The Real Republican Radicals

There have been two major political developments in the final, post-election act of the Trump Presidency—each interesting on its own, but confusing when taken together. First, Trump’s hold over elected Republicans has seemed only to strengthen after his loss, amid his baseless claims of a rigged election. When the attorney general of Texas announced an almost fact-free lawsuit trying to reverse the election results in four swing states, a hundred and twenty-six Republican members of Congress signed a statement supporting it. The list included some known Trump dead-enders but also plenty of mainstream Republicans: House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, New York’s Representative Elise Stefanik, Missouri’s Representative Ann Wagner. This week, Senator Josh Hawley, of Missouri, a rising star in the Republican Party, announced that he will formally challenge the certification of the election. Trump’s hold over his party was supposed to rest on his ability to win, but he lost, and not much has changed. More than a month after the election, the Republican Party of Arizona tweeted an image of Donald Trump standing over a body of water, in which he was reflected as a lion. The caption read “Lionhearted.”

The second development is the more surprising one: the conservative grass roots, long understood to be the source of Trump’s political strength, have been less forceful in their defense of the idea that the election was stolen than the Party’s elected leaders. For all the fears that preceded Election Day, there has been no widespread political violence, and rallies convened to protest the election results have drawn a far cry from the “MILLION” marchers that Trump’s press secretary claimed. During the past two months, the defense of the President has been defined by the comic-pathetic scene of Rudy Giuliani denouncing the election results to a handful of supporters and press at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, in Philadelphia. The Trump movement was long understood to represent a populist era of politics—a toppling of the élites. But now we are at the end of the Trump Administration, with the President insisting that democracy itself is under siege, and the people at the barricades are politicians and their lawyers.

In an effort to make sense of all this, I put in a call to the former Arizona senator Jeff Flake, one of the Republican insiders Trump effectively ejected from power. Flake, a libertarian conservative, was a forceful critic of Trump’s during the 2016 campaign, and called for Trump to withdraw from the Presidential race after the disclosure of the “Access Hollywood” tape that October. The President made the senator from Arizona a political target, on and off Twitter, and Flake’s approval ratings among Republicans in his home state plummeted. (This, even as Flake voted with Trump’s positions eighty-one per cent of the time). In October, 2017, Flake announced that he would not run for reëlection, saying that winning the nomination “would require me to believe in positions I don’t hold on such issues as trade and immigration, and it would require me to condone behavior that I cannot condone.” Of the mood that had gripped the Republican Party, he said, “This spell will pass, but not by next year.”

Flake lives in Mesa, Arizona, where he voted for Joe Biden last month. His wife of thirty-five years, Cheryl, keeps his schedule. He still has his oaky, patient senatorial voice but none of the old senatorial pomp. Flake spoke about the conservative base the way Western reporters speak about Kim Jong Un—as a force that is sublime in its power and childish in nearly every other dimension. In Flake’s view, the Republican Party had resisted its weakest, most irrational element for years, and then finally acceded to it. “Take Arizona as a microcosm,” Flake said. “For years, John McCain, principally, and [the former U.S. senator] Jon Kyl, and myself spent a lot of money from our campaigns and whatnot trying to keep that infrastructure sane. And, with McCain gone, and Kyl out, me gone, there is no effort at all in Arizona. You try to convince your neighbor who is a rational Republican to attend a district meeting or become a precinct committeeman, and then they attend, and all it is is conspiracy theories, and birtherism for years. The Party has simply been ceded to that element.” At least partly out of exhaustion. The Party’s radicalization, especially on immigration, had meant that “the business community has stopped giving to the state Republican Party, by and large,” which made the state Party even more dependent upon the national Party, which meant that its ranks filled even more with loyalists willing to tweet out photos of an aging casino billionaire reflected as a lion. Flake said, “It’s just a vicious cycle we’re in.” (“Jeff Flake is stuck living in the past,” a spokesperson for the Arizona G.O.P. wrote in an e-mail to The New Yorker. “The days of crony capitalists and ‘Republicans In Name Only’ dominating the levers of power in the Republican Party is on the decline.”)

Flake was describing a process that continued to unspool even after his story ended, and whose natural terminus is something like the situation of the past month, in which the conspiracies emanating from the President’s most senior allies have far exceeded anything coming from the conservative grass roots. “It’s time to move on,” the televangelist Pat Robertson said last week, suggesting that the President should leave Washington and not run again in 2024. (He spoke highly of Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor). In the most powerful seats in conservative Washington, the mood has been different. Ron Johnson, the senator from Wisconsin, has called for a hearing to investigate “election irregularities” in the 2020 contest. The former national-security adviser Michael Flynn, a retired three-star general, suggested that the President might invoke martial law as part of his challenge to the election results. Sidney Powell, a former prosecutor and Texas appellate lawyer, unspooled such baroque conspiracies about voting machines that even Giuliani insisted she wasn’t speaking for the Presidential campaign, but the President himself invited her to the White House several times during the week before Christmas. Some of this is natural—inner circles tighten when everyone knows an era is ending. But the inner-circle conspiracies took in something like half the Party in Washington—the portion that had signed the Texas letter. The paranoia was coming from the top of the Party; conservatism had been flipped upside down. Nothing the President had done since the election surprised Flake. He said, “What has surprised me is how many people in positions of power have pushed this nonsense.”

