Now is the summer of Republican content.
The G.O.P. is confident and unified. Donald Trump has held a consistent and widening lead over President Biden in all the battleground states. Never Trumpers have been exiled, purged or converted. The Supreme Court has eased many of Trump’s legal travails while his felony convictions in New York seem to have inflicted only minimal political damage — if they didn’t actually help him.
Best of all for Republicans, a diminished Joe Biden seems determined to stay in the race, leading a dispirited and divided party that thinks of its presumptive nominee as one might think of a colonoscopy: an unpleasant reminder of age. Even if Biden can be cajoled into quitting, his likeliest replacement is Vice President Kamala Harris, whose 37 percent approval rating is just around that of her boss. Do Democrats really think they can run on her non-handling of the border crisis, her reputation for managerial incompetence or her verbal gaffes?
In short, Republicans have good reason to think they’ll be back in the White House next January. Only then will the regrets set in.
Three in particular: First, Trump won’t slay the left; instead, he will re-energize and radicalize it. Second, Trump will be a down-ballot loser, leading to divided and paralyzed government. Third, Trump’s second-term personnel won’t be like the ones in his first. Instead, he will appoint his Trumpiest people and pursue his Trumpiest instincts. The results won’t be ones old-school Republicans want or expect.
Begin with the left.
Talk to most conservatives and even a few liberals, and they’ll tell you that Peak Woke — that is, the worst excesses of far-left activism and cancel culture — happened around 2020. In fact, Peak Woke, from the campus witch hunts to “abolish the police” and the “mostly peaceful” protests in cities like Portland, Ore., and Minneapolis that followed George Floyd’s murder, really coincided with the entirety of Trump’s presidency, then abated after Biden’s election.
That’s no accident. What used to be called political correctness has been with us for a long time. But it grew to a fever pitch under Trump, most of all because he was precisely the kind of bigoted vulgarian and aspiring strongman that liberals always feared might come to power, and which they felt duty bound to “resist.” With his every tweet, Trump’s presidency felt like a diesel engine blowing black soot in the face of the country. That’s also surely how Trump wanted it, since it delighted his base, goaded his critics and left everyone else in a kind of blind stupor.
With the ugly exception of the campus anti-Israel protests, the Biden years have been mostly free of this: no big antifa riots, no coordinated burnings of precinct houses, a noticeable stiffening of spines by corporate leaders when it comes to online efforts to cancel controversial figures, a growing impatience with the excesses of D.E.I. culture. But what happens when Trump is back in office and the cultural heat index spikes again?
Imagine the following scenario: Trump is in the White House and decides to make good on his signature promise of mass deportation of migrants. Federal agents are deployed to towns and cities to do the job, but many of them flatly refuse to participate in what feels to them like a modern-day re-enactment of the Fugitive Slave Act. They are joined by Democratic mayors and hundreds of thousands of Americans who are willing to form human chains around homes and neighborhoods to keep the agents out. But Trump doesn’t back down, and governors in red states call out the National Guard to break through the protests. Many are hurt, some are killed, and riots ensue.
That’s the incendiary America we are likely to get again in a second Trump term, whether the match is lit by deportations, another incident of police brutality or something else. The right-wing fantasy of somehow shutting down the left won’t be met quietly.
Nor will a Trump victory mean a Trump mandate. Trump may be pulling ahead of Biden in the polls, but that owes more to Biden’s weaknesses than to Trump’s strengths. In the Senate, Democratic incumbents like Ohio’s Sherrod Brown, Nevada’s Jacky Rosen and Pennsylvania’s Bob Casey are running ahead of their Trump-endorsed rivals. In the House, a swing of just four seats would make Hakeem Jeffries the speaker.
In other words, the sorts of things that Republicans liked the most about Trump’s first term — the tax cuts of 2017, the picks for the federal bench and the Supreme Court, the almost successful effort to overturn Obamacare — would be dead on arrival if Democrats keep or take power in one chamber or the other. And Trump would be unlikely to turn things around in the midterm elections: His record in picking candidates, from Arizona’s Blake Masters to Georgia’s Herschel Walker, is singularly poor, mainly because he likes people who appeal to his vanity rather than to their constituents.
Politically, then, a second Trump term would be a long spell of divided government. There are times when this can be productive: Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill, two genial Irishmen, got a lot done together. That just isn’t Trump’s style. Instead we’ll have trench political warfare, endless investigations, a stone wall against Trump’s judicial nominees, perhaps another impeachment (or two) and no legislative accomplishment. We will become Exhibit A in the propaganda sheets of Moscow and Beijing of how democracy doesn’t work.
Legislative paralysis alone won’t paralyze Trump. If anything, it will make him that much more dangerous. To an even greater degree than Biden, he will try to govern via executive actions of dubious legality. He will also seek to prove his political relevance with a much more Trumpian foreign policy than we had in his first term. That will be most obviously true in his approach to the war in Ukraine, which he will try to solve by using the threat of an arms embargo to force Kyiv into a humiliating armistice. It will be true in his threats to withdraw from NATO and from free-trade agreements with crucial allies like South Korea. It will be true in much higher tariffs on imports — a tax increase on all the American consumers who won’t be compensated by a tax cut on their income or wages.
And unlike in his first term, he won’t be saved from his worst policy impulses by seasoned and responsible advisers like Jim Mattis, Gary Cohn, H.R. McMaster or John Bolton. Instead, look to a new crop of populist conservatives who think, for instance, that the best way to shore up America’s position against China is to abandon the defense of Europe.
I have excluded from this essay some of the parade of horribles that Trump’s critics on the left expect from a second term, from anxieties about the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” scheme (which Trump has distanced himself from) to terror about the end of democracy itself. Those are fears I don’t share because, like many conservatives, I don’t think Trump is strong or smart enough to blow down the pillars of American institutional life. On the contrary, it’s precisely because I think those pillars will hold that I expect that a second Trump term will mainly be shambolic, angry, divisive, not catastrophic but profoundly corrosive.
If this is considered a conservative win, I wonder what a loss looks like. As for conservatives who have said they’d rather take their chances with a second Trump term than with a second Biden (or Harris) one, they might keep an open mind to see if the Democratic convention yields a younger, moderate, pragmatic nominee. The alternative is having to own the blame — and the consequences — of another bitter Trump term.
“Democracy,” said H.L. Mencken, “is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” If Trump wins in November, good and hard is what Republicans are going to get.
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