression.

David French is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of its newsletter The Third Rail.