We Are Approaching the MAGA-Trump Event Horizon

1. Eleven Months

December 2018 was an early tipping point for Trump and the Republican party.

In 2016 Donald Trump had won the presidency by accident. The institutional Republican party regarded him as an interloper. His first 23 months in office were disorganized and unpopular—by Election Day in 2018 he sat at net -8 approval. In the midterm election Democrats gained 40 seats in the House along with 7 governorships.

The Republican party could have run for the exits at that point, fleeing Trump. It did not. Instead, it doubled down on subservience. One of the oddities of that moment is that Trump’s domination of the GOP became more complete after the wreckage of the 2018 elections.

This is not how politics normally works. Usually, when a president’s party is rebuked by voters, the president is the one who moves in order to try to salvage his party’s standing. After 2018, the Republican party moved closer to Trump. Its rationale seemed to be: We are willing to lose elections to Democrats. We are not willing to have Trump’s supporters target us and our families.

And so the laws of political physics were suspended.

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This suspension continued after Trump lost the presidency and the Senate in 2020. In every other election, the defeated party has held struggle sessions and then gone on a journey of self-discovery to correct the mistakes of its past. But Trump insisted that he didn’t lose. The Republican party went along with him reluctantly on this lie until January 6th—and then eagerly afterwards once he was out of office. Republicans never seriously considered moving on from Trump. By 2022 his hold over the party was even stronger than it had been in 2018.

I cannot emphasize this enough: In contravention of all political precedent, after major electoral defeats the Republican party became more beholden to Trump.

Will this be true again if/when Republicans lose next November?

That is the event horizon we can’t see past. So I’m going to build two cases for you and you tell me which you find more persuasive...