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Who will save the Grand Old Party after Donald Trump leaves the White House?

By Jules Witcover - Syndicated Columnist | Jan 2, 2021

Jules Witcover

WASHINGTON – As defeated President Donald Trump prepares to leave the White House kicking and screaming on January 20, who among the remnants of the shattered Republican Party to which he clings has the stature or the ability to restore it as an integral partner in the traditional two-party system born just before the American Civil War ?

The best-known survivor in public office may its previous presidential nominee, Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah. But he is conspicuously outside Trump’s large circle who still share the president’s resentment-driven pseudo-populism.

Romney, a devout Mormon, seems not to share the hatred toward “others” that appears to drive much of the Trump loyalists. He is more in the mold of his own precursor as a Republican presidential nominee, the late Sen. John McCain. Romney remains admired in the party but maybe not inclined to undertake the task of returning it to the more moderate ways of working across the partisan aisle, as President-elect Joe Biden professes to favor.

The last Republican president before Trump to leave the White House so dramatically and obviously not of his own choosing was Richard Nixon in 1974. He was driven out over the Watergate scandal. Burglars bankrolled by the Nixon reelection committee broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters prior to the 1972 election, allegedly without Nixon’s knowledge, but the president became subsequently complicit in an attempted cover-up.

Ironically, Nixon thought for a long time that he was secure in his presidency. His original vice president, former Maryland Gov. Spiro T. Agnew, became so toxic as a critic of the press that his very presence in the line of presidential succession caused Nixon to see him as a sort of insurance policy for his own tenure in the Oval Office.

But at one point, according to top aide John Ehrlichman, Nixon considered removing Agnew from the line of presidential succession by appointing him to the Supreme Court. He wanted to replace him with a personal favorite, former Texas Gov. John Connolly. Instead, Agnew himself was forced to resign when found to have taken bribes from Maryland contractors even as vice president. Thus did House Majority Leader Gerald Ford, popular on Capitol and easily confirmed, become Nixon’s second vice president and then president.

Currently, beyond Romney there are few Republicans on the political scene potentially poised to step into the void created by Trump’s defeat, or to stymie a Trump comeback. Former Ohio Gov. John Kasich has injected himself into the discussion, by disavowing Trump to the point of speaking at the Democratic National Convention and appearing regularly on television talk shows since then. Likewise, Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska has blasted Trump, saying of his latest multiple pardons of cronies, “This is rotten to the core.” But others in the party have just remained silent.

The lame-duck vice president, Mike Pence, formerly an Indiana governor, has served loyally as a Trump clone, unlikely either to be sought by fellow Republicans to head the 2024 ticket or be any part of reviving the party. It seems at this stage that the bulk of party leaders are content to indulge Trump’s unrealistic dreams, without rallying to any restoration of the GOP’s time-honored standards of fiscal and cultural conservatism that were at the party core for so many years.

The John McCains, Bob Michels, Bob Doles and George Bushes of yore, who fought and wept over Democratic deficit financing and weak foreign policies for years on end, no doubt would be appalled. But such is the hypnotism that has lulled the party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Eisenhower as it has drifted into the fog created by a reckless and ignorant political outsider.

Jules Witcover’s latest book is “The American Vice Presidency: From Irrelevance to Power,” published by Smithsonian Books. You can respond to this column at juleswitcovercomcast.net.

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