A mutiny amid the Republican Party?

The op-ed is part of a strategy. “Never Trump” Republicans are setting themselves up to claim victory when the Trump GOP loses control of the House of Representatives later this year, a turn that looks almost inevitable. Barack Obama also lost the House in his first midterms, as did Bill Clinton, so it’s hard to see how heavy GOP losses this year can be ascribed simply to Trump: the president’s party takes a heavy hit in midterms regardless of who the president is. If Obama’s midterm rebukes didn’t mark him out as a catastrophe in the minds of the press, there won’t be any justification for saying that major losses count more heavily against Trump. But that’s exactly what the mainstream press, with its center-left tilt, will say, and it’s what Never Trump Republicans in the media—and apparently in the president’s own administration—will say, too. With the narrative reinforced on both sides, it will probably be believed, at least by the pundits and political hacks themselves.

But it won’t matter because the practical effect of shrinking the Republican Party will be to accelerate the change within it. The same thing happened after the GOP’s crushing defeats at the tail end of the George W. Bush years in 2006 and 2008. Far from emerging chastened and more moderate, as a party once against styling its conservatism as “compassionate” and chasing soccer moms, the GOP that rose from the ashes of the Bush debacle was one in which the House Freedom Caucus was stronger than ever. The party was more populist and aggressively right-wing, as seen first in the Tea Party and then in Trump campaign. Even Mitt Romney found himself on the campaign trail in 2012 talking about “self-deportation” and taking a surprisingly hard line—much harder than George W. Bush’s—on immigration. But Romney was a retrofit: he may have been able to win the Republican nomination, but he didn’t energize the right the way Trump would four years later. He was the ghost of Republicans past struggling to fit into the future.