For several weeks, I’d had a daunting file open in my browser tab—several hundred pages of affidavits from Republican poll watchers in Michigan, documenting irregularities that they claimed to have seen while observing the main vote-counting site in Detroit. After I got off the phone with Flake, it occurred to me that this file was a probe into the new Republican Party that Flake had described—these were the Michiganders who had been willing to serve as the foot soldiers in Trump’s war against the election. Judges had read it, seen no meaningful evidence of a stolen election, rolled their eyes, and moved on, but from a cultural point of view it made for interesting reading.

There was nothing especially raggedy or vague about the poll watchers’ affidavits. Their testimony was clear, their observations exact, their cursive legible to the point of elegance. Even if they had enrolled in Sidney Powell’s and Michael Flynn’s project, they sounded very little like Sidney Powell or Michael Flynn. They had been backed by a team of Republican lawyers, and some of them were lawyers themselves (George L. Boller: “I am a member in good standing of the state bar of Michigan”) or accompanied by lawyers (Cynthia Brunell: “I arrived a few minutes before 9 p.m. on Tuesday November 3 with my husband, David Brunell, an attorney volunteer with the Republican Party”). They came from prosperous and middle-class suburbs of Detroit: Bloomfield Hills, Sterling Heights, Livonia. They stayed for remarkably long shifts and kept a careful watch. (Articia Bomer: “I arrived at approximately 9:30 p.m. and left the next morning at approximately 6:30 a.m.”) Sometimes, when they could not remember exact details, they acknowledged it. (Colleen Schneider: “I asked the first set of women if they were getting counted twice and they said no. I moved down the line and asked again and I was told to pretty much mind my own business. I cannot remember the exact words.”) To read the file was to see the basic virtues of twentieth-century corporate life (exactitude, determination, careful record keeping) repurposed in service of a mania.

Many of the Republican poll watchers detected hostility from the election workers, perhaps because the Republicans were assiduously noting which of them were wearing Black Lives Matter face masks. (Colleen Schneider: “She told her table to continue counting the votes. Then she said that I didn’t intimidate her, to which I replied that she didn’t intimidate me either.”) Some suspicion concentrated on the poll workers, who were alleged to have counted some ballots that were incomplete. The patchiness of municipal government machinery drew attention. (Andrew John Miller: “I saw roughly 24 computers on November 3, 2020 and every computer I saw had a red error messages in the lower right-hand corner saying, ‘update overdue.’ ”) But even when the poll watchers noticed something that seemed to them amiss, the observations were relayed matter-of-factly. (Braden Gaicobazzi: “At least 80% of the military ballots I saw were straight ticket democrat or simply had Joe Biden’s name filled in on them. I had always been told that military personnel tended to be more conservative, so this stuck out to me as the day went on.”) The popular story of the Republican base through the Trump years, and especially this year, has been that it comes from the social margins, subject to the conspiratorial paranoia of QAnon and OANN. But, at the crucial moment, the base that the President could rely upon was composed of careful partisans who followed the rules and sought remedy within them. If Michael Flynn was plotting a revolution, they were preparing for a lawsuit. Really, they did not seem so far from the precinct committeemen whom Jeff Flake had worked so hard to install, to keep the Party infrastructure “sane.”

Some of the poll watchers lived in Michigan’s tenth congressional district, and in December their congressman, a conservative named Paul Mitchell III who had not run for reëlection, quit the Republican Party. In a letter addressed to the R.N.C. chair, Ronna Romney McDaniel, and Representative McCarthy, Mitchell made clear that he had supported the President (voting with Trump ninety-five per cent of the time, helping to whip votes, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars to support his colleagues) but that he had reached a breaking point after the election. “If Republican leaders collectively sit back and tolerate unfounded conspiracy theories and ‘Stop the Steal rallies’ without speaking for our electoral process, which the Department of Homeland Security said was ‘the most secure in American history,’ our nation will be damaged,” Mitchell wrote. “With the leadership of the Republican Party and our Republican Conference in the House actively participating in at least some of those efforts, I fear long-term harm to our democracy.” Mitchell wrote that he had asked the House’s clerk to record his affiliation as ‘independent’ for his final votes. “While admittedly symbolic, we all know that symbols matter.”

What has happened to the Republican Party during these past four years, and what will happen to it now? When Trump moved into the Oval Office, he hung a portrait of Andrew Jackson. But it is hard to credit the party as Jacksonian, or even broadly populist, when, this fall, it refused to send modest checks to suffering Americans, even though its own control of Washington was on the line. Trump was said to augur a rise of a more nationalistic cadre of young conservatives, but the emblem of this supposed turn, Turning Point USA, featured, at its annual conference in December, two models blasting cash through a “money cannon.” The conservatism to come might be anything at all.

In some ways the Republican and Democratic establishments have opposite problems. The Democratic problem is that no one ever leaves—it is in the hands of a stubborn, cagey gerontocracy. The Republican Party’s problem is that no one ever stays. In the space of a few short years, its leadership has pinged from neoliberalism to radical libertarianism to minoritarian institutionalism to authoritarian nationalism, hauling the conservative citizens of Sterling Heights along in their wake. Partisanship, rather than ideology, is keeping the Republicans glued together. If there were reasons to think that nationalism would be a stopping point, the events since Election Day have undermined them. Come January, conservatives will be in the minority, awaiting new instructions from new leaders to come.

In Mesa, Flake noted that his own political banner had been constitutional conservatism; it was only about five years ago that this was the default slogan of any grassroots movement on the right. “Everybody had their worn pocket Constitutions that they’d rip out at events,” he said. Now that same movement had arranged itself, Flake pointed out, behind the insistence that challenging the election results was “the only way to save the Constitution, and even calls for martial law.” Another rueful laugh. Flake said, “It’s just blown me away, frankly, how quickly that can happen.”