BERLIN — Those of us who covered former President Donald Trump’s extraordinary rise and victory often think of the canary in the (Yorkshire) coal mine that should have pointed to his general election viability: The British vote to leave the European Union, this month seven years ago.
Brexit, as hindsight made all too clear, was not only a harbinger of Trump’s potential but illustrated that the appeal of right-wing populism was hardly limited to America. And former Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s subsequent success penetrating the so-called red wall of pint-and-crisps Labour seats was a reminder that the demographic realignment underpinning the shift was no mere Rust Belt phenomenon, either.
But I increasingly think the more consequential storyline going into next year’s presidential election is the other side of the coin: not the strength of the populist right but the weakness of the center-right.
And now, like then, it’s not a story limited to the American side of the Atlantic.
I’m writing from Europe, which is clarifying in ways that I’ll get to, but let’s start with the U.S. And specifically, the Republican Party.
I’ll stipulate up front that the GOP’s Trump skeptics have no easy task. As made plain in the NBC poll last weekend, half the party remains in the grip of a personality cult. What else to conclude from a survey that shows a narrow majority of Republican voters support a candidate just indicted on 37 felony counts? Even more arresting, 77 percent of GOP primary voters surveyed said the charges were either no cause for concern or only bothered them slightly.
That’s the marketplace Republican officials are working with. As many a former GOP lawmaker happily emancipated from a primary ballot will tell you, they don’t have a Trump problem, they have a voter problem.
When I asked one House Republican lawmaker who endorsed Trump if not supporting him had been an option, this member said matter-of-factly: He’s going to win and he’s hugely popular in my district.
Sums it up, doesn’t it?
A politician taking the path of least resistance isn’t exactly news. And like I said, it’s not easy when so many of your voters are radicalized.
But the pre-Trump wing of the party is scarcely trying — or they are doing so in ways that only point to the difficulty traditional center-right parties are having in this moment.
Let’s start, where else, with House Republicans.
Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s response to Trump inviting three-dozen felonies? No, not an opening to break with someone who could be staring at prison time as the party’s nominee. McCarthy took it as an opportunity to impeach Attorney General Merrick Garland.
Yes, I know the stated move on Garland stems from Hunter Biden’s misdemeanor-and-diversion arrangement. But the decision to target Garland and the Department of Justice, rather than seize the chance to at least start moving away from Trump, tells you everything about how captive McCarthy is to his Trumpian base in the House GOP conference. As is his willingness to even entertain expunging Trump’s impeachments, whatever that means.
It’s not like McCarthy isn’t conscious of the risk Republicans bear in remaining handcuffed to Trump. Look no further than his own comments on CNBC Tuesday when, as he’s given to doing, he blurted out a Kinsley gaffe.
“Can he win that election?” McCarthy said. “Yeah he can … the question is, is he the strongest to win the election, I don’t know that answer.” (A few hours later, unsurprisingly, McCarthy fled to a safe space, Breitbart, to clean up his comments and testify to Trump’s strength in the general election.)
While House Republicans weigh impeaching the attorney general and relitigating the former president’s impeachments, many Senate Republicans are sticking with their long-running strategy: wishing Trump would go away.
Their posture reminds me of the William Faulkner line from “Intruder in the Dust,” the one about how Southern boys are forever fantasizing it’s not yet 2 p.m. at Gettysburg in 1863, and the Confederates have yet to be repelled. For more than a few Senate Republicans, it’s still June of 2015 and Trump has yet to come down that Manhattan elevator to take over their party. Or that, any day now, the party will revert to its pre-Trump identity.
Republican Leader Mitch McConnell no more wants to spend his golden years on Martha’s Vineyard than to see Trump as the Republican nominee in 2024. Yet McConnell didn’t even try to round up the votes for Trump’s impeachment conviction in the aftermath of Jan. 6, in hindsight the best chance the party had to be rid of Trump, and now he says nothing as the former president is charged with damning crimes.
McConnell may be betting, as he alluded to in his withering speech following Trump’s acquittal, that the criminal justice system will ultimately rid him of this meddlesome hotel developer.
But that’s the point. It’s forever somebody else or some other intervention that will finally break the party from its Trump spell. It was going to be his 2020 defeat, then it would surely be his conduct in the aftermath of the election and, okay this is really it, it had to be his role propelling lackluster candidates in last year’s midterms.
As ineffectual as the traditional Republicans in Congress have been in confronting Trumpism, the 2024 field has demonstrated why, at least precarceral, Trump’s hold on the GOP remains so firm.
The non-Trump Republican field today is a picture of the party’s fragmentation. It’s a mix of born-again Never Trumpers, those vowing to oppose him in the general election; Maybe Trumpers, those who would in fact like to beat him but don’t want to imperil their future viability within the system; and those clearly open for business with Trump, whether to secure a future appointment or because the wait is shorter to run again in 2028.
This composition, it’s worth noting, largely reflects the non-Trump Republican electorate, a mix of voters appalled by him and desperate to move on, those who “liked the policies” (ask any reporter how many times you hear that verbatim) but want a different nominee and those who still like Trump and may come around to him but for now are intrigued by others.
