The Past Decade’s GOP ‘Violets’: Making Peace With the Inevitable

Recently, the late Philip Kerr’s historical detective novel March Violets has profoundly disturbed me. Its title refers to German opportunists who only turned Nazi after newly installed Chancellor Adolf Hitler used the Reichstag fire as an excuse to push through an “Enabling Act” that gave him unchallenged authority in March 1933.

Or, as Kerr’s detective hero, Bernie Gunther, mordantly observes, “Everyone in Germany was somebody different before March 1933.”

The term can be easily adapted to the current situation in the Republican Party, as another would-be nationalist strongman, after failing in one attempt to overthrow the government, angles toward seizing power in a more meaningful way than he ever thought possible.

I took the image accompanying this post as darkness descended on Capitol Hill in November 2015. Five months before, Donald Trump had announced his candidacy for Presidency. Almost no member of the Senate or House of Representatives could imagine then how their lives were about to change.

Just as the Nazis were a minority party even up to March 1933, the MAGA faction did not constitute a majority of the GOP through much of the spring of 2016. But, just like the splintered anti-Nazi groups did not form a united front against Hitler, Trump opponents could not consolidate against him in time to slow his march to the party nomination.

In both cases, opponents bided their time, sure that the bumptious interloper would make a fatal mistake. It didn’t happen.

Not in November 2016, when Trump, contrary to pre-election polls, pulled out an Electoral College victory.

Not in February 2020, when, despite clear evidence that he had pressured Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy to announce an investigation of his likely Democratic rival Joe Biden, all but one Senate Republican voted to acquit him on impeachment charges.

Not in November and December 2020, when, having lost the popular and Electoral College counts, he refused to accept the results.

And not after January 6, 2021, when—despite fearing for their lives in a Capitol Hill riot instigated by the President—only six more Senate Republicans joined Mitt Romney in voting to convict Trump of inciting the insurrection.

The first Senate failure to convict Trump merely encouraged him to act even more drastically. The second failure was more consequential: The “violets” who privately (and, in some surprising cases, publicly) scorned and loathed him lost their chance to bar him from office again, move their party and nation in a new direction, and enjoy peace of mind.

Those Who Know Better

Now, with Trump running the table in the Republican primaries (defeated only in DC and Vermont), the ranks of party dissenters are even thinner than previously.

Falling by the wayside, accepting the inevitable by endorsing the presumptive nominee, are New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu (who had once called the former President “f****** crazy”) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (who called Trump “morally responsible” for inciting the January 6 riot). It may well be only a matter of time before the former President’s last rival for the nomination, Nikki Haley, ends up endorsing him, too.

The support of the MAGA faction for Trump is understandable; after all, they are true believers.

The Trump “violets,” however, are a different case. They have every reason, ideologically and personally, to refuse to endorse him. Yet instead, they try to exceed MAGA supporters with a shameless backing of everything he says or does, as seen in the cases of:

*Ted Cruz, who, despite calling Trump a “sniveling coward” for, among other reasons, suggesting that Cruz’s wife was unattractive and falsely implying that Cruz’s father was involved with the JFK assassination, ended up championing in the Senate Trump’s bid not to certify results in the 2020 election.

*Lindsey Graham, who, after calling Trump a “race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot” in 2016 and even threatened the White House with removing him from the Presidency if he didn’t denounce the Jan. 6 rioters, engaged in a public reconciliation.

*Kevin McCarthy, who, after saying Trump “bears responsibility” for the riot, flew down to Mar-a-Lago three weeks after the insurrection, and tried vainly to gain more significant support as Speaker of the House from the former President.

J.D. Vance: A Hideous Case

Yet the evolution of J.D. Vance—from acclaimed Hillbilly Elegy author and advocate for “flyover country” to one of Trump’s staunchest Senate defenders—has been especially hideous.

The Ohio Senator’s call a month ago for Trump to ignore any adverse Supreme Court rulings epitomizes the GOP violets at their most shameless—turning on a dime from implacable opposition to topping the MAGA crowd in overheated rhetoric and extreme positions.

Back in 2016, Vance told talk-show host Charlie Rose, “I’m a Never Trump guy; I never liked him,” and tweeted, “What an idiot.” 

But his February interview with George Stephanopolous on ABC’s “This Week” set a marker for threats that no mainstream politician had supported in decades.

