When Walter Mondale, the former Vice-President, died on Monday, C-SPAN circulated a video clip of him on the rostrum of the House of Representatives, from January 6, 1981. It is a remarkable visual snippet of a lost Washington. Mondale and President Jimmy Carter had just been defeated in a landslide by Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, receiving only forty-nine Electoral College votes to the Republicans’ four hundred and eighty-nine. The video shows Mondale dutifully carrying out his constitutionally assigned function of presiding over a special session of Congress certifying the results. First, Mondale, smiling, reads out the Presidential tally. Democrats and Republicans leap to their feet to applaud Reagan’s win. Then Mondale, still smiling, reads out the Vice-Presidential results. “Walter F. Mondale, of the state of Minnesota, has received forty-nine votes,” he says, before turning and making a wry but audible aside to Tip O’Neill, the legendary Democratic Speaker of the House. “A landslide,” Mondale jokes. “Very impressive,” O’Neill replies. Once again, the entire chamber rises. Republicans and Democrats give Mondale, the portrait of a classy loser, a standing ovation.
It’s hard to imagine that Mondale—or anyone in that forty-year-old video—could have conceived of a January 6th like the one we had this year, and of a President like Donald Trump who would decisively lose reëlection but not concede defeat, one who would unleash a mob of his supporters on the Capitol itself to stop his own Vice-President from doing his constitutional duty and ratifying that defeat. In two minutes and sixteen seconds, that decades-old video clip conveys the cost of our descent into the politics of performative confrontation, capturing the chasm between a democracy that worked and one that, today, does not.
Next Wednesday, President Joe Biden is set to deliver his first address to a joint session of Congress, on the eve of his hundredth day in office. Outside the Capitol, newly erected fences and a heavy National Guard presence attest to the lingering scars of our own January 6th. But January 6th denialism has taken hold in Trump and many of his supporters—even some inside Congress. They now claim the horrific events of that day were merely a peaceful protest, and they continue to refuse to accept the legitimacy of Biden’s win. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been unable to reach a deal with Republicans to create a bipartisan commission to investigate the attack on the Capitol.
And never mind the old bipartisan ritual of applauding the President, no matter which Party he comes from; a number of Republican members of Congress told Punchbowl News that they won’t even bother to show up for the President’s speech. “No,” said Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a former member of the House Republican leadership. “No,” said Representative Nancy Mace, a highly regarded Republican freshman from South Carolina. “I am not,” said Representative Greg Pence, the brother of Trump’s Vice-President, Mike Pence. Just hours after rioters sought to stop the Vice-President from banging down the gavel on the Trump Presidency, Greg Pence was one of the hundred and forty-seven Republicans who voted against certifying the election results—a total so large that it represents not some small lunatic fringe but the vast majority of the House Republican Conference.
Three months later, no price has been paid by the Republicans who took that vote. In the immediate aftermath of January 6th, this outcome was not entirely clear. Some Republican politicians initially disavowed Trump and seemed to believe that his hold on the Party would dissipate—Nikki Haley, I’m thinking of you—but have since proved eager to run away from their own words. Many companies even announced that they would suspend political donations to those who had voted against certifying the election results, suggesting there might actually be consequences. Instead, the inevitable walk-back has already started.
In recent days, as new campaign-finance reports have come in, the nonprofit group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) has found numerous examples of corporate political-action committees resuming contributions to Republicans who voted to overturn the election results. They include the PACs run by A.T. & T., the American Bankers Association, JetBlue, and the National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors. Toyota’s PAC has given at least forty-eight thousand dollars to thirty-one Republican members who voted against certification, according to Noah Bookbinder, the president of CREW, who told me it was the largest amount that his group has found so far—a “full-on embrace of not caring that members of Congress encouraged an insurrection.”
This is hardly surprising. Washington is a calculating place, and these companies have calculated, accurately, where the vast majority of Republican officials in Congress still stand. Papering over a scandal, assuming that the public is not paying enough attention to care about a few donations which really matter only to the politicians who receive them—that’s what this town is all about. “There was an opportunity for the Republican Party to differentiate itself from Donald Trump and his anti-democratic actions and tendencies, to say he’s gone too far,” Bookbinder told me. “They didn’t do that.”
