If Trump Croaks, Like The GOP Establishment Hopes, Who Will Lead The MAGA Charge? Gaetz?

Deus Ex Machina is a Latin phrase (God out of the machine) that is used to describe a plot devise whereby a seemingly unsolvable problem in a story is suddenly and abruptly resolved by an unexpected and unlikely occurrence (or character)— bringing a happy ending to a seemingly irresolvable plot situation, surprising the audience. McKay Coppins’ new essay for The Atlantic this morning, Waiting For A Deus Ex Machina End To The Trump Era, asserts that if you press most Republican officials hard enough— “even the ones with MAGA hats in their closets and Mar-a-Lago selfies in their Twitter avatar— [they] will privately admit that Donald Trump has become a problem. He’s presided over three abysmal election cycles since he took office, he is more unstable than ever, and yet he returned to the campaign trail this past weekend, declaring that he is ‘angry’ and determined to win the GOP presidential nomination again in 2024. Aside from his most blinkered loyalists, virtually everyone in the party agrees: It’s time to move on from Trump.”

Ah, yes… “his most blinkered loyalists”— the Republicans like Marjorie Traitor Greene, Scott Perry, Chip Roy and Matt Gaetz who have a great deal more power in the House of Representatives than is safe for this country. Robert Draper profiled Matt Gaetz in that context this morning— a guy you would have been smart a year ago to bet would be in prison for child sex trafficking but who holds immense power over the smooth functioning of the U.S. government thanks to a weak, ambitious and feckless political hack from Bakersfield, California. Draper wrote that “In the 3 weeks since McCarthy ultimately agreed to the price of the portrait, Gaetz’s role in the melodrama has only entrenched his stature as an attention-craving political arsonist adored by the Trump wing of the GOP— but also, House Republican leaders begrudgingly say, as a lawmaker with new powers. Gaetz and his fellow antagonists demanded and got a deal allowing a single lawmaker to force a snap vote to oust the speaker, a commitment for a third of the seats on the powerful Rules Committee and an agreement that any lawmaker could force votes on changes to government spending bills. Taken together, the concessions drastically hamstring McCarthy’s ability to shape a legislative agenda… The far right is exultant. ‘He handed McCarthy a blunt knife and forced him to castrate himself on national television,’ Raheem Kassam, a British political activist and the editor of the far-right online journal the National Pulse, said in an interview. What the prankish and abundantly coifed 40-year-old Gaetz, a Florida Republican, plans to do with his new clout is a matter of intense speculation in Washington.”

And he certainly isn’t what Coppins had in mind for the role of deus ex machina is his play. He wrote that if you ask members of the GOP establishment how they plan to be rid of Trump, “the discussion quickly veers into the realm of hopeful hypotheticals. Maybe he’ll get indicted and his legal problems will overwhelm him. Maybe he’ll flame out early in the primaries, or just get bored with politics and wander away. Maybe the situation will resolve itself naturally: He’s old, after all— how many years can he have left?” No one exactly says they hope he dies, but… this kind of “magical thinking pervaded [Coppins’] recent conversations with more than a dozen current and former elected GOP officials and party strategists. Faced with the prospect of another election cycle dominated by Trump and uncertain that he can actually be beaten in the primaries, many Republicans are quietly rooting for something to happen that will make him go away. And they would strongly prefer not to make it happen themselves.” Former Michigan Rep Peter Meijer, who voted to impeach Trump and was then beaten by a MAGA clown in a primary referred to the “wish for his death strategy” as actuarial arbitrage. Meijer told him “You have a lot of folks who are just wishing for [Trump’s] mortal demise,” although Meijer claims he isn’t in that camp.

Some Republicans are clinging to the hope that Trump might finally be undone by his legal troubles. He is currently the subject of multiple criminal investigations, and his detractors dream of an indictment that would derail his campaign. But most of the people I talked with seemed resigned to the likelihood that an indictment would only boost him with the party’s base. Michael Cohen, who served for years as Trump’s personal attorney and now hosts a podcast atoning for that sin titled Mea Culpa, grudgingly told me that his former boss would easily weaponize any criminal charges brought against him. The deep-state Democrats are at it again— the campaign emails write themselves. “Donald will use the indictment to continue his fundraising grift,” Cohen told me.

Others imagine a coordinated donor revolt that sidelines Trump for good. The GOP consultant told me about a private dinner in New York City that he attended in the fall of 2021, when he saw a Republican billionaire give an impassioned speech about the need to keep Trump from returning to the Oval Office. The man said he would devote large sums of money to defeating the former president and urged his peers to join the cause. The others in the room— including several prominent donors and a handful of Republican senators— reacted enthusiastically that night. But when the consultant saw some of the same people a year later, their commitment had waned. The indignant donors, he said, had retreated to a cautious “wait and see” stance.

This plague of self-deception among party elites contains obvious echoes of Trump’s early rise to power. In the run-up to the 2016 Republican presidential primaries, a fractured field of feckless candidates spent time and money attacking one another, convinced that the front-runner would eventually collapse. It was widely believed within the political class that such a ridiculous figure could simply never win a major party nomination, much less the presidency. Of course, by the time Trump’s many doubters realized they were wrong, it was too late.

Terry Sullivan, who ran Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign, told me that Trump’s rivals failed to beat him that year in large part because they were “always convinced that his self-inflicted demise was imminent.”

