Historian Heather Cox Richardson weaves together the events of the past few days and demonstrates the submission of the Republican Party to one angry man. At the Republican National Convention, the party’s elders were notably absent. No Bush or Cheney; no Romney. Trump put his daughter-in-law, Lara, in charge of the Republican National Committee. It’s the Trump party now, and he controls all its levers of power. Note below that he hasn’t stopped hawking merchandise, even in the middle of his campaign. If you can open a tweet, this is an example of Trump turning his campaign into a money-maker for himself.
She writes:
…Trump began the day by posting an advertisement for the fourth “series of Trump digital trading cards,” or NFTs (which are unique digital tokens) featuring heroic images of Trump. People who buy 15 or more of them—at $99 apiece—get a physical trading card as well. Trump said that the physical card has a piece of the suit he wore at the presidential debate, and Trump promises to sign five of them, randomly. Up to 25 people who buy $25,750 worth of the cards with cryptocurrency will be invited to a gala next month at his Jupiter, Florida, golf club.
In the ad, Trump made it a point to emphasize his enthusiasm for cryptocurrency, an emphasis that dovetails with Trump’s recent promotion of an “official” cryptocurrency project. He linked to a Telegram channel run by his sons Don Jr. and Eric that, at the time, was called “The DeFiant Ones” but has been renamed “World Liberty Financial.” While there is little public information about the project, the channel has almost 50,000 subscribers.
Hawking merchandise was an odd move for a presidential candidate, and it suggested his focus is elsewhere than on the election. Also today, Trump announced that he plans to make former Democrats Robert Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, both of whom have endorsed him, honorary members of his transition team. Kennedy told right-wing personality Tucker Carlson that he would “help pick the people who will be running the government…”
And then, this evening, Quil Lawrence and Tom Bowman of NPR explained the story behind the surprising photos of Trump on Monday giving a thumbs-up over a grave in Arlington National Cemetery. The reporters wrote that “[t]wo members of Donald Trump’s campaign staff had a verbal and physical altercation Monday with an official” at the cemetery, where “[f]ederal law prohibits political campaign or election-related activities.” When a cemetery official tried to prevent Trump campaign staff from entering the section where the grave was located, “campaign staff verbally abused and pushed the official aside.” A Trump campaign spokesperson said the official who tried to prevent the staff from holding a political event in the cemetery was “clearly suffering from a mental health episode.”
The elephant in the room these days is that most Republicans, along with many pundits, are pretending that Trump is a normal presidential candidate. They are ignoring his mental lapses, calls for authoritarianism, grifting, lack of grasp on any sort of policy, and criminality, even as he has hollowed out the once grand Republican Party and threatens American democracy itself.
It’s hard to look away from the reality that the Republican senators could have stopped this catastrophe at many points in Trump’s term, at the very least by voting to convict Trump at his first impeachment trial. At the time, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) said, “Out of one hundred senators, you have zero who believe you that there was no quid pro quo. None. There’s not a single one.” Republican senators nonetheless stood behind Trump. “This is not about this president. It’s not about anything he’s been accused of doing,” then–majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told his colleagues. “It has always been about November 3, 2020. It’s about flipping the Senate.”
When the Framers wrote the Constitution, they did not foresee senators abandoning the principles of the country in order to support a president they thought would enhance their own careers. Assuming that lawmakers would jealously guard their own power, the Framers gave to the members of the House of Representatives the power to impeach a president. To the members of the Senate they gave the sole power to try impeachments. They assumed that lawmakers, who had just fought a war to break free of a monarch, would understand that their own interests would always require stopping the rise of an authoritarian leader.
But the Framers did not foresee the rise of political partisanship.
In the modern era, extreme partisanship has led to voter suppression to keep Republicans in power, the weaponization of the filibuster to stop Democratic legislation, and gerrymandering to enable Republicans to take far more legislative seats than they have earned. The demands of this extreme partisanship also mean that members of one of the nation’s major political parties have lined up behind a man whom, were he running this sort of a campaign even ten years ago, they would have dismissed with derision.
Finally, devastatingly, the partisanship that made senators keep Trump in office enabled him to name to the Supreme Court three justices. Those three justices were key to making up the majority that overturned the nation’s fundamental principle that all people must be equal before the law. In July 2024 they ruled that unlike anyone else, a president is above it.
In May 2016, South Carolina Republican senator Lindsey Graham famously observed: “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed…….and we will deserve it.”
