T R U M P I S M C O R R U P T S ( H T T P S : / / T H E B U L WA R K .

C O M / C A T E G O RY / T H E - T R U M P -WA R S / T R U M P I S M - C O R R U P T S / )

Trump’s GOP is Increasingly Racist and Authoritarian—and Here to Stay

Having already forsaken Republican principles and policies, his supporters are now willing to forsake reality, too.

by  R I C H A R D N O RT H PAT T E R S O N ( HT T P S : / /T H E B U L WA R K . C O M / A UT H O R / R I C H A R D - N O RT H - PAT T E R S O N / ) · N O V E M B E R 2 4 , 2 0 2 0

STERLING, VIRGINIA - NOVEMBER 22: U.S. President Donald Trump gives thumbs up to supporters from this motorcade after he golfed at Trump National Golf Club
on November 22, 2020 in Sterling, Virginia. The previous day President Donald Trump left the G20 summit virtual event “Pandemic Preparedness” to visit one of
his golf clubs as the virus has now killed more than 250,000 Americans. (Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

D
onald Trump entered our political bloodstream propelled by racism
and mendacity—the bogus “birther” movement intended to
delegitimize America’s first black president. Six years later he is
exiting our highest office trailing lies and extra-constitutional maneuvers
aimed at maintaining power by disenfranchising black voters.

In between he inflicted on us a presidency which was ignorant, cruel,

reckless, lawless, divisive, and disloyal. Mendacity and bigotry became the
mode of communication between America’s president and his party’s base.
Not only did he worsen a deadly pandemic—by immersing an angry and
alienated minority in his alternate reality, he is sickening our future.

Trump did not materialize from the ether. He rose from a political party bent
on thwarting demographic change by subverting the democratic process; a
party whose base was addicted to white identity politics, steeped in religious
fundamentalism, and suffused with authoritarian cravings—a party which,
infected by Trumpism, now spreads the multiple malignancies metastasized
by Trump’s personal and political pathologies.

Since the civil rights revolution triggered an influx of resentful Southern

whites, the GOP has catered to white grievance and anxiety. Trump’s
transformative contribution has been to make racial antagonism overt—a
badge of pride that bonds him to his followers in opposition to a pluralist
democracy that threatens their imperiled social and political hegemony.
Ride or
die.  
Support  J O I N ( H T T P S : / / P L U S . T H E B U L WA R K . C O M / S U B S C R I B E / )
Hence the 2019 tweet The NOW
Bulwark.
(https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1150381395078000643) in
which America’s president told four congresswomen of color—three native-
born Americans and one a naturalized citizen—that they should “go back and
help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
With poisonous efficiency, Trump managed to combine racism, xenophobia,
and hostility to non-white immigrants to inflame his followers’ antagonism
against “the other.”

P O DC AST

Berny Belvedere on Truth in the Age of Trump

(https://podcast.thebulwark.com/berny-belvedere-on-truth-in-
the-age-of-trump)

He comprehends his audience all too well. Take the poll released last week
(https://www.prri.org/research/trumpism-after-trump-how-fox-news-
structures-republican-attitudes/) by the Public Religion Research Institute
(PRRI) measuring the attitudes of “Fox News Republicans”—the 40 percent
of party adherents who trust Fox as their primary source of TV news. The
survey found that 91 percent oppose the Black Lives Matter movement; 90
percent believe that police killings of blacks are “isolated incidents”; and 58
think that whites are victimized by racial discrimination, compared to 36
percent who think blacks are.

Their animus toward immigration is equally strong. Substantial majorities

believe that immigrants consume a disproportionate amount of
governmental services, increase crime in local communities, and threaten
our cultural and ethnic character. Support for Trump’s wall is nearly
unanimous (96 percent); two-thirds (66 percent) favor barring refugees
from entering the United States; and a majority (53 percent) support
separating children from their parents when a family enters the country
without permission.
 ***

A
nother key subgroup of the GOP base, white evangelicals, harbors
similar attitudes. The poll found that the majority adamantly disbelieve
that the legacy of racial discrimination makes it difficult for African
Americans to succeed. The head of the PRRI, Robert P. Jones, concludes
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/11/13/trumps-racist-
appeals-powered-white-evangelical-tsunami/) that Trump arouses white
Christians “not despite, but through appeals to white supremacy” based on
evoking “powerful fears about the loss of White Christian dominance.”

