Demolition Man
Our Democratic Party leaders told us America needed a strong Republican Party. They should have been more careful what they wished for.
“If you hear people on the rope line saying, ‘I’m a Republican,’ I say, ‘Stay a Republican.’ Vote for me but stay a Republican, because we need a Republican Party.” So said presidential candidate Joe Biden in 2019 while on the campaign trail in Iowa. Biden was worried that the Republicans would be “clobbered” in the 2020 election once the electorate digested the abuses of power wrought by Donald Trump during his first term in office. Biden’s chummy affection for the Republican opposition could just be written off as the remnant of a bygone age, a time before January 6th, 2021, when Trump’s MAGA loyalists stormed the Capitol and displayed a willingness to use brute force to maintain a grip on power. But even as late as 2023, Democratic leaders like Nancy Pelosi were still claiming the country needed a “strong Republican Party.”
If the Bidens and Pelosis and other career politicians who dominate the Democratic Party wanted a strong Republican Party their wishes have certainly been granted in the first two weeks of Trump’s second term. Trump and his brigade of billionaire plunderers have taken a wrecking ball to the regulatory state, mass firing federal employees, freezing funding for life-saving programs, mothballing websites with vital information, hacking into the private information of common citizens, and even illegally strong-arming their way into the Treasury Department’s payment systems. As Democratic politicians’ phone lines are jammed with calls from desperate constituents repulsed by this unchecked illegality, the electorate is waking up to a reality some of us have suspected all along: the DNC milked us incessantly for campaign donations in 2024 by stoking fears of authoritarianism while the party had no plan of action for dealing with a second Trump presidency if he won. While Pelosi and Biden thought their struggle with the Republican Party was similar to a rivalry between two Ivy League football teams they were unknowingly facing a ruthless enemy that would gladly throw the Democratic Party into the dustbin of history, and American democracy along with it.
Of course, the Democratic establishment will say the Republican Party they love and respect stands for the kind of decency and decorum that is the exact opposite of the vulgar villainy of Trump and his MAGA hordes. But this supposed distinction only betrays just how naive and impotent our Democratic Party leaders really are. The Democratic and Republican parties are two entirely different political formations. The Democratic Party fights for little more than the perpetuation of its own existence, a mutual admiration society and career advancement network that promotes and protects the individuals who have served the party most faithfully. Sure there are some issues like reproductive rights, gun control, and supporting organized labor that form a nucleus of Democratic priorities. But there are few ideological hills the Democrats would die on if a shift to the right might help increase the chances of a Democrat coming out ahead in the polls. The Republican Party on the other hand has a conservative ideological project that transcends, and at times even jeopardizes, the existence of the party itself: the desire to dismantle the Federal Government. Republicans have shown themselves willing to turn on their own party establishment and shift their loyalties en masse to figures like Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump, provided these upstarts showed an aptitude to wage war against the regulatory state better than the party insiders. Donald Trump is not a revolting break from the GOP’s noble past but the very embodiment of their anti-government ethos, the most skilled practitioner yet of the Republicans’ multi-generational quest to gut and cripple the state itself.
All of Trump’s craziest schemes unleashed in the past two weeks trace their lineage back to the GOP’s ongoing campaign to destroy the American people’s confidence in their democratically elected federal government. Let’s review briefly:
Trump’s reckless freezing of federal funds to supposedly root out programs that advance “Marxist equity” echoes the deranged witch hunts of Wisconsin Republican Joe McCarthy in the 1950s attempting to expose supposed Communist infiltrators in the federal government.
Trump nominating Kash Patel to use the FBI as an instrument of retribution against political enemies and Trump allowing Elon Musk to illegally access the private information of American citizens parallels Richard Nixon’s use of the FBI to keep tabs on those on his “Enemies List” through illegal wiretapping and other invasions into the privacy of the people.
Trump placing incompetents and saboteurs to lead federal agencies (e.g. fracking champion Lee Zeldin to run the EPA) follows the legacy of Ronald Reagan who appointed Anne Gorsuch (corporate lawyer enemy of the Clean Air Act and mother of none other than conservative Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch) as EPA head to demoralize and dismantle the agency from the inside.
Trump’s nomination of officials rife with conflicts of interest is in the tradition of George W. Bush putting his Vice President and former Haliburton CEO Dick Cheney in charge of the military. Haliburton would reap billions of dollars in government contracts during an Iraq War aggressively promoted by Cheney.
Trump’s use of “DEI” as a completely unproven cause of the deadly American Airlines crash is just the latest use of coded race-baiting language that Lee Atwater admitted was the foundation of the GOP’s “Southern Strategy,” a maneuver expertly employed by Reagan’s invocation of “welfare queens” as a justification for slashing social spending.
