There isn't going to be a "post-Trump era" for the Republican Party

The 2012 Democratic platform, in its original draft, did not mention God. Some people made an issue of that, and so former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland offered an amendment to add language that would... well, mention Him. Political prudence demanded its inclusion, so the Powers that Were wanted the amendment adopted.

It was put to a voice vote. It's hard for me to see how any objective observer could not have concluded that the amendment had been soundly (excuse the expression) defeated.  Nevertheless, the chair declared it passed, the gavel came down, and that was that. I rolled my eyes, and for a brief moment reflected not so much on the heavy-handedness with which the party establishment had overridden what seemed to be the clear will of the majority as how far things had deteriorated in the Democratic Party in recent years that a passing reference to the bland, nonsectarian, generic deity reverenced by the nation's founding documents and the American Civil Religion in its platform could be controversial.

At the time, I could not foresee the disaster that would overtake the Republicans four years later. At the 2016 Republican Convention in Nuremberg Cleveland, heavy-handed use of the gavel and the tyranny of the majority prevented any delegate- including those required by state law to do so- from voting for any presidential candidate other than Donald Trump, who had received somewhere around 40% of the votes in that year's primaries and caucuses. Dissenting delegates were ruthlessly gagged.

Mr. Trump is being challenged by two quite insignificant other Republicans, former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld, and former Congressman Joe Walsh. Mr. Trump currently enjoys the support of 91% of the members of the mutated Republican Party, and there is no real chance that either Weld or Walsh will get as much as ten percent of the vote anywhere. Yet several state Republican parties have canceled primaries and caucuses to stifle any possible opposition or resistance to Mr. Trump's renomination.

And now, it appears that Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, and the other Trump sycophants in the Senate- already assured by the preponderance of blind partisanship of Mr. Trump's acquittal in the coming impeachment trial regardless of the evidence (Sen. Graham has already announced his intention to violate his juror's oath and vote for acquittal without any need for any stinkin' evidence) are trying to come up with ways to dispose of the impeachment without bothering to have a real trial with, you know, witnesses and stuff.

Mr. Trump's authoritarianism has been on display throughout his time of office and even before. This is the guy who offered to pay the legal fees for any supporter who beat up a protestor at his rallies. He's the guy who throws the word "treason" at anyone who criticizes or even disagrees with him about as freely as wedding guests throw rice at the bride, and more than once advocated the jailing of his critics. This is the man who keeps arguing that the law should be changed to permit him to sue journalists who run "intentionally" false stories (presumably he, or someone he controls, would decide what is "false," and what falsehood is "intentional"). His efforts to intimidate the press (and anyone else he thinks he can intimidate) are constant and relentless. He has expressed admiration for the kind of "love" Kim Jong Un extorts from the people of North Korea and bemoaned the fact that authoritarian leaders overseas have more tools at their disposal for dealing with people who pose problems than he does (Saddam Hussein's murderous tyranny is one example; Rodrigo Duterte's extra-judicial murders of suspected drug dealers is another- not to mention POTUS's on-again, off-again bromance with Kim and his ongoing infatuation with Vladimir Putin).

He openly sided with the far-right demonstrators who terrorized Charlotte, North Carolina during that rally over the removal of Confederate statues and tried to apportion the blame equally between the two sides despite documented evidence that the Klan and the Nazis had not only initiated the violence but rehearsed tactics for coordinating their assaults on the numerically smaller and much less well-organized group of counter-demonstrators.  He's a man who, throughout his career in business as well as politics, has consistently demonstrated a contempt for the law and a belief that the rules don't apply to him.

All of those are reasons why his impeachment is so important even though his supporters have rigged the process so that no matter what the evidence may show at whatever sort of a "trial" takes place in the Senate. He is a threat not only to freedom and democracy and everything America stands for but to the rule of law. In the entire history of our nation, the only movement which threatened our identity and our values as powerfully and as credibly has been the Confederate States of America, a conspiracy which resorted to outright treason in the constitutional sense and in which the conspirators- despite the disingenuous denials of neo-Confederates and romantically-inclined Southerners- testified over and over in the Declarations of Causes adopted by the individual states that the causes they wanted to secede from the Union to protect were those of white supremacy and the institution of slavery.

