The lesson for Republican leaders and donors is that sticking with Trump will be expensive. Trump himself and pro-Trump candidates are hurting the GOP’s election chances. Trump lost the presidency in 2020. Pro-Trump candidates cost the GOP its hold on the U.S. Senate in 2021. More pro-Trump candidates are slumping badly in 2022. More GOP stumbles mean more cash for Democratic constituencies.
Trump tried one exit from this predicament in 2021: a violent overthrow of his election defeat. That did not work.
Pro-Trump candidates in the states have tried other exits: rewriting election rules in their favor. That can work at the margins. But when something big happens—such as the overturning of Roe v. Wade—marginal gains may not suffice. To win consistently, a party needs a broad coalition. A party that keeps alienating great numbers of voters by nominating extremists, crooks, and weirdos is a party that is abdicating from governing. The costs of that abdication can be tallied in dollars and cents—as Republicans are tallying them right now. The National Taxpayers Union Foundation estimates that student-debt relief will cost the average taxpayer $2,000.
That’s only one line in the cost of Trump to the Republican Party and its voters. More bills will come in until Republicans accept that he and his faction will not disappear on their own. If they want to see the back of him, they’re going to have to grab him themselves and push him out the door with their own hands. If they don’t, their donors had better get used to more big payouts to more Democratic constituencies in the election cycles ahead.
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