That sense of racial and cultural besiegement pervades the 73 percent of Fox
News Republicans who, the survey found, believe that white Christians suffer
from “a lot” of societal discrimination—more than double the number who
say that blacks do. This religious persecution complex explains the otherwise
mystifying ability of evangelicals to conjure a “war on Christmas” from the
greeting “happy holidays”—simply because some Americans choose to
acknowledge our divergent beliefs.

In sum, the GOP is now the party of white identity. In 2016, Vox reports
(https://www.vox.com/2020/11/7/21551364/white-trump-voters-2020),
Trump carried whites by 54 to 39 percent; in 2020, by 57 to 42 percent (per
the raw exit polls). Whites are the only racial group whose majority supported
Trump; in both elections, Trump lost overwhelmingly among nonwhite
Americans. It has long been apparent that the party cannot indefinitely
survive the changing demographics which are making us a multiracial
democracy—and which engender such resentment in its electoral base.

That fear of displacement helps explain the profound emotional connection

between Trump and Republican voters. Their loyalty is not to the political
philosophy traditionally embraced by the GOP, but a visceral sense of racial,
religious, and cultural identity—and the need to preserve it—which is
instinctively authoritarian and anti-democratic.

This linkage is captured through research by Vanderbilt political scientist

Larry Bartels which Philip Bump reported in the Washington Post
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/09/01/republicans-least-
committed-democratic-principles-are-those-most-worried-about-white-
america/) last September. Bartels surveyed respondents regarding four
statements which, taken together, read like a blueprint for Trump:

The traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may

have to use force to save it.
 A time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their
own hands.

Strong leaders sometimes have to bend the rules in order to get things
done.

It is hard to trust the results of elections when so many people will vote for
anyone who offers a handout.

Reports Bump: “Most Republicans and Republican-leaning independents

agreed with the first statement. . . . Nearly three-quarters agreed that election
results should be treated with skepticism.” Republicans and Republican-
leaning independents were also “significantly more likely to say they agreed
with the other two statements than that they disagreed.”

“Ethnic antagonism,” Bartels told Bump, is “the most powerful factor

associated with willingness to resort to force in pursuit of political ends and
support for ‘patriotic Americans’ taking the law into their own hands and
‘strong leaders’ bending rules.” This lies at the heart of Trump’s appeal: his
shared sense of victimization by an insidious elite; his unvarnished
denunciation of white America’s supposed enemies; and his promise to keep
them at bay—if necessary, by force. For many in the Republican base, he
fulfills a psychic longing for an American strongman.

This will to autocracy as self-defense is supplemented by fundamentalist

fanaticism. In the New York Times, Katherine Stewart describes
(https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/16/opinion/trump-religion-
authoritarianism.html) the growth of “a radical political ideology that is
profoundly hostile to democracy and pluralism, and a certain political style
that seeks to provoke moral panic, rewards the paranoid and views every
partisan conflict as a conflagration, the end of the world.”

Further, Stewart observes, “Christian nationalism is a creation of a uniquely

isolated messaging sphere. Many members of the rank and file get their main
political information not just from messaging platforms that keep their
audiences in a world that is divorced from reality, but also from dedicated
religious networks and reactionary faith leaders.” Their unwavering loyalty
despite Trump’s glaring personal faults is, she adjures, “proof enough that
the religious-nationalist end of the right-wing information bubble has
gotten more, not less, resistant over time.”

Stewart chillingly describes a November 11 virtual prayer gathering organized

by the Family Research Council. One speaker asserted that Joe Biden’s
election embodied “the whole godless ideology that’s wanted to swallow our
homes, destroy our marriages, throw our children into rivers of confusion”;
another that Biden and Kamala Harris represent an “ideology” that is “anti-
Christ, anti-Biblical to its core.” When electoral defeat augurs a religious
apocalypse in the minds of evangelicals, democracy itself becomes their
enemy.

