Republicans have no clue how to handle their deranged ‘Messiah’
Imagine you are a serious US politician.
What do you do when the man your party put in the White House tries to buy another country’s territory, before repeating claims that he is like the “King of Israel” and boasting that he is “the Chosen One”, all within the space of two days?
The obvious answer is to distance yourself. Do you really want to be associated with a man who seems happy likening himself to the Messiah and thinks foreign policy is a protracted real estate negotiation?
But two and a half years into Donald Trump’s presidency, most Republicans just don’t have that option. They’ve come this far with him, and there’s no graceful way to turn back now, even if he is refusing to talk to the Danish unless he’s allowed to buy their autonomous Arctic region of Greenland.
Since 2016, the world has become inured to the President’s hyperactive tweeting and outlandish gaffes. They may still spark a flurry of media attention at first, but are quickly buried by the next bizarre outburst.
Take this week: the cancelling of the state visit to Denmark over the Greenland issue was overshadowed almost immediately by a tirade on how American Jews voting Democrat are “disloyal”, backed up by the “King of Israel” self-comparison.
These incidents have garnered essentially zero comment from congressional Republicans, except for an Arkansas senator who claimed that the Greenland thing was all his idea and said opponents were “blinded by Trump derangement”.
Every time, Trump’s critics ask whether sensible Republicans will acknowledge how deeply disturbing this all is and renounce their leader in the name of common sense. Every time, they are disappointed.
The world’s most famous Twitter account contains more scandal-generating gaffes and tirades in a day than most Presidents achieve over an administration.
Some are attacks on private businesses, like the US department store Nordstrom that dropped Trump’s daughter’s unprofitable fashion line or a Washington restaurant that asked one of his staff to leave.
Sometimes they’re personal insults – against political opponents (dead and alive), world leaders, business people, Hollywood actors, the special prosecutor charged with investigating his campaign, and key figures in his own government.
The man whom Trump himself appointed secretary of state is “dumb as a rock”; his former justice secretary is “scared stiff and missing in action”; the chair of the Federal Reserve is “clueless Jay Powell”.
And sometimes they’re downright dangerous: responding to violent white supremacist protests in Charlottesville by noting the “very fine people on both sides”; threatening to withdraw disaster relief funds from California in the midst of wildfires as revenge for criticisms made by local politicians; telling four ethnic minority congresswomen (three of whom were born in the US) to “go back” to where they came from, then calling them “anti-American”.
All received little to no condemnation from most Republicans.
Bring any of this up, and you’ll be accused by Trump-apologists of not understanding what he is doing.
You’ll be told that the US should have started being tougher on China years ago, that the Iran deal was a mess, that the tax cuts are working, that white working-class voters have been ignored, and that the Democrats’ obsession with minorities started the culture war.
And there may even be merit in some of those claims.
None of that, however, negates the fact that the man currently in charge of the US is too volatile, inconsistent, egotistical and impulsive to be trusted with power.
Or to put it another way, do Republicans really believe that cancelling a state visit because of an absurd demand to buy Greenland is in the interests of either America, or their own party?
If they don’t, they have a problem. Because having backed Trump about Nordstrom, about Charlottesville, about California, they have helped widen the partisan divide into an untraversable chasm. If you’re not for the President, no matter what he does, you’re against him, and will be subjected to the same Trump Twitter treatment as all his other enemies, regardless of party.
Perhaps their calculation is that it is useful to stay in Trump’s good books for now, let him say what he likes as long as he cuts taxes and appoints Supreme Court justices, then try to undo the damage he has done to trust in democracy and America’s global standing after he’s gone.
That’s a risky game. The behaviour of this President keeps getting more extreme, while the mechanisms that are meant to be holding him in check are waning.
Those initially appointed to his cabinet who had been expected to challenge him have resigned; those with respected careers in Congress whose job it is to hold the executive to account have stayed silent.
The data mills are churning with analysis of whether or not Trump will win a second term, but a more urgent question is how much weirder things will get in his first.
If the US has a President who thinks he’s like the son of God and has no respect for the sovereignty of other nations, is it really inconceivable that he might build on this Messiah-complex and contempt for democracy, and try to change the law to allow himself to stay in office?
And if he does, will Republicans, who have turned a blind eye to nearly three years of the President trampling over America’s democratic institutions, do anything to stop him?
Main image credit: Getty