Once Trump embarks on a second term, Vance said, he should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, [and] replace them with our people.”  If the court ruled against Trump, the ex-President would be justified in taking the same position that Andrew Jackson had so memorably expressed it in the 1830s: the Chief Justice “has made his decision; now let him enforce it.”

Many Hillbilly Elegy reviewers praised Vance’s rise from poverty to Yale Law School graduate as a victory of will and determination over circumstance.

But evidently, Vance must have missed in his education any mention of the Jacksonian Era, because “Old Hickory’s” response to the Supreme Court ruling on Cherokee land rights that the Senator alluded to has become one of the darkest stains on that President’s record, as it removed an entire indigenous population.

Surely, Vance’s statement that unlike Mike Pence, he would have permitted competing slates of electors when the 2020 vote counts were presented to Congress, has put him on Trump’s list of 2024 Veep hopefuls.

Why the New ‘Violets’ Fear Their Party Leader

At no other time in its history has the Republican Party been so overshadowed by a single man. Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan never caused so much fear of their displeasure among officeholders. Once has to ask, “Why are so many so worried?”

Let me enumerate the fears that may beset the Trump “violets”:

*Being “primaried”: In 1950, Maryland Senator Millard Tydings, a 24-year incumbent and conservative Democrat, lost his seat when colleague Joseph McCarthy, criticized by the Marylander for perpetuating a “fraud” and a “hoax” with his charges of widespread Communist infiltration of the State Department, aided the campaign of his Republican challenger. These days, challenges come even before Election Day, when an incumbent might be forced to take less compromising positions lest he face an opponent from his own party’s fringes. Liz Cheney’s loss of her once-safe House seat, after she had voted for his impeachment for inciting the Capitol riot, served notice that Trump could rile up the MAGA base against them. Of the nine House members who joined Cheney in voting against Trump, three lost primaries when they sought reelection, and four others chose to retire.

*Blackmail: The Presidency President gave Trump access to all kinds of secrets about domestic and foreign figures. But, as Andrea Bernstein’s September 2022 ProPublica piece notes, his immersion in the world of New York tabloid journalism had already taught him how to trade gossip for maximum advantage. The one politician who has gone on record to describe his methods is former New Jersey Governor Christie Todd Whitman, made vulnerable when her teenaged son went on a drunken spree that landed him in the hospital. Annoyed a few years later that a tunnel project nearing final state approval would run from the Atlantic City Expressway almost to a casino run by then-rival Steve Wynn, Trump called Whitman to let her know it would be “too bad” if the press found out about the youth’s escapade. Nearly 20 years later, when Whitman refused to endorse his Presidential bid, Trump sent her a letter repeating the same veiled threat. Whitman rebuffed him each time. How many politicians have followed her lead? (At least one Southern senator, widely rumored to be gay, presents an especially tantalizing possibility for such treatment.)

*Doxxing: The digital age has made it possible to find out and disseminate information on public figures that had previously been closely held. Trump used such cyberbullying by revealing the cellphone number of Lindsey Graham, who briefly ran against him in the 2016 Republican primaries. The South Carolina shortly found himself barraged with crank calls.

*Harassment: Being accosted at restaurants, airports, and other public places has become far more of a hazard for officeholders in the Age of Trump. After Graham briefly broke with Trump after the January 6 riot, Trump supporters harassed him at Reagan National Airport with shouts of “Traitor!” and “You’re a liar!” (That same week, Democratic congressional members received similar treatment.) Even when they don’t defy Trump himself but one of his minions, they may be harassed, as when allies of Jim Jordan conducted a pressure campaign on his behalf for Speaker of the House that resulted in threats against them, their offices, or spouses.

*Lost TV commentary gigs: A Trump opponent might not only lose his office but also standing in the party that could jeopardize potential income from appearing on TV. Contributors to Fox News—those who have moved beyond being mere “guests”—are paid even as they build their corporate brands. Displeasure from Trump or his base can lead to the loss of brands and bucks.

*Lost lobbying fees: Despite sporadic reform attempts over the years, government officials can often expect cushy paydays after their tenures conclude by joining lobbying firms. These, too, can wither on the vine if Trump is on one of his vendettas. Politico’s Alex Isenstadt reported last week that they have been warned if they didn’t vote in the DC primary, they shouldn’t expect access if Trump returns to the White House.

