If you want to know what’s happening to the Republican Party these days, I suggest you watch Sean Hannity. He’s become the cuckoo in the GOP coal mine.
Last week, for example, Hannity announced that he had gotten “sick and tired” of conservatives who dared to point out that Emperor Trump is prancing around the country naked. If Trump loses, Hannity complained, “I am pointing the finger directly at people like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham and John McCain. I have watched these Republicans be more harsh toward Donald Trump than they’ve ever been in standing up to Barack Obama and his radical agenda.”
And while Hannity was warning that he could never support such people again, Erick Erickson and others in the #NeverTrump movement took the opposite course, declaring that Trump supporters like Hannity should have no role in the GOP’s post-election resurrection.
“Don’t blame us,” Erickson wrote last week. “Blame yourselves. You championed the braying jackass, even attacking good conservatives in the race, and the only thing happening now is exactly what the rest of us have said all along would happen.”
This is only early August, folks, yet various GOP factions are in all-out war over who to blame for the coming catastrophe. It’s like watching a political version of that biker shootout down in Texas last year. And while we will always need a conservative party, at this point I just can’t imagine how you put all this back together into a functioning political organization after November. Because nobody in the party seems to be in a mood to forgive each other, to say the least.
Speaking of our cuckoo in the coal mine….
In another segment last week — this one a typically fawning interview with Trump — Hannity sympathized with Trump’s suggestion that the election is being rigged. If Trump loses in November, they suggested, the outcome won’t be a legitimate expression of the American people but instead an outcome dictated by voter fraud and other trickeration.
The whole idea is stupid for any number of reasons. The most obvious is that when your Chosen One is losing by double digits in your own network’s polling (Fox News has Trump down by 10), election theft is not your most pressing concern. Democrats have no need to steal an election that Trump is handing to them in a gift-wrapped box topped by a pretty silver bow.
More importantly, Trump’s increasing warnings of a stolen election are deeply threatening to democracy. The foundation of self-governance is a willingness to abide by the will of the people as it is expressed at the ballot box, and Trump, Hannity and others are recklessly undermining that foundation.
Clearly, the GOP base that Hannity represents is nowhere near coming to terms with today’s America. They do not yet recognize that the world view that has been so carefully tended on their behalf within the hothouse bubble of Fox News and talk radio simply collapses when it is exposed to the reality of the outside world. The denial is so strong that they are already preparing an intellectual “safe space” to which they can retreat after Trump’s defeat.
I don’t have the slightest idea how this ends. Trump is going to lose, yes, but I suspect that we’ll look back on that defeat as the real beginning of this amazing story rather than the end of it.
