Are Republicans Waking Up?

Photo by (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

For the past eight years, many of us have been waiting on Republicans to find the intestinal fortitude to stand up to Donald Trump. For the past eight years, we have seen glimmers of hope here and there, but we’ve been frequently disappointed.

Republicans who stood in front of the Trump Train were either drummed out of the party, packed off to early (or not-so-early in some cases) retirement, or coopted into the fold. I noticed a long time ago that people rarely go just a little bit trumpy. Going trumpy is often like a complete personality change a la “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” and it’s rare to come back. But once again, I’ve seen some glimmers of hope in the weeks since Donald Trump became president-elect.

For starters, the rumblings from Republicans about Matt Gaetz as attorney-general eventually persuaded Gaetz to withdraw from consideration. I guess he’s no RFKJR if he runs at the sound of a few harrumphs.

More serious for Trump is the growing number of people who supported him over Biden yet are now a bit nonplussed that Trump seems to be planning to do all the dastardly and inane things that he said he would do.

Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal seems to be one of these people. In a recent op-ed, Strassel complains about RFKJR, writing, “No insider believes this is a heartfelt pick. Even political naïfs understand what happened: This agreement was entirely transactional.”

Strassel believes Republican senators should “rescue” Trump from his bad choice but laments that “Senate Republicans are playing monkey-see-monkey-do to an extent that even Mr. Trump must be exasperated.”

“Nearly every GOP senator looks at Mr. Kennedy with wincing concern—knowing the havoc the anticapitalistic big-government regulator can and will wreak on a Trump agenda,” Strassel continues, “Yet no one steps up to save the president. If Joe Biden chose Hulk Hogan to be Treasury Secretary, does anyone think Democrats would have let him step into that trap? But so desperate right now are Republicans to nod along that they are abdicating the real job of advice and consent—and protection.”

I can guarantee that Trump is not exasperated by Republican spinelessness. The obsequiousness that Strassel has identified is something that Trump has cultivated for most of a decade. He doesn’t want people with the chutzpah to stand up to him when he’s wrong. He wants yes men who, when told to jump, will ask how high as they leave the ground. This is exactly what many of us warned about in the years before the election.

Not everyone has had the awakening that Strassel is experiencing, but I have seen signs of life from Mitch McConnell. When the Senate reconvenes, McConnell will pass the Majority Leader’s gavel to John Thune (R-SD). Thune’s election as Majority Leader is somewhat of a defeat for Trump since he is from the more traditional wing of the party and not as trumpy as Florida’s Rick Scott, one of the other likely contenders.

It may be that McConnell’s return to the relative anonymity of the backbench has made him more comfortable speaking his mind or that he is more willing to expose Republican fault lines now that the Democrats have been defeated, but McConnell has taken direct opposition to Trump policy recently on a couple of occasions.

First, McConnell fired a shot across RFK, JR.’s bow with a warning against undermining faith in vaccines. As reported by the AP, McConnell said in a statement, “Efforts to undermine public confidence in proven cures are not just uninformed — they’re dangerous, Anyone seeking the Senate’s consent to serve in the incoming Administration would do well to steer clear of even the appearance of association with such efforts.”

McConnell specifically defended the polio vaccine, which was invented by Jonas Salk in the 1950s. Before the vaccine, polio killed thousands (fewer than COVID-19 during the pandemic, I’ll note) every year and left many others crippled or in iron lungs. McConnell survived polio when he was two years old, but the disease still has no cure. Polio cases dropped sharply after the vaccine was introduced and there have been no reported cases in the US since 1998.

RFK, Jr.’s position on the polio vaccine has been inconsistent. He has said that he supports the vaccine but has also specifically questioned its safety and said, “There’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective.”

A few days after issuing the vaccine statement, McConnell authored an article in “Foreign Affairs” (which is not a magazine for men looking to hook up with international women despite how it sounds) defending American involvement in Ukraine and the Middle East. McConnell identifies China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea (the same countries that I noted in October comprised a new Axis of Evil) as “adversaries” to the US and warned against isolationism, calls to “give up on American primacy,” and the strategy of pivoting away from Europe and the Middle East.

McConnell convincingly argues that the world needs American “hard power” to preserve the peace and that defending Ukraine is part and parcel of resisting China. When America engages in isolationist navel-gazing, strongmen run amok and the world becomes a more dangerous place.

As McConnell puts it, “Standing up to China will require Trump to reject the myopic advice that he prioritize that challenge by abandoning Ukraine. A Russian victory would not only damage the United States’ interest in European security and increase U.S. military requirements in Europe; it would also compound the threats from China, Iran, and North Korea.”

The problem for Strassel and McConnell is that they are vestiges of a conservative party that no longer exists. This is evident if we look at public opinion polling of Republican voters.

When it comes to vaccines, Gallup reports that Americans are sharply more skeptical of childhood vaccinations than they used to be. This increased skepticism is driven mostly by Republicans. The share of Republicans who consider childhood vaccination important has plummeted 18 points since 2019. There can be no doubt that this is a reaction to the scaremongering about COVID vaccines, which has now spread to other drugs.

As you might expect, polling regarding RFKJR’s nomination to head the Department of Health and Human Services reflects the Republican skepticism about vaccines. A new survey from the Democrat-leaning groups Protect Our Care and Data for Progress found that voters overall disapproved of the choice of Kennedy, but 74 percent of Republicans approved.

Likewise, McConnell is out of step with the Trump™ Republican Party on foreign policy. While McConnell’s view is still popular among Americans at large, it is no longer the view of a majority of Republicans. Only about a third of Republicans support continued aid to Ukraine and Republican support for an active role in world affairs was falling even while Trump was in office during his first term. (The Chicago Council Survey does show a slight rebound in July 2024.)

And let’s not forget tariffs. McConnell hasn’t mentioned them lately, but he did criticize Trump’s trade policies back in September. These days Republicans overwhelmingly favor a host of anti-trade ideas such as imposing reciprocal tariffs equal to what other countries impose on US goods (85 percent support per YouGov), banning imports of “essential goods” from China (77 percent), and imposing a 60-percent tariff on Chinese imports (72 percent). The free-trade days of the Republican Party are over.

Some Republicans may be waking up to the reality that Donald Trump is not going to usher in a conservative utopia. He’s not even going to usher in an era of conservative competency. He’s going to usher in a dumpster fire ensconced in a train wreck.

McConnell has probably been awake to Trump’s problems for quite a while. I’m not so sure about Strassel. Either way, they and others need to realize that placing party over country and ideology has resulted in a party that no longer resembles them.

The pair and their peers in politics and the conservative media are part of the reason that America has to deal with four more years of Trump. They continually underestimated The Former Guy’s uncanny ability to survive political scandals and bad behavior. They assumed that any Republican, even Trump, was better than any Democrat. They may be experiencing the onset of buyer’s remorse now, but it’s too late to change the fact that the country will be in Trump’s hands for the next four years.

What they can do, however, is to realize that Republicans won’t stop Trump. If they want to limit the damage that Trump does in his second term, Trump-skeptical conservatives are going to have to make common cause with moderate Democrats. America desperately needs a bipartisan coalition of the sane to marginalize both radical fringes. To do that, they must put party aside. The Republican Party is so intertwined with Trump that making Trump lose on any issue is going to be perceived as Democrats winning.

The conundrum is that winning is everything to Trump, and if Republicans save him from himself, he isn’t winning. It’s a Catch-22 for Trump and the GOP which probably means that Trump will get his way on most issues that can’t be blocked by congressional Democrats.