*Threats to themselves: Bodyguards, bulletproof vests, and assassination fears have become more of a way of life for Capitol Hill members—indeed, any government or electoral functionary. Don’t think that House and Senate members didn’t shudder at the thought of cowering from another mob as they voted to let Trump off the hook in the second impeachment trial—and even to join him by voting against refusing to certify Biden as the 2020 winner. Romney, Cheney, and Rep. John Katko spent heavily on personal security after voting to impeach Trump in 2021, according to this 2022 Axios article.

*Threats to family members: The attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul surely resonated with the then-Speaker’s colleagues on the GOP side of the aisle. Trump’s subsequent embrace of swiftly rebunked conspiracy theories about the attack could in no way have reassured the GOP Violets that he would come to their aid if another fanatic tried to perpetrate violence on their loved ones as well.

As I considered the impact of a Trump denunciation on members of the party he took over, I was reminded of the final, terrifying image of the 1978 remake of the sci-fi classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers. So was the remake’s director, Philip Kaufman, who told The Hollywood Reporter’s David Weiner six years ago, “[Donald Sutherland’s pod shriek] at the end of the film could be a very Trumpian scream. The way Trump points to the press in the back of the auditorium and everybody turns, you get that scary ‘poddy’ feeling. There’s a kind of contagion that’s going on here.”

Quote of the Day (John Lewis, on the Press and the Civil-Rights Movement)

“If it hadn’t been for the press, the civil-rights movement, the whole struggle would have been like a bird without wings…. For the press, it was very dangerous, especially in the American South, to be a reporter, to be there with a pen and a pad, with a camera. I saw members of the Klan and racists turning on the media, beating people, leaving them bloody, and then turning on us.”—John Lewis (1940-2020), civil rights activist and Congressman (D-GA), quoted in Jamil Smith, “‘We Cannot Lose Hope’: John Lewis Looks Forward,” Rolling Stone, May 2019

In the last four years, the media faced new dangers, including crowds egged on by a President who called reporters “enemies of the people.” His undermining of those who dared to tell the truth culminated on January 6 with a mob aiming to overthrow the legitimate electoral victory of a multi-racial coalition.

One image lingering with me from that infamous day is of an African-American Capitol Police officer standing against an overwhelmingly white mob ready to breach the building. His presence would have been impossible without the similar courage shown decades before by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, and, as the latter noted, the media that covered them.

Like many people, I have had my beefs with reporters from different outlets. But without media coverage—most crucially, during January 6 and its aftermath—most Americans would not have grasped the extent of the relentless assault on liberty occurring in the last four years.

For a long time, I have seen in local libraries a Library of America anthology, Reporting Civil Rights, containing roughly 200 eyewitness accounts of the movement from 1941 to 1973. Recent events have made it more imperative than ever, I think, that I read these two volumes.

(The image accompanying this post was Lewis’ official congressional photo, taken Feb. 13, 2006.)

Quote of the Day (Richard J. Evans, on the Nazi Path to Power)

“By the time he came out of prison [in late 1924, for leading a coup attempt the year before to overthrow Germany’s Weimar Republic], Hitler had assembled the ideology of Nazism from disparate elements of antisemitism, pan-Germanism, eugenics and so-called racial hygiene, geopolitical expansionism, hostility to democracy, and hostility to cultural modernism, which had been floating around for some time but had not so far been integrated into a coherent whole. He gathered around him a team of immediate subordinates—the talented propagandist Joseph Goebbels, the decisive man of action Hermann Goring and others—who built up his image as leader and reinforced his sense of destiny. But despite all this, and despite the violent activism of his brownshirt paramilitaries on the streets, he got nowhere politically until the very end of the 1920s….In October 1929, however, the Wall Street crash brought the German economy tumbling down with it....The political effects of the Depression were calamitous. The Grand Coalition broke up in disarray; so deep were the divisions between the parties over how to deal with the crisis that a parliamentary majority could no longer be found for any kind of decisive action….The Nazis, then, as the elections of September 1930 and July 1932 showed, were a catch-all party of social protest with particularly strong middle-class support and relatively weak, though still very significant, working-class backing at the polls. They had broken out of their core constituency of the Protestant lower middle classes and farming community.”— Cambridge Univ. historian Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 1933-1939 (2005)

Unfortunately, the blueprint for Fascism remains fundamentally the same in the 21^st century as it was in the 1920s and 1930s: the exploitation of multiple far-right ideologies by a single demagogue; the assistance of propagandists who tended to imagery; legislative deadlock; calamitous economic conditions; and then, seemingly out of nowhere, a political coalition with sudden breakout appeal.

