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How Trump broke the GOP — and they never saw it coming: historian
Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat wrote in her Tuesday Substack that the radical shift in the Republican Party can't be blamed on anyone other than the enablers of President Donald Trump.
As she explains, Trump did not simply seize control of the Republican Party from the outside. Instead, she writes that the GOP had already become receptive to an authoritarian, anti-democratic figure before Trump came down the golden escalator in 2015. It was well-established Republican leaders who helped legitimize, protect and ultimately empower him.
Ben-Ghiat recalled a past column in the New York Review of Books ahead of the 2020 election, in which she looked at the GOP's early embrace of Trump and its willingness to accept his authoritarian tendencies. It was a test, she wrote, for "how much lawlessness they were comfortable with, meaning how much they would let him get away with due to their spinelessness."
It was the reason he announced that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any support, she explains.
"I was walking through a park when I saw that speech on my phone, and I had a sinking feeling: this was all too familiar to me as a historian of fascism," she recalls. "So I watched very carefully what happened next, and who came forth to kiss the ring after that gangster audition."
Former Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions is a central “first-hour enabler," she says. His endorsement gave Trump establishment credibility at a key point in the 2016 primary, allowing Trump to present himself as newly “mainstream.” Sessions was rewarded with the attorney general spot, but his experience also showed the conditional nature of Trumpian loyalty.
When Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation, Trump publicly insulted and ultimately forced him out. Sessions later attempted to regain Trump’s favor during his Senate comeback campaign, but Trump backed his opponent, Tommy Tuberville, helping end Sessions’s political career.
The other is former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who Ben-Ghiat paints as a Republican leader who moved from privately acknowledging troubling information about Trump to becoming one of his most committed defenders. She cites a reported 2016 private remark by McCarthy about Russian influence, followed by party leaders’ decision to keep the discussion secret. The expert argues that this culture of secrecy and loyalty enabled later efforts to protect Trump through scandals, impeachment proceedings, attacks on institutions and challenges to the 2020 election.
But they're not the only enablers. The GOP, she says, was on the path to embrace authoritarianism long before Trump.
"The Republican Party, and the robust media universe that supported it, were ready for a far-right, rule-breaking, and polarizing personality like Trump," Ben-Ghiat writes. "By the time Trump started his candidacy, the Republican Party was a party of white supremacist zealots, gun-rights extremists, and leaders like [Sen. Mitch] McConnell (R-Ky.), who had long approved of subverting voting rights and other bedrocks of democracy. This is why Trump’s many actions that promised a decidedly anti-democratic future for America were not deal-breakers..."
The GOP, she explains, ultimately become a party in which fear of retaliation has stopped dissent from Trump. Whether political defeat, public ridicule or violent threats from Trump supporters, Republicans continue to remain silent. Those willing to speak up, like Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) and Rep. Tom Massie (R-Ky.) were shoved out in GOP primaries where Trump promoted and funded their opponent.
She concludes by assessing that Trump’s takeover succeeded because Republicans repeatedly chose accommodation, or appeasement, over a unified resistance. In Ben-Ghiat’s view, the GOP’s transformation was not an accidental hijacking by Trump, but a self-inflicted collapse, brought by leaders who not only accepted extreme conduct, but embraced it in exchange for power, access or political survival
