Trump Is The Wedge

On abortion, foreign policy and the rule of law, Trump is the common factor driving the GOP apart.

Image courtesy of Wired

In previous pieces I’ve discussed how abortion, foreign policy and the rule of law have wedged the GOP. By “wedged,” I mean that these issues have deeply divided the party and thrown it into disarray.

Wedges can be exploited by the opposition to disillusion or even peel off voters from the party, and Democrats and the Biden Campaign are mobilizing to drive these wedges deeper.

But zooming out a bit, it’s now clear that there is a root cause of all of these wedges, and his name is Donald Trump. And it is simply astonishing that he is hammering these wedges in himself—without the Democrats having to give much of an assist at all.

Republicans are running scared on abortion, uncertain whether to back a national ban or leave it to the states to decide. Neither of these ideas is popular with voters. But we are here because Trump nominated three anti-abortion justices who, as he likes to boast, helped kill Roe v. Wade.

On foreign policy, most Republicans are in support of assisting our allies in Ukraine. But Trump really wants to help his pal Putin, so MAGA radicals in Congress are now threatening to oust Speaker Johnson if he even permits a vote on Ukraine aid. Trump even worked actively to kill the Senate’s compromise border bill that would have also funded this aid.

On the rule of law, we’re five days out from Trump’s Manhattan trial, a stark reminder that a multiple-indicted criminal defendant sits at the top of the GOP ticket. Republicans who support Trump today do so at the expense of our very legal system and democratic institutions, which Trump is working actively to undermine.

Today I’ll take a closer look at how Trump is driving these wedges in deeper each day. In a normal election cycle, any one of them would be a dangerous development for the GOP, so the fact that there are three, each being pounded in by Trump himself, could spell political catastrophe for Republicans unless they can shake themselves loose.

Trump Wedge 1: Abortion

Trump came into office having made a deal with white evangelical Christians. As noted on a recent podcast by The Daily, Trump basically told them, I may not be the most upright and Christian of candidates, but help elect me, and I’ll appoint pro-life justices so it will have been worth it.

They did help elect him in 2016, turning out in huge numbers, and he kept his end of the bargain. With the appointments of Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett, the Court had enough extremists on it to overturn Roe and 50 years of abortion rights.

The Dobbs decision came down in June of 2022, and we are seeing two clear patterns since. 

First, in the conservative red states—and in purple states where the GOP controls the legislature, for example in Wisconsin and Arizona—draconian abortion bans have either been enacted or have snapped back into effect due to archaic, pre-Roe statutes, some dating back to the 1800s. 

Second, the GOP is consistently losing elections wherever abortion is front and center as an issue, even in those red states where they have gerrymandered themselves into power. 

Trump understands that the abortion issue is a loser for the party. So on Monday he tried to thread the needle, highlighting in a video address once more how he was the one to end Roe through his Supreme Court appointments, even while indicating that he would not support a national ban on abortion.

This set off a firestorm within the Republican Party. Anti-abortion groups condemned his statement, clearly disappointed with anything that falls short of a federal ban. Then, after the Arizona Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that a near-total abortion ban from 1864 would go back into effect, Trump waved off concerns, claiming that the state somehow would fix it. “That will be straightened out,” Trump said.

The state did not straighten it out. On Wednesday in the Arizona legislature, Republicans blocked efforts by Democrats to repeal the 1864 law, and the Speaker has indicated he will not allow a repeal to come up for a vote. Democrats responded with cries of “Shame!” arguing that it was now clear that Republicans really are as extreme as the Democrats have been saying.

Arizona helps demonstrate a new political reality: Trump’s decision to leave abortion to the states permits a nationwide race to the bottom driven by the most radical elements of the Republican Party. Candidates like Kari Lake are now scrambling to distance themselves from their prior support of Dobbs and these draconian bans, but Democrats and the voters will still hold them accountable. In races often decided by a few thousand votes, the abortion wedge driven ever deeper by Trump could prove decisive.

