Voices: Liz Cheney’s loss proves there will be no post-Trump Republican Party

To borrow from Nicki Minaj, Donald Trump “just killed another career. It’s a mild day.”

In retrospect, the first signs that there would be no “post-Trump” Republican Party came when only 10 House Republicans voted to impeach Trump for his actions on 6 January 2021 and only seven Republican Senators had the courage to convict him. That happened despite overwhelming evidence that his words and deeds had stoked the violent attack on Congress.

There were others signs to come. House Republicans moved to kick Liz Cheney out from her leadership position because of her outspokenness against the former president. And several of those Republicans who voted to impeach – such as Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, Fred Upton of Michigan, Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio and John Katko of New York – all decided to walk away from Congress rather than face pro-Trump primary challenges.

Most House Republicans opposed the creation of a bipartisan commission to investigate the riot, and Republican Senators filibustered a bill that would have created one. Their subsequent disdain for the January 6 select committee gave another indication that the party’s relationship with Trump would not end. And this week, one of that panel’s only two Republicans was vanquished – at least for now.

Following the ousters of her fellow impeachers Jaime Herrera Beutler, Tom Rice and Peter Meijer, Cheney’s defeat in the Wyoming congressional primary on Tuesday cements the truth that there will be no post-Trump GOP.

Even Cheney’s status as the daughter of a former Republican vice president could not protect her, and hers is the second political dynasty that the Trump machine has killed just this year. In May, Texas’ scandal-marred attorney general Ken Paxton, who has been under indictment since 2015, survived a primary from George P. Bush, the grandson of George H.W. Bush and Jeb Bush’s son – largely thanks to Trump’s support.

Put simply, this is what the Republican Party now is. It no longer stands for earnest principles of limited government, personal responsibility, respecting tradition, or even promoting white Christian heterosexual hegemony. It bears more resemblance to an online fandom not unlike Minaj’s Barbz or Taylor’s Swifties, albeit one with a habit of indulging in anti-trans and anti-immigrant sentiments.

So what next for the Wyoming congresswoman? Countless pundits have speculated whether Cheney could run for president in 2024. To the extent they think she has a hope of winning or even obstructing Trump’s chances of regaining the nomination, these Beltway creatures (and yes, much as he doesn’t want to admit it, your reporter is such a specimen) are as divorced from reality as those very Republicans who say that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

They simply refuse to admit a reality where the Republicans they see at their parties in Georgetown or their fundraisers in Northern Virginia or Embassy Row are not heavyweights at the heart of power, but political apostates. They cannot bring themselves to admit that the Republicans whom they chat to in green rooms before going on a panel for the Sunday shows are nothing like the Republican electorate.

One need not look any further than the GOP’s half-hearted approach to counter-messaging President Joe Biden’s freshly signed climate and health care spending bill – the momentous Inflation Reduction Act. Republicans have settled on a talking point about the Biden administration hiring 87,000 agents for the Internal Revenue Service, a scare story that has been repeatedly debunked. The idea has an echo of the party’s relentlessly repeated false claim that under Obamacare, “death panels” would be convened to pull the plug on grandma, but it carries little of the same salience (likely because after seven years of threatening to repeal Obamacare, they finally got the chance and failed).

Instead of tearing Biden’s newly revived agenda apart, the GOP is stuck offering a full-throated defense of Trump after the FBI searched his home — even after the Republican National Committee has been stuck with paying the former president’s bills. Similarly, even supposedly non-Trump Republicans like Virginia’s Glenn Youngkin are being dispatched to campaign for election-deniers like Michigan gubernatorial nominee Tudor Dixon.

Trump understands that he has a symbiotic relationship with the GOP: the party gives him the ability to influence people, and he gives it a devoted fan base. It remains for now a mutually beneficial relationship, and there is no incentive for either partner to change.