MAGA Nation wants Trump with all the baggage of indictments | Opinion
The list of candidates for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination continues to lengthen. Of all the crowd sensing an opportunity for someone other than the twice-impeached and soon to be multi-indicted Donald Trump to become the party’s nominee, only Chris Christie seems willing, even eager, to attack his former friend head-on. The others are all trying to run in the lane that says: “vote for me and get all that Trump represents without the baggage.”
The problem with this approach is that most of MAGA Nation persists in their fealty to Trump precisely because of the baggage. What one needs to realize is that, for the vast majority of MAGA folks, their starting point is the illegitimacy of the Democratic Party. Given that determination, there can be no thought of a Democrat winning any race, much less the presidential one. If he/she does prevail, then the race must have been fixed. The isolation of MAGA supporters within their partisan silo only deepens the certitude that a Democrat could not possibly have gotten more votes than the man they and everyone they know backed. Trump, with his Big Lie about a rigged election which he began pushing months before any votes were cast in 2020, provided them with the most convenient explanation for Biden’s victory. That cognitive dissonance Fox News discovered, to its dismay, when the network reported the disappointing election results straight up , only to have much of their faithful audience seek venues like Newsmax and OAN which were amplifying the lies that MAGA Nation needed to believe to keep their worldview intact.
And so, when Trump incited insurrection on Jan. 6 by urging the thousands assembled at the ellipse to “fight like hell” to take back their country, to MAGA adherents the president was simply having recourse to the only means left to prevent the injustice of Biden replacing him two weeks later. Far from pretending such violence was “ordinary political discourse,” as the Republican National Committee would have it, the true believers regarded it as a desperate but necessary last step to save America.
Republican leaders at first failed to read the political landscape accurately. Kevin McCarthy and others, notably Liz Cheney, having been terrorized by the mob, felt impelled to take whatever action they could to remove Trump from power, whether by impeachment or the 25th Amendment, before he could further imperil the republic.
Then, for McCarthy and most Republican leaders, there was an awakening to the real sentiments of the MAGA rank and file who continued to cherish Trump as their champion against the illegitimate Democrats. And with it an appreciation of Trump’s prescience in realizing, as early as 2015, that nothing he could do would cause his supporters to abandon him. So McCarthy, from wanting Trump removed as soon as feasible, now led the effort to prevent anybody from investigating the events connected to Jan. 6, which would inevitably expose the criminality of Trump and his collaborators, too many of whom were McCarthy’s colleagues. Realizing that MAGA Nation would not be kind in its response to any such developments, McCarthy made his pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago. When the Republicans regained control of the House in 2023, chairs like Jim Jordan and James Comer immediately began investigations of the investigators of ex-President Trump, under the conviction that the best defense against the exposure of their party’s collusion with a coup plotter is relentless, baseless offense.
The Republican Party finds itself caught in the web which Newt Gingrich first created in the 1990s when he so demonized the Democrats that they became forever discredited as a participant in any legitimate political system. No one recognized the possibility for reaping the power and spoils that that disqualification occasioned than did Donald Trump. He is still riding that tiger, to our peril. With prosecutors closing in from New York to southern Florida, we can only hope it will not be for much longer.
Robert Emmett Curran is Professor of History Emeritus at Georgetown University who now lives in Richmond. He recently published “American Catholics and the Quest for Equality in the Civil War Era.”