The GOP is Putting Trump Out to Pasture

by Charles M. Blow, Guest Opinion

Families have a grandfather or an uncle who, in his prime, was the patriarch, the family’s force and compass. His counsel was sought and heeded. He was treated with the utmost respect and deference.

But, as the years passed, his power waned; his acuity dulled; his admonitions began to sound archaic. The family reordered itself. So another man or a woman became the leader, and the grandfather or uncle was demoted, without any formal proclamation but by familial inertia, to a kind of elder emeritus.

The family still loves him and honors him, but they also regularly tune him out or ignore him. He was integral to the family’s journey but is now only incidental to its future.

This is what is happening to Donald Trump in the Republican Party, a dynamic underscored by the disastrous speaker battle in the House of Representatives. Trump is essentially being put out to pasture.

Before one of the votes for speaker, Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, rebuked Trump and McCarthy. She told her fellow Republicans in the House:

“Let’s work together. Let’s stop with the campaign smears and tactics to get people to turn against us. Even having my favorite president call us and tell us we need to knock this off. I think it actually needs to be reversed: The president needs to tell Kevin McCarthy that ‘Sir, you do not have the votes, and it’s time to withdraw.’”

Talk about damning with faint praise. She suggested that Trump wasn’t even operating on his own convictions but was being told what to do by the Republican House leadership. It sounded laudatory, even loving, but it was a cutting reprimand.

Trump has suffered a staggering string of losses, most recently watching voters reject many of the candidates he endorsed during the midterms, and the speakership battle, which ended in McCarthy ceding so much power that he is essentially a speaker-in-name-only.

Trump knows better than most that loss lingers on a person like a rancid odor.

Trump, like every other president, had a moment, but now the sun is setting on that moment. The country and his own party are drifting away from him.

But, if Trump is not the leader of his party now, who is? By default, even if diminished, he retains the title, even without the power. So, in a way, the Republican Party is a runaway chariot. No one fully controls it.

The party became so anti-establishment and pro-iconoclast that it actually came to reject institutional procedure and tenured professionalism. You can only operate so long with a throw-the-bums-out mentality before you run out of “bums” and realize that you’re left with no one to replace them but scoundrels.

The people who ground the workings of the House to a halt are the progeny of Trump’s chaos.

In Greek mythology, Cronus, who had overthrown his father, Uranus, learned that one of his children was destined do the same to him. So he ate them all. But his sixth child, Zeus, came along and was hidden by Zeus’ mother. When Zeus was older, he forced Cronus to disgorge his siblings (gross, I know), and together Cronus’ children overthrew their father.

The Republican Party, and Trump himself, are also caught in this loop: They topple their party’s “establishment” every few years only to become the establishment in need of toppling.

The party has completely lost sight of the values of wisdom and service, of paying one’s dues and working one’s way up. For it, every cycle is a revolution and a war. In the long run, this is bad for the party and for the country.

But, in the short run, it’s even worse for Trump. His protégés are coming to either overthrow him or put him out to pasture, and there is precious little he can do to stop them.