This compound of racial, cultural, and religious anxiety drives the GOP’s
longstanding aversion to minority voting rights—and to representative
governance in an increasingly diverse society. As Republican strategists well
appreciate, a party whose appeal is confined to conservative whites is, over
the demographic long term, doomed to defeat. The GOP’s design is to
postpone as long as possible their electoral day of reckoning.

The party’s efforts to suppress the nonwhite electorate through voter ID

laws, upheld by its conservative Supreme Court majority, have been amply
documented (https://thebulwark.com/donald-trump-vs-democracy/)—as
have its massive voter purges and poll closures in minority precincts. The
cynical pretext for these measures—the prevention of voting fraud for which
no evidence exists—became the GOP’s primary means of tilting elections
long before Trump appropriated it to enrage his credulous base.

No such excuse precedes the party’s overt reliance on extreme

gerrymandering (https://thebulwark.com/can-we-stop-americas-free-
fall/) to fix congressional and state legislative elections—upheld, once again,
by Republican justices. Examples abound. In 2018, Wisconsin’s electorate
gave Democrats 53 percent of their votes, whereupon Republicans won 63 of
the 99 seats in the state assembly
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Wisconsin_State_Assembly_election);
11 of the 17 seats up for election in the state senate; and 5 of the state’s 8
congressional districts
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections_in_Wisconsin).

***

B
ut these subversions of the popular will, however grotesque, merely
serve as the gateway to Trump’s efforts to steal the presidency by
rigging the Electoral College to reverse Joe Biden’s indubitable victory. In
launching his naked attempt to disenfranchise the majority of voters in
Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin through assertions
of fraud unprecedented in their speciousness and scope, Trump took the
GOP’s distaste for free and fair elections to its logical conclusion: the
abrogation of American democracy at the highest level.
Trump justified his anti-democratic sociopathy by proliferating a plethora of
groundless and preposterous falsehoods calculated to delegitimize our
electoral processes. He claimed that millions of phony mail-in ballots had
been cast for Biden; that voting machines had been re-engineered to exclude
millions more cast for him; and that Republican election observers had been
excluded from many polling places by a host of local officials bent on serving
a labyrinthine conspiracy to purloin the White House.

“The Radical Left Democrats,” Trump tweeted

(https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1328361451497664512),
“working with their partner, the Fake News Media, are trying to STEAL this
Election.” Never once did he or his lawyers cite a shred of evidence
supporting any material impropriety. Rather his purpose was to convince the
Republican base that they were being cheated of their leader by the insidious
“other.” Numerous polls confirm that it’s working; typical is a
Politico/Morning Consult survey showing that 70 percent of Republicans
don’t believe the election was fairly conducted.

So persuaded, the base supports Trump’s desperate efforts to overturn the

results. He began with a spate of bogus lawsuits seeking to invalidate many
thousands of ballots in five critical states—particularly those cast by African
Americans in major cities like Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlanta, and Milwaukee.
This effort at race-based disenfranchisement differed only in scale and
timing, but not in kind, from the GOP’s traditional efforts to prevent
minorities from voting at all.

Subjected to an embarrassing series of defeats, Trump then turned to attacks

on long-established norms which exposed the seamy reality of banana
Republicanism: By attempting to prevent partisan local and state officials
from certifying the results confirming Biden’s victory, Trump hoped to
persuade Republican state legislators to appoint a rival slate of Trump
electors and then ask the Congress to choose them over Biden’s—or at least
to judge enough electoral votes unsettled to throw the decision to the House
of Representatives. The House would presumably then hand Trump a second
term because, per the constitutional provision for “contingent” elections
(https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R40504.pdf) that was last used in 1825, each
state delegation would get one vote—and at least 26 delegations in the new
Congress will contain more Republicans than Democrats.

