Entrusted by voters with total control of the levers of governmental power, the Republican Party is on the precipice of greatness. They’ve decided instead to step back from the brink and go to war with each other. The GOP is squandering an opportunity to leave a lasting mark on history. They are instead preoccupied with assigning blame among themselves for spoiling the unique historical moment that is right now upon them.
It’s hard to find a political observer today who will confess that Donald Trump’s election to the presidency came as a surprise. Too many now posture as though they always knew that approximately 200,000 perfectly distributed votes in the Midwest would deliver the presidency to the unpopular GOP candidate. A cursory review of the political landscape on Election Day makes quick work of this plague of revisionism. In fact, Republicans were still internalizing the implications of Trump’s shock victory even 24 hours after the election. “GOP members [and] staffers are clearly still processing last night’s big win,” wrote House Freedom Caucus spokeswoman Alyssa Farah. “Keep getting texts along lines of ‘omg, we can do tax reform!!’” Well, maybe not.
Those grandiose visions of sweeping conservative reforms have given way to far more narrowly tailored objectives. Following the failure of the Republican ObamaCare replacement bill, both congressional Republicans and Donald Trump signaled their intention—albeit with dubious sincerity—to move on to tax-code reform. Except, now, it might not be tax-code reform. Snake-bit by the American Health Care Act debacle and now lacking more than $300 billion in savings that would have made a tax-code overhaul a revenue-neutral proposition, Republicans are reevaluating their approach.
This week, Senator Orrin Hatch confessed that the GOP’s vaunted reformation of the tax code “may turn out to be” just a temporary, targeted tax cut that would expire after 10 years. “I would prefer that over a border adjustment tax,” Senator David Perdue agreed. “I want to make it permanent,” sighed early Trump ally, Representative Chris Collins. “But if my choice became 10-year, temporary, or nothing, I’ll take 10-year, temporary.”
Amid these efforts to manage expectations, a sense of crushing disappointment is palpable. This was supposed to be the Republican Party’s moment. The GOP has spent the last four election cycles clawing its way back from the nadir of its political power to become the nation’s governing party. It has not controlled this many state and federal offices in nearly 100 years. Yet schisms within the GOP in Congress and an absentee chief executive—who seems only ever to engage in the role of the presidency when it means sowing divisions and stoking animosity—has rendered the Republican Party, at the apex of its potency, a spent force.
There are no excuses for this condition. Right-leaning commentators and columnists are fixated on assigning blame for this situation rather than resolving it. There’s plenty to go around. Overcautious Republican leadership in the House sought to govern without the public support that could be mobilized with a communications strategy. Recalcitrant ideologues in the GOP House conference cannot be appeased and maintain policy positions that don’t have their colleagues’ support. The president is nowhere to be seen. When he deigns to appear, he and his representatives are aggressively ignorant on policy, scornful of friendly overtures toward potential allies, and reliant entirely on the compelling nature of the cult of personality surrounding the presidency.
The divisions roiling the GOP are hardly new. An unruly coalition of disparate interests and varied ideological persuasions is a good problem for a governing party to have. A broad and diverse coalition is a symptom of electoral success. Democrats somehow managed to pass sweeping legislation despite having a coalition comprised of urban machine politicians, blue-collar workers, ethnic minorities, progressive activists, and Southern conservatives. Tax relief, Medicare reform, and a ban on partial-birth abortions, all passed by the GOP-led 108th Congress and signed by George W. Bush, suggests Republicans can manage their internal contradictions if they so desire.
Republicans who haven’t zealously joined the infighting and score-settling have taken to magical thinking. The “drain the swamp act of 2017,” for example, seeks to banish 90 percent of all federal agency employees from the Washington D.C. metro area. As though scattering the unwieldy federal government to the provinces was its own tonic.
This all makes for compelling drama, but posterity will not make of it more than a footnote. The history books will not be filled with passages on the GOP’s preoccupation with infighting. Nor will historians devote much effort to litigating whether the new administration couldn’t do its job effectively because the names of some transition officials in incidentally collected intelligence were unmasked in a suspicious manner. These are legitimate and pressing issues of good governance that appear small in retrospect. Their burning relevance will cool with time and fade into memory. All that will be left is the disgrace of the Republican moment lost.