Trump’s violent, apocalyptic rhetoric and his followers’ willingness to use force on January 6th follows decades of Republicans and the NRA promoting a right-wing gun fetish, prompting right-wingers to stockpile weapons in resistance to supposed government overreach.
Trump nominating an anti-vax skeptic in RFK Jr to lead the Department of Health and Human Services builds on the GOP’s anti-science, anti-expert propaganda that they used to shelter their Big Oil donors from the growing calls for a green transition in the 2000s and 2010s.
Trump’s rude and bombastic demeanor only builds upon the GOP’s embrace of nastiness and lack of decorum, like South Carolina representative Joe Wilson screaming, “You lie!” during Barack Obama’s September 2009 address to a joint session of Congress.
Trump is the Republican Party and the Republican Party is Trump. Of course, Trumpism features notable mutations in Republican thought and action. Trump might disagree with Nixon on the need for OSHA, disagree with Reagan on the virtues of international free trade, or disagree with George W. Bush on prioritizing traditional family values and the use of the military to advance democracy across the globe. But Trump’s ideological fluidity on these side issues and his status as an “anti-politician” have only made him an even more effective agent of the federal government’s destruction. Rather than a departure from traditional Republican decency, Trump has become the most effective Demolition Man the GOP has ever had in its one enduring quest to sabotage the administrative state.
Unable to conceptualize political struggle beyond the regularly scheduled election cycles, there are many Democrats who remain confident that Trump’s destructive acts bode well for their party in the 2026 mid-terms and 2028 presidential race. Like Biden in 2019, these Democrats expect Americans to punish the Republican Party for the sins committed by Trump in office. They forget that Republicans have a grander objective than just getting their party members elected to office. The secret to Republican strength is that even when they fail to competently discharge their duties as elected officials they succeed in their ultimate goal of destroying America’s confidence in the competency of the federal government. Conservative diehards like Newt Gingrich and Roger Stone, who remained loyal to the GOP during the radioactive fallout after Watergate, knew that in the long run, they could transform general distrust for politicians and Washington into support for a Republican Party that promised to gut ineffective federal programs and slash taxes along the way. While Democrats were focusing all their energy on winning particular electoral battles, the Republicans kept their eyes focused on a long-term war of attrition that eroded one of the most vital resources necessary for democracy to function: trust in elected officials and the government itself.
Some Democrats have finally realized that resisting Trump’s power grab will require immediate action beyond the typical fundraising and strategizing for upcoming election cycles that may never happen. Like frogs in a slowly warming pot, they are now aware that turning the internal workings of the government over to a Nazi-saluting mega-billionaire might mean that conditions have gotten too hot to simply hunker down with your head under the water. Members of Congress like Chris Murphy, Jamie Raskin, and Ilhan Omar crawled out of the boiling pot to join marchers protesting the closing of the USAID offices after a physical and digital raid by Elon Musk and his band of Gen Z coders. The actions of these elected officials are more noble than the meeker Democratic frogs deciding to stay in their pot and silently boil to death. But all the marches, speeches, symbolic gestures, and even lawsuits amount to little more than hopping and croaking around a boiling pot. Nobody in Congress, not even the most outspoken critics of Trump’s will to power, seems to have any idea how to turn down the heat that is boiling the Democrats alive.
“I’m really worried that no party should have too much power,” Joe Biden told his Iowa crowd in 2019, expressing concern that the GOP might no longer be strong enough to serve as a “countervailing force” in American politics. Six years later, the Democratic Party is in ruins because its leaders were so comfortable, so content that they thought politics was the gentlemanly parlor game rather than a struggle for power, war by other means. They forgot their duty to their country and to the Americans who entrusted them with their vote was to make the Democratic Party as strong as possible, to present a positive and inspirational vision of government that could innoculate the population against the GOP’s anti-state wasting disease that is currently threatening our government, our economy, and our society with chaos. They have betrayed the voters by revealing that they had no ideological agenda beyond electing Democrats who are only slightly better than Republicans on taxes, climate, labor, and civil rights. Democrats needed Republicans to maintain their cushy “lesser of two evils” routine, doing little more than reclaiming partial chunks of ideological territory lost to Republicans in intermittent red waves.
Trump and the Republicans on the other hand have no use for Democrats beyond objects of ridicule and targets of their insatiable sadism. There is nothing more pleasing to Trump, Musk, and the ascendant Republican Party than to see the Democrats scramble, unable to mount a “countervailing force” needed to stop the destruction unfolding in Washington today. Democrats can either help themselves by tapping into populist rage against the billionaires who are breaking and looting our federal government or they can hope that the Republicans pump the breaks on their ideologically-driven demolition derby out of a nostalgic longing for a “strong Democratic Party.” Something tells me that Donald Trump and Elon Musk won’t be quite as tender-hearted about the Democrats as Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi were about the Republicans.
Good write up Jon. You'd never hear a Republican say "we need a strong Democratic party", and that alone is the difference right there.