Setting aside that this would shred American democracy, Trump’s plan
suffered from a situational flaw: In key states, Democratic governors could
prevent this from happening.
Last night, this improvisational strategy finally collapsed from its own
incongruity. Newly spotlighted by unwanted celebrity, Michigan’s
canvassing board voted—with one abstention—to certify the state’s electoral
results. Shortly thereafter, the head of the federal government’s General
Services Administration, who had for weeks stymied the orderly transition
process to the Biden administration, at last authorized the transition to go
forward. However defiant, Trump is destined to leave office without
acknowledging his loss
(https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1331086969183621120).

One can fairly ask whether, in a closer election, Republicans would have
pushed even harder to give Trump a second term he had lost at the ballot box.
And even now one can ascertain the ongoing harm to our democracy from
Trump’s aborted efforts.

It is not just the death threats against secretaries of state from both parties
who defied Trump’s wishes. It is the perpetuation of a distrust in democracy
among a significant segment of Americans; the encouragement of Republican
state legislatures to pass more restrictive voting laws; the image of a
president using the trappings of his office to lobby state officials; and the
prospect of more successful efforts to rig presidential elections. As Trevor
Potter, a Republican who formerly headed the Federal Election Commission,
told the New York Times
(https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/21/us/politics/trump-vote.html), Trump
“is creating a road map to destabilization and chaos in future years. . . . What
he’s saying, explicitly, is if a party doesn’t like the election result they have
the right to change it by gaming the system.”

***

O
ne danger has become abundantly clear: far too many elected
Republicans are just fine with Trump’s anti-democratic moves, or at
least would not honor their sworn responsibility to defend the Constitution
from his depredations—often because they are simply too terrified of their
party’s base, and the voracious right-wing media which inflames it.

That partisan media, ever more toxic, is creating a separate America fed by
infinite servings of hagiography and disinformation meant to nourish
Trump’s cult of personality. Their latest target of opportunity is Fox News,
which has thrived on igniting a Republican audience galvanized by fealty to
Trump. As Trump works to undermine the election, outlets like Newsmax and
OAN are striving to cannibalize Fox’s viewership by outdoing its hysteria in
perpetuating Trumps lies and endorsing his methods
Here, remarkably, Tucker Carlson serves as a cautionary tale. When Carlson
dismissed (https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/tucker-carlson-rudy-
giuliani-sidney-powell-election-fraud), as gently as possible, the crackpot
allegations of Trump lawyer Sidney Powell about a sweeping conspiracy
using rogue voting machines, he was savaged
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/11/20/hey-maga-folks-
dont-bail-tucker/) across the right-wing echo chamber as a spineless
quisling. Lesson learned.

At bottom, this is about money. As Paul Waldman of the Washington Post

observes
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/11/10/republicans-have-
declared-war-democracy-itself/): “It is not enough for the GOP’s base to be
disappointed in the results of the election and determined to do better next
time. They must be enraged. For the conservative media, creating and feeding
anger is a business model that goes back decades.”

Republican officials who defy Trump can expect no sanctuary save on media
loathed by the base. Their cautionary tale is Mitt Romney, conspicuous in his
forthright denunciation
(https://twitter.com/MittRomney/status/1329629701447573504) of Trump’s
efforts to overturn the election: “It is difficult to imagine a worse, more
undemocratic action by a sitting American President.”

Duly castigated, Romney stands virtually alone. Most elected Republicans

have spent the last three weeks vociferously supporting Trump’s
machinations, timorously hiding behind pusillanimous verbal formulae
about combating fraud and counting every vote, or tepidly allowing that
Biden might—eventually—become the president-elect. Some, like Lindsey
Graham, even pressured state election officials to honor Trump’s wishes.
Collectively, they have quickened the GOP’s transformation into a quasi-
authoritarian instrument of minority rule.

Trump himself will give his nominal party no surcease.

His need for omnipresence is omnivorous; his means various. Already he is

contemplating running for president again in 2024—or at least teasing a run
so he can soak his most ardent followers. He is seeking to control the
Republican National Committee by supporting the re-election as party chair
of his factotum Ronna McDaniel. He is planning a PAC to finance his public
activities—and, no doubt, his private needs.
Other widely discussed possibilities include starting his own media company
to compete with Fox News, which he deems to have been insufficiently loyal.
Whatever the means, he will perpetuate the myth of a stolen election for his
political and personal profit. Given his vengeful nature, one can expect him to
take noisy revenge on any Republican who dares to contradict him.

