Can the GOP Save Itself? Probably Not. Should It Try?

Since the beginning of the rise of Trump, members of the Republican Party have grappled with how to save their party from the dim-witted reality television host with autocratic tendencies. They have continuously tried, and they have continuously failed. Since losing the presidency, the Senate, and the House, rank-and-file Republicans have largely doubled down on Trumpism in the hopes of not alienating the very Trump-y base. But the ouster of Liz Cheney from Republican leadership may have opened the door—finally—to a reckoning in the Republican Party.

Cheney’s crime was refusing to parrot the lie that Trump actually won the 2020 election. He did not. But before she was removed from her leadership post, she warned the House Republicans who had voted her out that this was not her last stand. “I promise you this,” she said. “After today, I will be leading the fight to restore our party and our nation to conservative principles, to defeating socialism, to defending our republic, to making the GOP worthy again of being the party of Lincoln.” It was like something out of a movie—complete with hecklers at her defiant not-to-be-the-last hurrah.

Later, Cheney told reporters she would do everything she could “to ensure that the former president never again gets anywhere near the Oval Office.”

It can be hard sometimes to fully recall the GOP resistance to Trump, given the former president’s continued stranglehold on the party. But the Never Trumpers found a new figurehead this week, new energy to once again try to salvage their party from the ash heap of Trumpism. This week more than 100 Republicans released a letter threatening to break off and form a third party. The group is led by former CIA officer Evan McMullin and former Trump administration official Miles Taylor, and includes four former governors and 27 former members of the House. “The civil war within the GOP is not ending,” Taylor told CNN on Wednesday night. “Today, it is just beginning.”

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“The Republican Party still finds itself in Donald Trump’s Darth Vader–like chokehold,” Taylor told me when I spoke to him. “And if the GOP doesn’t ditch the dark side soon, historians will not be writing about the party’s dominance in the 2020s but rather about its demise.” He was calling for an “insurgency of pragmatists to disrupt the GOP status quo and either bring the party back from the brink of extremism and restore sanity, or else to hasten the creation of an alternative political movement that will embrace truth, decency, and America’s founding ideals.” (The former president, who was kicked off most social media platforms for fomenting an insurrection against the U.S. government, and thus had to release a poorly written statement to advertise his response, was not pleased.)

The GOP is floundering, Taylor told me; it is failing to make a compelling case to young people. “You know you’ve got a problem when more young people would rather join the Nickelback fan club than your political party,” Taylor said. “If the GOP doesn’t wake up, it deserves to be wiped out.”

The larger question remains: Can the Republican Party be saved, and does it even deserve to be saved? We have long been a country of two parties, but there is nothing in our Constitution that mandates our political system be set up in this way. And what we have now is effectively a two-party system in which one party has lost its mind. See, for example, the Republicans in the Arizona Legislature, who have spent at least $150,000 on a recount led by a Florida-based cybersecurity company called Cyber Ninjas. (Cyber Ninjas is currently looking for bamboo ballets because of a conspiracy theory that is really too stupid to go into.) It’s hard to argue that the two-party system is the best means of democratic governance when one party is literally trying to make it harder to vote. Given all this, perhaps it’s better to let the modern-day GOP go the way of the Whigs.

And yet, is the Republican Party holding itself hostage? Can it be saved if it breaks free of its former leader, as Cheney and Taylor would have it do? Liberate itself from the angry tweets of a guy who is banned from Twitter? After all, Trump no longer holds office; he spends much of his time entertaining tourists and telling people where the omelet station is at his Palm Beach club. If the GOP wants to maintain any semblance of credibility, people like Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney and Miles Taylor will have to wrest control back from the spineless cowards who are currently in control. I’m not holding my breath.