For those Republicans who continue to harbor doubts about Donald Trump’s ability to capably represent their party as its presidential nominee, not to mention to competently perform the duties associated with serving as commander-in-chief, Monday was a pivotal day. It was the day in which Trump, the GOP’s delegate leader and the prohibitive favorite to emerge the nominee, descended on Washington D.C. to gauge the sentiments toward his candidacy among Republican officeholders. Trump took the temperature of his party in the nation’s capital and found that it remains, for now, pretty chilly.
Perhaps the biggest question mark of the day loomed impending over a meeting set to be held at the influential D.C. law firm Jones Day, where Trump was reportedly to meet with an untold number of GOP lawmakers for a closed-door session. The anti-Trump wing of the Republican Party, which might have feared that the residual resistance to Trump’s bid was faltering, had those fears allayed by that meeting. The event attracted no new Trump supporters, but merely the handful of lawmakers who have already gone on record supporting the reality television star’s presidential bid. The one notable exception was Senator Tom Cotton, who has contended that he is neutral when it comes to Trump’s candidacy. Cotton’s gravitas on matters related to national security will ensure that he remains, at least, impartial toward a candidate who vacillates between reckless isolationism and the invasion and annexation of sovereign territory in the Middle East.
Though it is often difficult to pin down the celebrity candidate’s ideology, many conservatives believe that Trump is not one of them. It is perhaps a more cynical assessment of the real estate mogul’s electoral appeal, or lack thereof, which has placed a surprisingly durable cap on his support from Republican officeholders. The calculation for Republicans seeking reelection in November may rest on a simple conclusion: Donald Trump is electoral poison.
Don’t take my word for it. A perusal of the polls reveals that Trump’s standing among general election voters in a head-to-head matchup with Hillary Clinton is weak and getting worse. In the last four major national surveys, Trump has trailed Clinton by between 9 and 13 points and has ceded to the former secretary of state the support of a majority of voters. In a hypothetical general election matchup with Clinton, Trump is in a worse position today than he has been in six months, and the trend toward Clinton is accelerating.
The scale of the disaster for Trump in November would also be one for his party’s members further down the ballot, too. The GOP’s majority in the U.S. Senate would be gone from the moment Trump accepted his party’s nomination in Cleveland. The celebrity candidate’s standing in the polls is so disastrous that even the GOP’s majority in the House, the largest it has been in the post-War period, is in jeopardy. Trump fans that do not dismiss the polls outright have taken to hoping for a black swan event to rescue them. Some gruesome Deus ex, perhaps a crippling downturn in the economy or a radical Islamist terrorist attack; something, they perversely pray, will come along and reverse Trump’s fortunes.
That’s an ugly way to think about politics, and for those Republican officeholders on the bubble, it’s cold comfort. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has given his members the green light to do whatever they need to in order to retain their seats if their GOP presidential nominee renders his party toxic. If that means his members feel they should support their party’s presidential nominee, fine. If they feel their seats would be imperiled if they were to support Trump, that’s fine, too. Maybe they think they should just beg the electorate to retain them if only to serve as a modest check on the inevitable President Hillary Clinton? Go for it. All bets are off.
The storm clouds gathering over the GOP’s Senate majority have compelled the party’s members in the upper chamber to embrace some damage control options ahead of their likely ouster, and the most glaring outstanding issue is the conspicuously vacant seat on the Supreme Court bench. The likelier a Trump nomination becomes, the less sense it makes for the GOP in the Senate to stand firm on their belief that the next American president should select the late Antonin Scalia’s replacement. McConnell has repeated his pledge not to hold hearings for or to schedule a vote to confirm Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, but that is beginning to smell like perfunctory opposition. “I’m open to it,” said Senate Judiciary Committee member Orrin Hatch when asked if the upper chamber might consider Garland in December, following the results of the 2016 elections.
The dam of opposition to Garland’s nomination is collapsing. Already, seven GOP senators have agreed to take a meeting with Garland, even if those meetings do not yield support for Judiciary Committee hearings to consider his confirmation. Of course, even this gesture in acknowledgment of the political realities in front of them has been judged to be heresy by the conservative media environment’s self-appointed inquisitors. It is not difficult to imagine the electoral environment appearing so bleak for the GOP that the Senate’s opposition to hearings prior to the lame duck session evaporates. In that event, the right’s most trusted voices will surely ramp up the apoplexy to 11, but who will be listening at that point? Surely, not the Republican lawmakers who saw their remarkably large majorities in Congress crumble. Those once reliably conservative voices that made every effort to forgive Trump’s excesses and excuse the immoderation he invited in his followers will have lost much of their authority. The scale of the coming losses, should they materialize, may reveal to Republicans in Washington precisely how modest the size of the pro-Trump coalition is and the limited influence of the celebrity’s media boosters.
Should Trump become the party’s nominee, whatever the GOP is left with after November will be a more conservative party. Its minorities in Congress will be truncated, and its members will have been returned only by reliably conservative districts and states. Those members will continue to rely on the influence that conservative media will maintain, but what about the rest of the party? In states and districts where anti-Trumpism is strongest and where lawmakers will have to exert every effort to distance themselves from the reality television star who inexplicably won a Republican presidential nomination, what use will they have for talk radio or for center-right blogs? The first test of the reduced influence of advocacy among the conservative talker class is that posed by Merrick Garland’s nomination. When things begin to look bleak for the GOP and Garland seems the lesser of a truckload of forthcoming evils, the opposition to him in the Senate may collapse. In that event, the right’s sentinels of ideological purity will rend garments over yet another betrayal, but power brokers in Washington won’t be listening anymore.
