'Burn it down' is about saving the GOP, not punishing it!

Ok. I'll admit it: the slogan "Burn it all down" leaves the wrong impression. Doubtless, that's why David Franch, Peggy Noonan, and others who- while agreeing that Donald Trump is awful- caution against the course that Charlie Sykes, Mona Charen, Bill Kristol, and yours truly advocate: voting a straight Democratic ticket in November to turn Mr. Trump's increasingly likely and well-deserved defeat into a salutary catastrophe for the Republican Party.

French, Noonan, and the others mistake this intention as an exercise in vengeance, retaliation, and nihilistic rage not unlike that which motivated people to vote for Mr. Trump four years ago. They are wrong. In fact, they completely miss the point.

In fact, they've been missing the point for a while now. That point is that Donald Trump is not merely a temporary glitch in the history of the party of Lincoln and Reagan. He has permanently changed the party's DNA.

Trumpism is not a virus that the GOP can fight off and get out of its system. It is cancer. I had cancer several years ago. By the grace of God, I survived. But it involved more than merely taking a pill or applying a Band-Aid. It involved removing a third of my large intestine and six months of nausea, diarrhea,  peripheral neuropathy, and the loss of my sense of taste and my appetite due to chemotherapy. It was, all-in-all, a rather extreme course of treatment. But it was necessary, and I'll tell you one thing: I'm glad I went through it. As rough as it was, it was a heck of a lot better than the alternative.

The same is true of doing whatever has to be done to rid the Republican Party not only of Donald Trump but of the cancer of Trumpism. This president has left a permanent mark on the Republican Party that the personal disappearance of one man from the political stage will not erase. Donald Fredovich will not go quietly into political oblivion once Joe Biden takes the oath next January. I have I hunch (and I devoutly hope) that the American people and the talking heads who inform and to entirely too great an extent dictate the direction of our political discourse will quickly begin to ignore him. But he will almost certainly do everything in his power to remain the center of as much attention as he can possibly muster. Whether or not anyone is paying attention, self-promotion is simply what Donald Trump does. He can't help himself.

I doubt that the movement he started will remain personally attached to him in any but a nostalgic sense. There are too many others prepared to pick up his mantle. It's unlikely that Tucker Carlson, the Fox talking head who has achieved certain popularity as a potential political figure in his own right among the Trumpistas, will get very far in the unlikely event that he attempts to claim Mr. Trump's warped movement as his own. Those Trump supporters who retain any particular ideological integrity will probably gravitate to Ted Cruz, whom I see as the likely 2024 Republican nominee. Various other Republicans have positioned themselves through four years of sycophancy to stake their own claims. The ugliest and most vicious elements of the Trump coalition will lose prominence in the post-Trump era and are already fading. The most blatant racists and the most shameless inhabitants of the alt-right will no longer exercise as much influence either in the Republican Party or on the right side of the spectrum generally as they have during the Trump years. But the point that French, Noonan, and others miss is that their agenda is not going away just because Donald Trump does.

I can see Mr. Trump being carried by his personal need for attention and adoration into running again in four years. I doubt that he'll get anywhere. The personal flaws which I and others have argued for the past four years make him a literal danger to our national security in the Oval Office are quietly recognized by enough of his own followers that they will seek a new leader or leaders who lack them. But the critical point is that as things now stand, the Republican Party has fundamentally changed, and so has the conservative movement.

Protectionism now has a following in a movement and a party hitherto associated with a commitment to free trade and free markets. Isolationism (and here, Rand Paul will doubtless be heard from in the future) has a following as a substitute for the robust, muscular defense of American interests around the world that characterized the administrations of Reagan, Ford, and the Bushes. A narrow, crabbed nationalism has largely taken the place of the generous-hearted patriotism of past Republican administrations, and the populist mutation is likely to leave a lasting mark.

If there is one lasting legacy Donald Trump is likely to leave us, it's the legitimizing of militant ignorance. The Richard Spencers and the neo-Nazis may well be forced back under the rocks from whence they crawled in 2016, but Mr. Trump has made irresponsible slander and conspiracy theorizing mainstream on the right. It will not disappear with him.

The COVID pandemic has been the arena in which militant ignorance has been the most vicious because it is here that it's had its worst consequences. It isn't merely that Mr. Trump's bizarre insistence on ignoring the ample warnings of the scientific and intelligence communities that the crisis was coming constituted a lost opportunity to prepare the nation and minimize the damage. His dereliction of duty concerning COVID has been absolute, catastrophic, and continues to place the lives of countless Americans in peril. His minimization of the seriousness of the greatest public health emergency of our times has led as much as a third of the nation into a lethal state of denial. Public health experts tell us that the universal or near-universal use of masks would save tens of thousands of lives and go a long way toward bringing the pandemic under control within our borders. But Mr. Trump- whose disdain for science has become legendary- for the most part has discouraged it both by his rhetoric and by his example.

