Republican Party has to wash off the stain of Donald Trump

Well before he incited this week’s mob violence on Capitol Hill, Donald Trump had become a global hate figure, and for good reason. With his narcissism, vulgarity and misogyny, he personified what many foreign observers see as America’s worst values.

What happened on Thursday morning AEST was, by any standards, truly abominable – a direct result of his unhinged and self-serving campaign to overturn November’s presidential election, which he lost. Whatever legacy Trump could boast – his 2016 victory, his booming pre-pandemic economy, his Middle East peace breakthroughs – has been erased.

It is true that for the past four years the Republicans made no attempt to control Trump, his family and some of his advisers until it was too late. His moral character was so defective that he only survived this long because of the complicity of the Republicans rather than with their support. Some of them – Ted Cruz, for example – are now damaged goods.

However, there were signs of grace when both the Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell and Vice-President Mike Pence realised that the respectability of the US constitution and their political movement took precedence over any loyalty to an American president. Just as Trump has all but destroyed the soul of American conservatism, so he has inflicted significant damage to American democracy.

How did the US get to this point?

When Trump rudely burst on the political scene in June 2015, like virtually everyone else, I laughed off his prospects on ABC’s PM and said he lacked any credibility. A few months later, when he was leading in the Republican primary polls, I wrote in these pages that Trump represents “disorder, dysfunction and disaster”.

When he shocked us by winning the Republican nomination in mid-2016, I said that, like John Howard, I “tremble” at the thought of Trump becoming president. He would become “the most unpredictable and dangerous president in American history.” Sure enough, in power, Trump was “fanning the flames of resentments and hatreds.”

But unlike many contributors to these pages – especially those readers who have great difficulty in distinguishing analysis from endorsement – I eventually understood why this “rude, crude, lewd buffoon” resonated with a significant group of Americans. This is not just because Trump tells the Republican Party’s angry conservative base what it wants to hear – from guns, climate, tariffs, immigrants. It’s because he has touched the raw nerve of those Americans, especially significant segments of mainly white, blue-collar class, who believe their nation is in big trouble.

It has not just been that Washington has become an entrenched class of politicians increasingly divorced from the public. The angst has far more to do with a widespread sense that the US is in serious decline. The post-September 11 endless wars, the global financial crisis, the toxic polarisation, the widening inequality, the wage stagnation, the loss of manufacturing jobs overseas, the spread of identity politics, the rise of China, the decline of US global pre-eminence – all this confused and disoriented many Americans before 2016.

That’s why Trump has blamed America’s problems on not just Democrats, but the Republican establishment whose neo-conservative agenda of globalisation and Wilsonian misadventures had failed so many. It’s why Trump has consistently presented himself as living antidote to decline. It’s also why – and this is important – the underlying conditions that gave rise to Trump will not disappear anytime soon.

Trump has never been capable of growing out of his protest mode. And during his tenure, with rare exceptions, the Republicans became the party of protest, not the party of governance. This was crazy. When Lenin seized the Kremlin in 1917, he stopped denouncing government. Trump could not stop! And the results were not just election disaster but mayhem on the streets of Washington.

What now? The Republican leadership has to denounce Trump and say “never again”. They need to wash the stain of Trump off themselves in order to be credible opponents. Any Republican, who (unlike Pence and McConnell) has continued to back Trump up to the last moment, is by definition unfit for a leadership role in the party and should be pushed to the margins. The Republicans need to search for new more intelligent leaders, who can challenge the incoming Democratic White House and Congress, but challenge it with reason and not with force – something Trump was beyond understanding.

Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and the Democratic Congress are likely to make huge errors, especially economically, in their governance. But there is now a vacuum on the right spectrum of American politics. It is vital that the next generation of conservative leaders find a philosophy and language capable of filling it. As Trump has shown, the alternative may be something very nasty indeed.

Tom Switzer is executive director of the Centre for Independent Studies and a presenter at the ABC’s Radio National.