Quote of the Day (Yascha Mounk, on ‘A President Who Openly Disdains Basic Constitutional Norms’)

“For the first time in its history, the oldest and most powerful democracy in the world has elected a president who openly disdains basic constitutional norms—somebody who left his supporters ‘in suspense’ whether he would accept the outcome of the election; who called for his main political opponent to be jailed; and who has consistently favored the country's authoritarian adversaries over its democratic allies.”— Yascha Mounk, lecturer on government at Harvard and host of “The Good Fight podcast,” The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It (2018)

In 1940, Franklin D. Roosevelt called for the “Arsenal of Democracy.” Yesterday, the current—and, hopefully, departing—occupant of the Oval Office became The Arsonist of Democracy.

Let there be no mistake: The storming of the Capitol was not like the storming of the Bastille, a movement against a hated symbol of oppression. 

This was an assault on a symbol of republican government, completed in the Civil War as a glorious representation of the order and freedom that the Confederacy was trying to rend asunder. 

This was an insurrection carefully planned, as noted in Jesselyn Cook's Huffington Post article, for days in far-right message boards, encrypted messaging apps and other social media channels--an activity winked at now, as it has been throughout his term, by the man from whom they took their cues. 

Whatever else might be said about him, Donald Trump has, through a long career in the public eye, proven that he could never learn, never leave well enough alone. His latest despicable act—in effect, inciting a riot, then walking away from the consequences—was so predictable. Mounk has been among many observers who discerned his problematic political pattern and warned where it might lead.

Last year, the GOP let Trump off the hook without even a slap on the wrist during the impeachment hearings. Now, the ones with any sense among them act so shocked at what has taken place. Why?

They thought that by acquitting Trump, despite massive evidence that he tilted foreign policy to undermine the leading candidate to replace him in the opposing party, they were ensuring survival in their next primary.

But they were only ensuring that their feckless party leader would turn a nation with only 4% of the world’s population into one with 20% of all COVID-19 deaths.

They were only ensuring that a businessman and media personality with a long, documented history of discrimination and insults against minorities would be in charge when racial unrest broke out in earnest over police shootings.

They were only ensuring that the political extortionist exercising his prerogative against the Ukraine a year ago would again practice extortion against Georgia state election officials within the last week.

They were only ensuring that a sociopath with bottomless rage would, as his time in office ended, turn on longtime members of the party that elected him, thereby ensuring loss of both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

How long do his longtime Capitol Hill and White House enablers expect to keep fooling themselves about their responsibility for all this? How long do they expect the rest of America to be similarly naïve?

Yes, I feel sorry for the five people who died in yesterday's assault. They died for a chimera—the patent falsehood of rampant voter fraud disproved in court after court in multiple states. They died for the Chaos President.

But I feel even sorrier for the people caught inside the Capitol, a building with strengthened restrictions against foreign terrorists 20 years ago but all too vulnerable against a domestic mob, many of whom wielded pepper spray against police.

I don’t blame those who assaulted this symbol of our democracy. Believe it or not, I don’t even blame Trump, who has never shown that he learned anything in his youth about civics, let alone balancing the books or even common courtesy.

Instead, I blame those who should have known better—the business executives who overlooked his financial and moral bankruptcy while they profited from his tax legislation; the alleged “news” network that in reality was a propaganda tool in the world’s proudest democracy; the privately troubled Republicans who kept finding excuses not to call Trump to account, as well as the shameless party opportunists who thought they could benefit from the inchoate, unreasoning resentment he unleashed.

If there is any justice, the GOP as its currently constituted Trump cult will be so utterly discredited in the eyes of the electorate that it will cease to exist, as the Federalist Party did after broaching secession at the Hartford Convention of 1814.

Back then, the Whigs coalesced (for about 30 years, anyway) out of the wreckage of the party that Alexander Hamilton brought into being. But these days, who knows what will happen?

The scary thing is that Americans can no longer say, "It can't happen here." Yesterday, it almost did, courtesy of the Arsonist of Democracy.