For the Republican party, Trump will be kudzu in human form: near-
impossible to kill. Predicts former RNC chair Michael Steele
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-2024-
rematch/2020/11/21/58ce87ac-2a8d-11eb-8fa2-06e7cbb145c0_story.html):
“Unlike any of our former presidents, he will be an ongoing presence. . . . He
wants the party to continue to be consumed by him and his madness.”

Ultimately, this otherworldly obduracy stems from Trump’s manifest

psychological illness (https://thebulwark.com/how-has-donald-trumps-
mental-state-affected-his-presidency/): his imperishable narcissism; his
ineradicable drive to be noticed; his relentless need to dominate; his
comprehensive carelessness of all considerations save what pleases him in
the moment. Television turned this moral pygmy into a mythic figure—and
he cannot let go.

His loyal supporters reciprocate his needs. They will become whatever he
desires—the base for his political comeback; the funders for his PAC; the
audience for his new media entity. Their devotion will make a pilgrimage to
Mar-a-Lago de rigueur for Republican officeholders ambitious to rise.

More than ever, they will dominate Republican primaries. As Democratic

pollster Stanley Greenberg wrote in the Atlantic
(https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/10/trump-will-leave-
behind-harsh-political-landscape/616771/), the forces of whiteness who
constitute Trump’s base—evangelical Christians, conservative Catholics, and
Tea Party adherents—are an increasingly prohibitive majority of the GOP
electorate.

The consequences are inescapable. As The Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last wrote in

the New Republic (https://newrepublic.com/article/160212/republican-party-
dead-its-trump-cult-now):

Republican elites want very much to turn the page on Donald Trump following
his loss. But . . . they do not have any say in the matter, because their party now
belongs to him. And the party belongs to Donald Trump because he has
delivered to Republican voters exactly what they want.
That’s why one sympathizes with those hopeful Republicans who imagine
building a reformed GOP through a multiracial coalition rooted in an
economic agenda which codifies Trump’s pseudo-populism. Trump was
never about programs so much as feelings—foremost a racial and religious
defensiveness fundamentally opposed to diversity.

Moreover, a notable phenomenon of Trump’s presidency is the degree to

which financially embattled working-class whites imagined, contrary to
observable reality, that their economic situation had improved—or soon
would. There are few better examples of how politics mirrors psychology
more than lived experience.

This fidelity is why some Republican gurus remain committed to Trump’s

strategy of maximizing support among middle-class and blue-collar whites.
After all, they argue, despite Trump’s defeat the GOP did better than expected
in senatorial and congressional races. Why risk tinkering with his formula?

Finally, economic populism is antithetical to the donor classes who, in truth,

did better under Trump than did anyone else. They got their tax cuts and their
judges—the GOP’s pipeline for judicial nominees, the Federalist Society, is
dedicated to advancing pro-corporate jurisprudence. This is not the
prescription for worker-friendly policies.

It’s difficult to identify a potential Republican candidate with sufficient gifts

to reorient the party, or even to beguile the base with a more rarefied
Trumpism. Far more likely the nominee in 2024 will be whoever best
channels Trump in the raw. And who better than Trump himself or, at least,
some Trump—more likely the suitably unhinged Don Jr. than the White
House Barbie.

For the foreseeable future, Trumpism will define the GOP. The path to
regeneration runs not through reform but, one fears, must proceed from
self-destruction. The wait time will be painful for the party, and fateful for
the country.

Richard North Patterson

(https://thebulwark.com/author/richard-north-patterson/)
Richard North Patterson is a lawyer, political commentator and best-selling novelist. He is a
former chairman of Common Cause and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

C O PY R I G H T 2 0 2 0 , A L L R I G H T S R E S E R V E D . T H E B U L WA R K I S A P R O J E C T O F D E F E N D I N G D E M O C R A C Y T O G E T H E R I N S T I T U T E .