Populism and authoritarianism, as odd a combination as they may seem, have always had an affinity for one another in America. And that old and ugly combination has found its most potent expression in Donald Trump and the movement which he founded. Without even getting into the devastation Mr. Trump's presidency has caused our national prestige and our alliances, he and his movement are most dangerous as the mortal enemies of our values.

Oddly, it seems that people who claim to be "conservatives" and to reverence the Constitution are OK with this. Polls have routinely shown the percentage of self-identified Republicans who support Mr. Trump in the high eighties or low nineties. It appears that many of the politicians and journalists who have allowed themselves to be compromised by Mr. Trump think that once he leaves office, things will return to normal. But they won't.

It's not just that history will not forget their moral cowardice. It's that the genie will not go back into the bottle; the lady will be unable to dismount the tiger without being eaten. Jonathan V. Last writes in today's Bulwark that Republicans will never turn on Trump, almost no matter what he does, because Trump is Forever:

In the normal course of the last century, the president has been only the interim head of his party. He appoints his people throughout both his administration and the institution of his party, but eventually he leaves office and retires to life outside the public realm. At that point, he may still exert some influence behind the scenes. He may be close to donors. His mentees might still consult his advice. But other political actors are jockeying for position; the world moves on.

It seems highly unlikely that Donald Trump will ever move on.

Either a year from now or five years from now, Donald Trump will step away from the presidency. Raise your hand if you think he will retire to Mar-a-Lago and delete his Twitter account.

It seems much more likely—maybe inevitable—that once he leaves office, Trump will continue to tweet and call in to cable news shows. Perhaps he will even attend political rallies, which is the part of the job he seems to enjoy most.

There is no reason to think—none at all—that he will discontinue his penchant for weighing in on American politics on an hourly basis. There is every reason to think that he will vigorously attack any Republican who was disloyal to him during his administration. Or retroactively criticizes his tenure. Or runs in opposition to one of his preferred candidates. Or jeopardizes any of his many and varied interests.

What this means is that there is no way for a Trump-skeptical Republican to simply wait out the Trump years. There will be no “life after Trump” because Trump is going to be the head boss of Republican politics for the rest of his days.

As I said at the beginning: Trump is not a caretaker of the Republican party. He is the owner.

Trump and his movement are not temporary aberrations. They are mutations that have deeply embedded themselves in the DNA of the Republican Party and of the conservative movement. Republicans fear to oppose Trump because they know that if they do, he will come after them with all the ruthlessness of a mob boss to whom some soldier has shown disrespect. Or some capo.

And once he leaves office, while he may no longer (thank God!) have his hands on the levers of governmental power or his finger on the nuclear button, he will still be in command of a movement which has become, not one tendency among many within the Republican Party, but its face. His own face will continue to be on the news. His crude and grotesque words and deeds will continue to have meaning and political power in a sense that no previous former president has been able to manifest. He will still be in a position to destroy dissent because of his influence over his base- which by now has spread like cancer from a small cluster group of tinfoil hatters, conspiracy theorists, and extremists to something like 90% of the Republican Party.

The cancer is terminal, The Republican Party that existed before 2016 is dead. What has arisen in its place is a protectionist, isolationist, authoritarian, profoundly un-conservative and grotesque mutation that can never be trusted with power or taken seriously again.

I think that the cancer of Trumpism will kill the Republican Party eventually and that something new will arise to take its place. Something must if the two-party system is going to survive. Otherwise, a Democratic Party which, even if it manages to hold back its own extremist tide this time out, will inevitably succumb to it not many election cycles hence and mutate in much the same way the Republicans have will be without a credible, honorable source of opposition and nobody will be able to speak anymore for American values.

There remains only one last, desperate therapy that might cure what was once the Party of Lincoln: for Donald Trump to be repudiated by the American people next November in a landslide so massive and overwhelming that Republican politicians and conservative journalists will not only realize how far out of step with them they are but will fear something more than they fear Donald Trump's ability to isolate and destroy them- an ability which otherwise will continue, unabated and indefinitely, even after he leaves office.

Nothing will save the Republican Party and the conservative movement but a catastrophe so vast that Donald Trump will be discredited forever among Republicans, and Trumpism ruthlessly purged from them like the cancer it is.