The COVID-19 virus cannot possibly have a greater friend than it has in Donald Trump, and the third or so of the nation that more or less blindly follows him has basically hamstrung our attempts to protect ourselves from it by openly flaunting social distancing, the wearing of masks, and other common-sense measures to limit its spread.  So disordered is the president's psyche, and so distorted are his priorities, that he attacked the head of his own task force, Dr. Deborah Birx, yesterday for warning that the virus is widespread and has us teetering on the edge of disaster. So fixated is he on himself and his own self-interest that he went so far as to accuse her of making the statement out of a partisan desire to embarrass him!

Everything, it seems, is about Donald Trump. Even COVID-19. But that isn't the most serious problem. The most serious problem is that a third of our nation believes everything he says, blindly follows his lead, and under his encouragement has become so alienated from any source of information that isn't blindly loyal to him as to be immune to facts, logic, or reason.

Donald Trump will disappear. But that will not. All of this, of course, was at least in general terms predictable; many who had paid attention to the man and his personality before his candidacy, in fact, predicted it. Others were so terrified of Hillary Clinton that they wouldn't listen. I would gladly forgo the opportunity to say "I told you so" if somehow it could undo the nearly irreparable harm this man has done not only to our standing in the world, our economy, and our national security but our capacity to conduct our common affairs through the elemental usage of our native common sense.

It will belong to the historians of a future generation to assess the damage Mr. Trump has done to America, but it is catastrophic. Wishful thinking and stubborn ignorance have become a political ideology because of him, and it will remain so after he's gone.

Admittedly, "burn it all down" is a message that invites misunderstanding. But this is not about rage, nihilistic or otherwise. Nor is it about anger, or retaliation, or any such petty motive. It's about doing at long last what the conservative movement as a whole has refused to do these past four years: recognizing the gravity of the crisis.

Not long ago I read about a farmer who developed a melanoma on his arm. Rather than seeking treatment, which had it been timely might have saved his life, he cut it off with a pocket knife- and subsequently died.  What ails the Republican Party and the conservative movement is not a minor cosmetic flaw that can be removed with a pocket knife. It is virulent cancer that has changed the very DNA of the American right. It can only be cured by radical, drastic measures. Removing Trump is essential, but inadequate. Not only Trump but Trumpism must be eradicated, root and branch if the Republican Party is going to have a future as a responsible alternative to the increasingly radical and extreme Democrats.

I am under no illusions as to the consequences of two and perhaps four years or more under Democratic control of both the White House and both houses of Congress. But that is not the worst future we face. The worst future would be a Republican Party no longer led by Trump, but still very much in the grasp of Trumpism. It would be a science-denying political cult constituting a major portion of the American people that militantly believes what it wants to believe and is totally oblivious to facts or logic. It would be the Democrats being opposed for the foreseeable future only by an entity governed neither by principle or facts, but by conspiracy-mongering and wishful thinking.

America can survive four years of Joe Biden and a Democratic Congress. It is, after all, Joe Biden we're talking about, not Bernie Sanders. As crazy and irresponsible as the Democratic lurch to the left might be, they, at least, haven't yet defaulted to a Donald Trump. That may happen sooner rather than later. But it hasn't happened yet.

But neither American nor the Republican Party- nor the conservative movement as a school of coherent thought- can survive a permanent transition of the only viable alternative to the Democrats from the party of Eisenhower and Ford and Reagan and the Bushes into a modern version of the Know-Nothings. And that is precisely what today's Republican Party has become. It cannot be saved with a pocket knife. It cannot be cured of what may well be terminal cancer by half-measures. It cannot be rescued by removing Trump but leaving Trumpism as its ruling ideology.

The defeat of the Republican Party this November must be catastrophic not because individual Republicans or the party as a whole need to be punished, or because Never Trumpers feel the need to take revenge or lash out. It must be catastrophic because that's the only way it can be saved. Only by making not only Trump but Trumpism political poison so deadly that the party itself will see the need to purge it from its system can it ever be restored to what it was before 2016.

And I'm not sure that it can be done even then. It's hard to overestimate the degree to which the incompetence, lack of empathy, personal insecurity, ego, stubborn ignorance, and tone-deafness of Donald Trump has warped the soul of the Republican Party, and the worst possible thing would be to encourage those who still belong to it in their blindness to that fact.  This may be the only chance to save it from itself.

Only a disaster at the polls, from the top of the ticket to the bottom, can conceivably force the GOP to confront the ugly thing it has become in the past four years, and motivate it to aspire to be something better again. The alternative may well be essentially unopposed governance by an increasingly radical and wild-eyed Democratic Party not for four years, but for a generation.

The post-Trump era will not begin for the Republican Party when Donald Trump leaves office. It will not begin until the Republican Party decisively and definitively turns its back on him and on every petty, stupid, mean-spirited thing he stands for. And that's unlikely to happen unless he's perceived as a result of November's election to be so toxic that nobody with any influence in the party will want to keep his heritage alive.