“There will be a post-Trump era,” she said. “And I think there’s going to be a new generation of voices in the Republican Party that push back on some of the trends we’ve been seeing—the isolationist, anti-trade, anti-intellectualism trends that are not moving us in the right direction.”
The old generation might have its say, too.
On New Year’s Day, forty-eight hours before he was sworn in to serve his freshman term, Senator-elect Mitt Romney penned an op-ed in the Washington Post that sent shockwaves through the capital city. Explaining that while he agreed with many of Trump’s policy decisions, and declaring that he would not “comment on every tweet or fault,” Romney warned, “With the nation so divided, resentful and angry, presidential leadership in qualities of character is indispensable. And it is in this province where the incumbent’s shortfall has been most glaring.”
Trump was disgusted. He recalls a conversation with Romney, during the interview for secretary of state, when he told him, “if only you spent the same energy” against Obama in 2012 as he had opposing Trump in 2016, he would have won the presidency for himself. “But he only wants to play hardball against me,” Trump says, rolling his eyes. “Romney had too much respect for Obama.”
Trump scolded the incoming senator on Twitter, urging Romney to be a “TEAM player” and help Republicans “WIN!” But for Romney, winning wasn’t merely about legislative conquests and electoral triumphs; it was about the government projecting moral leadership, providing an example of comity and dignity for the rest of the country to follow.
For some, these notions were long since irrelevant. To support Trump meant to ignore or justify all that he said and did—period.
This continued to manifest itself most entertainingly on the religious right. As the government shutdown spilled into January, Robert Jeffress, the Dallas pastor who had railed against Romney’s Mormonism in 2008 and 2012, told Fox News that the president’s tactics were warranted because “The Bible says even heaven itself is going to have a wall around it.” Around that same time, Jerry Falwell Jr. told the Washington Post Magazine that it was a “distortion” to say America “should be loving and forgiving” because Jesus taught such things. “In the heavenly kingdom the responsibility is to treat others as you’d like to be treated,” Falwell Jr. said. “In the earthly kingdom, the responsibility is to choose leaders who will do what’s best for your country.”
Not all churchgoers and committed Christians were so unblushingly apologetic for Trump. But over his first two years in office, no group had debased itself quite like their foremost clerics.
“These evangelical [leaders] are the biggest phonies of all,” says Michael Steele, the former party chairman. “These are the people who spent the last forty years telling everyone how to live, who to love, what to think about morality. And then this motherfucker comes along defiling the White House and disrespecting God’s children at every turn, but it’s cool, because he gave them two Supreme Court justices. They got their thirty pieces of silver.”
There were indicators of progress inside the GOP, however halting and long overdue.
In the middle of January, as the shutdown raged on, McCarthy took a step that should have been taken years earlier: stripping Steve King of his committee assignments.
The Iowa congressman had been making thinly veiled racist comments for at least a decade. And his rhetoric had grown that much bolder since the election of Trump: speaking of “cultural suicide by demographic transformation”; meeting with members of a far-right, Nazi-founded Austrian party; endorsing a self-avowed white nationalist for mayor of Toronto; and warning, “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”
But it wasn’t until he finally, fully removed the veil that Republicans felt compelled to act. “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive?” King said in an interview with the New York Times.
When it was published in January, the House of Representatives voted 424 to 1 in favor of rebuking King; the lone dissenter was a Democrat who wanted King formally censured. Meanwhile, the party’s leadership removed King from his committees. This would essentially make him useless to his constituents; not taking any chances, Iowa’s GOP leaders worked behind the scenes to promote a challenger in the upcoming 2020 primary, a state lawmaker with big donors and deep roots in the Fourth District.
But none of this guaranteed King’s defeat: At his first town hall meeting back home after the hullabaloo in Washington, he received a standing ovation.