In the Washington of Walter Mondale, a President attacking the legitimacy of an American election was unthinkable. Three months after it actually happened, what is unthinkable is that Republicans would even consider repudiating the President who did it. Washington’s old normal is that video of Mondale; its new normal is half of Washington being totally fine with a violent mob trying to kill the other half of Washington. Or pretending that it never took place. For those who can’t explain away the events of January 6th, ignoring the insurrection in favor of culture wars and partisan posturing has already become a perfectly acceptable alternative. “12 weeks later,” the anti-Trump Republican activist Sarah Longwell wrote this week, for the Bulwark, a conservative news site, “we’re debating corporate tax rates, Dr. Seuss, and trans bathroom access, like nothing ever happened.” But, of course, it did happen. What this episode reveals is not merely a few new examples of corporate hypocrisy or Nikki Haley’s breathtaking ability to flip-flop but a Party that is nowhere near to breaking with its destructive leader.
If you want to spend an entertaining few hours trying to understand how this debacle came to pass, reading former House Speaker John Boehner’s new memoir, “On the House,” is a good place to start. In the book, Boehner offers a breezy, expletive-filled backstory of how shameless cynics and chaos worshippers took over his House Republican Conference and then, eventually, the Trump White House and the Party itself. In 2015, Boehner, a genial Ohio Republican who loved golf, Camel cigarettes, and a good glass of Merlot, resigned from his Speakership under pressure from the G.O.P. insurgents of the Freedom Caucus. That same group soon became Trump’s most fanatic supporters on Capitol Hill, and remains the political force to be reckoned with among House Republicans today. Two of Boehner’s chief nemeses, the then congressmen Mick Mulvaney and Mark Meadows, went on to become chiefs of staff in Trump’s dysfunctional White House. Boehner loathes them so utterly that he considers them a category unto themselves, writing that, without the mentoring of the late former President Gerald Ford and other establishment Republicans, he himself might have become “a bomb-throwing Meadows/Mulvaney-type jackass.”
My favorite scene in the book is when Meadows, newly elected, with Boehner’s help, in 2012, arrives at the Capitol and immediately votes against Boehner’s reëlection as Speaker. When Boehner wins, anyway, Meadows shows up in Boehner’s office and kneels on the floor, begging forgiveness. This was no more sincere than Meadows’s policy views, in Boehner’s telling. Meadows and other members of the Freedom Caucus won election as self-proclaimed budget hawks, even driving the disastrous government shutdown of 2013 in an effort to slash spending, before turning around and embracing Trump and his massive additions to the deficit. “I guess those trillions in Trump debt didn’t bother him a bit,” Boehner writes. “No, most of these guys weren’t about principles. They were about chaos and power.”
Boehner draws a straight line from the Freedom Caucus’s ascendancy to January 6th. He denounces the group’s members as “political terrorists” who emboldened the actual terrorists who stormed his old office on Capitol Hill, flatly debunks various Trump conspiracy theories, and calls the insurrection a “low point for our country.” I’ve always believed that the transformation of Congress into what Boehner calls Crazytown was both a prerequisite for, and a warning indicator of, the Trump follies to come. This account offers some sharp new material for that thesis.
It may well be what Boehner does not say, however, that best explains Trump’s enduring hold over his party. In an interview with Time magazine, Boehner admitted something that he did not in the book itself, which is that he voted for Trump in 2020, understanding full well that the President would never accept any election result that did not have him as the winner. “I voted for Donald Trump,” Boehner said. “I thought that his policies, by and large, mirrored the policies that I believed in.”
Boehner is hardly alone in this. Trump, after all, was not supported these past few years by only his most slavish sycophants. Many of Trump’s critics within the Republican Party voted for him, too, as did those, like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, who have emerged, post-January 6th, as leaders of a small but vocal new Republican congressional opposition to the former President. They did not repudiate him when it would have mattered, and that, in the end, is why he is gone but not at all forgotten. The Trump Administration is over; the Trump crisis is not.