“There is an old quote that has been attributed to Lee Atwater: ‘When your enemy is in the process of drowning, throw him a brick,’” Sullivan told me. “None of Donald Trump’s opponents ever have the balls to throw him the damn brick. They just hope someone else will. Hope isn’t a winning strategy.”

For conservatives who want to prevent a similar fiasco in 2024, the emerging field of GOP presidential prospects might seem like cause to celebrate. After all, the healthiest way to rid their party of Trump would be to simply beat him. But a sprawling cast of challengers could just as easily end up splitting the anti-Trump electorate, as it did in 2016, and allow Trump to win primaries with a plurality of voters. It would also make coalescing around an alternative harder for party leaders.

One current Republican representative told me that although most of his colleagues might quietly hope for a new nominee, few would be willing to endorse a non-Trump candidate early enough in the primary calendar to make a difference. They would instead “keep their powder dry” and “see what those first states do.” For all of Trump’s supposedly diminished political clout, he remains a strong favorite in primary polls, where he leads his nearest rival by about 15 points. And few of the other top figures in the party— Ron DeSantis, Mike Pompeo, Nikki Haley— have demonstrated an ability to take on Trump directly and look stronger for it.

Meijer… attributes Republican leaders’ current skittishness about confronting Trump to the party’s “ideological rootlessness.” The GOP’s defenestration of long-held conservative ideals in favor of an ad hoc personality cult left Republicans without a clear post-Trump identity. Combine that with what Meijer calls “the generalized cowardice of political figures writ large,” and you have a party in paralysis: “There’s no capacity [to say], ‘All right, let’s clean the slate and figure out what we stand for and build from there.’”

Even if another Republican manages to capture the nomination, there’s no guarantee that Trump— who is not known for his grace in defeat— will go away. Last month, Trump caused a minor panic in GOP circles when he shared an article on Truth Social suggesting that he might run an independent spoiler campaign if his party refuses to back him in 2024. The Republicans I talked with said such a schism would be politically catastrophic for their party. No one had any ideas about how to prevent it.

Meanwhile, the most enduring of GOP delusions— that Trump will transform into an entirely different person— somehow persists.

When I asked Rob Portman about his party’s Trump problem, the recently retired Ohio senator confidently predicted that it would all sort itself out soon. The former president, he believed, would study the polling data, realize that other Republicans had a better shot at winning, and graciously bow out of 2024 contention.

“I think at the end of the day,” Portman told me, “he’s unlikely to want to put himself in that position when he could be more of a Republican senior statesman who talks about the policies that were enacted in his administration… Maybe that’s wishful thinking on my part,” Portman conceded.

As for Gaetz— for example— Draper asked “Will he continue in his role as an insatiable limelight seeker, one who boasted to colleagues that he began each day instructing aides to call Fox News bookers to determine what message du jour he should be trumpeting? Will he assert himself more on substance and push harder on his far-right agenda? Or is his only goal blowing things up?” Draper wrote that animus between Gaetz and McCarthy “intensified this past April, when audiotapes were released of a conversation four days after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, in which McCarthy could be heard telling fellow House Republican leaders that Gaetz’s denunciation of Trump critics like former Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming was ‘putting people in jeopardy.’ The second-ranking Republican leader, Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, had chimed in that Gaetz’s rhetoric after the riot was ‘potentially illegal.’ Gaetz fired back, ‘This is the behavior of weak men, not leaders.’ A day later, Scalise offered a public apology— with the result, according to a close associate of the two men, that they had made peace. The same did not hold true with McCarthy, the associate added.”

At the same time, Gaetz’s dislike of the aspiring speaker— “I’m never voting for you,” he vowed to Mr. McCarthy a day after voting began— had become a hindrance in negotiations. By midweek, the McCarthy team turned to Representative Chip Roy of Texas as the preferred stakeholder among the Never Kevin group. Gaetz and his chief ally, Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado, were excluded from the Wednesday night discussions, which yielded nearly all the concessions originally demanded by the hard-liners.

“Everything got fruitful with the Freedom Caucus when he stopped being included in the meetings,” [Patrick] McHenry said of Gaetz.

By Friday afternoon, Roy and 13 others had thrown their support to McCarthy. Yet Gaetz, Boebert and four other Republicans continued to hold out through two more rounds of voting that carried on past midnight.

On the 15th Ballot, Gaetz and his five allies finally all voted “present,” which enabled McCarthy to eke out victory. Gaetz told reporters he dropped his opposition because “I ran out of things to ask for,” but McHenry said Gaetz had not asked for or received any “things” that had not already been handed over. What he had done instead, McHenry said, was demonstrate his singular ability to bring everything to a screeching halt.

“And in that crucial moment, when everything came down to him, he knew the gig was up and saw that the deal on the table was the best he was going to get,” McHenry said.

If Gaetz’s principal aim was to cement his reputation as the right’s pre-eminent warrior, he appears to have achieved that objective. “He showed that he was the one with the cojones to take all the blows,” said Kassam, the National Pulse editor.

A week after the final speaker votes were cast, the Florida congressman became the first sitting member to guest-host the former Trump adviser Stephen Bannon’s War Room podcast. It was the ultimate reward in the MAGA universe, a fellow Republican member ruefully observed, for Gaetz’s obstructionist antics.