This split is on course to play out in Iowa, where a conservative and more establishment-friendly electorate could split the non-Trump vote, and in New Hampshire, where any Trump alternative from Iowa will see their vote carved into by Chris Christie or whoever emerges to win over independents and anti-Trump Republicans.
The public presentation of the candidates also reflects this array. Take Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who’s most clearly targeting those voters still enamored with Trump or at least his scent. There’s the affect, each sentence, to paraphrase President Joe Biden, being a noun, a verb and “woke.” And there’s the substance, most recently his offensive against the immigration “invasion,” promise to use U.S. military assets as needed to curb the flow of fentanyl and opposition to birthright citizenship.
DeSantis isn’t trying to break the party from Trumpism, he’s accommodating it and in fact offering to prosecute a more efficient version. I get it. It’s a reflection of where many Republicans are in 2023 and also happens to be authentic to who DeSantis is.
There are two obvious challenges for him, though. First, it’s exceedingly difficult to out-bid Trump on policy provocation because, well, he’s Donald Trump. See his 2015 proposal to bar Muslims from migrating to the U.S., which horrified GOP elites but, revealingly, was fairly popular with their voters. He’ll see your drug interdiction proposal and raise you an electrified border wall.
More worrisome for DeSantis and the other aspirants is that Trump’s appeal is more primal than policy, that, like former U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, he has a demagogue’s grasp on the electoral id.
Which brings me to Europe.
The rise of right-wing populism here owed much the same to what it did in America. It was oriented around identity, be it national, racial or sexual. Yet it sprouted as much because the traditional center-right parties were divided over whether, or how, to confront or co-opt the movement. And, much like the Republicans, they’re still not quite sure how to proceed.
Take the Germans. The CDU, the country’s traditional center-right party, should be well-positioned to take advantage of dissatisfaction with Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s ungainly, tripartite coalition government. However, its the far-right AFD that’s climing in the polls, posting record highs in surveys. Why? In part because the CDU isn’t quite sure how to present itself. Their journeyman leader, Friedrich Merz, has long struggled with whether to embrace the grievance-mongering of the AFD or returning more to the centrism of the party’s longtime leader, Angela Merkel.
A neat illustration: Merz called Ukrainian refugees “welfare tourists” only to express regret over using the phrase. Predictably, as my colleagues in Berlin have reported, Merz is now facing the specter of a challenge internally from the leader of Germany’s most populous state, Hendrik Wüst, who’s unambiguously calling for a return to Merkel moderation.
In the meantime, the AFD has latched onto the backlash over energy prices and regulations, adding another potent topic alongside its most galvanizing issue, migration.
“We have a lack of leadership, we have a political class unqualified to tackle these major, complicated issues, this is everywhere the same,” a long-serving CDU lawmaker told me. “It more and more grows into a systemic crisis of our democracy.” Speaking of his own party, the lawmaker added: “We are equivalently weak as the government is.”
Because of its history, Germany’s political parties are, for now, still adhering to the continent’s old <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordon_sanitaire_(politics)" target="_blank" link-data="{"linkText":"cordon sanitaire","link":{"target":"NEW","attributes":[],"url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordon_sanitaire_(politics)","_id":"00000189-1fe6-d6d5-a79d-9ff6969d0004","_type":"33ac701a-72c1-316a-a3a5-13918cf384df"},"_id":"00000189-1fe6-d6d5-a79d-9ff6969d0005","_type":"02ec1f82-5e56-3b8c-af6e-6fc7c8772266"}”>cordon sanitaire when it comes to the AFD, refusing to enter into a coalition with them.
In France, President Emmanuel Macron demonstrated how corroded traditional politics had become by marching to the presidency in 2017 via a new centrist party he hatched. Yet Macron has groomed no successor who can, like he increasingly has, appeal to the center-right and do what he did twice: fend off the National Front’s Marine Le Pen in a runoff.
Spain may be the most illustrative of this moment in Europe and the U.S. After suffering steep losses in a regional election in May, Spain’s socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez decided to call a snap election for this summer. But whether the more mainstream right party can form a government in Madrid may depend in part on its capacity to form a coalition with the far-right Vox Party.
Sánchez knows this is and is betting the threat of Vox will prove sufficient to rally Spanish voters from far-left to center, as it did just enough for him to claim enough votes in 2019 to form his own coalition government on the left.
A weakened liberal government pinning its hopes on a narrow rejection, again, of a highly polarizing right-wing political brand? Yes, that sounds familiar.
Spain would hardly be alone among European countries relying on far-right parties to form conservative-leaning coalition governments.
It’s a parliamentary concession of necessity that, of course, has no pure equivalent in the U.S. However, the GOP is, in its own way, just as reliant on the Trumpist ranks. That’s the inherent risk looming over any Republican split – that they have no path to the presidency or congressional majorities if Trump’s diehards don’t vote. Because of their weakness in repelling Trump at the outset, Republicans are handcuffed to his supporters. It’s not likely to end well.
And one only needs to glimpse at the U.K. for a window on what comes next for conservative parties in the wake of a demagogue’s departure. The British Tories no longer have the cult of personality but are being held accountable for Boris Johnson’s chaotic reign and exit. It’s the worst of both worlds. And it has Labour poised to reclaim 10 Downing Street next year sheerly by being the alternative to … that.
Benjamin Johansen and Peter Wilke contributed to this column.