Trump Wedge 2: Foreign Policy

There was a key failure of a vote in Congress yesterday that few people are aware of. In any normal legislative session, the death of a so-called “rules” vote—which permits a bill to proceed to the House floor accompanied by rules around how it can be debated and amended—would be a big headline. But the far-right MAGAs in Congress have tanked so many rules votes and undermined their own Speaker so many times that this defeat barely made a ripple.

At stake was renewal of FISA funding, which is short for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. After 9/11, FISA was amended to strengthen the surveillance powers of U.S. intelligence services, and it expires on April 19. The extremists hate FISA because it permits warrantless surveillance of bad foreign actors, who of course sometimes deal with bad U.S. counterparts, which to no one’s surprise include the Putin Caucus folks.

On Wednesday morning, Trump posted this on his Truth Social platform:

“KILL FISA, IT WAS ILLEGALLY USED AGAINST ME, AND MANY OTHERS. THEY SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN!!!” 

This was misguided. There’s no authority under the FISA law at issue for U.S. intelligence agencies to spy on U.S. citizens. Still, this was a cue for MAGA loyalists to move to kill the rule resolution that would have permitted consideration of and a vote upon the bill. With 19 Republicans voting against (and all Democrats—it is customary to vote against the “rule” of the opposing party unless otherwise instructed by party leadership), the hard-right sunk the FISA bill, marking the 7th time they have done so this year alone.

That’s not the only apparent split. GOP House leaders have begun publicly acknowledging a deep rift within the party on the question of foreign influence, specifically by Russia. As I wrote about earlier, the chairs of the House Foreign Affairs and Intelligence committees have both spoken up recently about how pervasive Russian influence has grown within the GOP, to the point that Russian propaganda and talking points have made their way to the House floor. This admission raises the stakes considerably in the battle between traditional conservatives on one side, who want to stand up to authoritarian threats, and MAGA apologists and Putin enablers on the other. It is a battle for the very soul of the party, if it has one left at all.

Up next week is a critical vote on Ukraine aid. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Q-GA) has threatened to renew her motion to vacate the chair and pull down yet another GOP Speaker should Mike Johnson allow the vote to occur. If she follows through with her threat, it will be yet another example of GOP dysfunction and disunity, putting their hair-thin majority at ever more serious risk in November.

In a twist, should Rep. Greene make her move, Democrats could wind up lending their votes to keep Speaker Johnson in his position, perhaps in exchange for a clean-ish aid bill for Ukraine. If that occurs, it will further confirm another hallmark of this Congress: that it is Democrats who are actually governing and getting critical legislation passed, from the budget to essential foreign aid.

Trump Wedge 3: The Rule of Law

One final point. 

The impending first criminal trial of Donald Trump, which begins Monday, will bring into focus another troubling and deep division within the GOP over the rule of law itself.

On the one hand, Trump has secured the GOP nomination with something around 80 to 85 percent of Republican primary voters in his column. On the other hand, he is facing 88 criminal counts in four different jurisdictions; he attempted to overturn a legitimate election and incited a violent attack on the Capitol; he spread the Big Lie about a stolen election and grifted hundreds of millions from his followers from it; he has flagrantly used his position and platform to threaten witnesses and court officials and their families; and he now intends to become a “Day One” dictator, toss aside our treaty obligations with NATO, and upend the rules-based international world order.

Trump is, by any measure, an extreme threat to ordered liberty, our judicial system, and the proper functioning and independence of our civil institutions. Republicans are largely lining up behind him to march in this monstrous parade, but there are a few courageous ones, including former Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, along with many other former cabinet members and military officials who served under Trump, who are now speaking out against him publicly and forcefully. They are seeking to create a “permission structure” to pull enough Republican voters away from Trump to cause his electoral defeat. 

And if returns from the GOP primaries are any indication, with a sizable number of Nikki Haley voters still casting ballots for her despite the fact that she is no longer running, this may wind up proving the biggest wedge of all. 

Taken together, and if leveraged properly by Trump’s foes both outside and within the Republican party, this could add up to a stinging defeat for the party in November. That is by no means guaranteed, but the right cards are now very much in hand for such a result to play out.

Should that happen, Sen. Lindsay Graham will have been proven absolutely correct when he tweeted back in 2016, “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed… And we will deserve it.”