Opinion Vinay Lal writes: Donald Trump’s presidential bid shows how far the Republican Party has fallen

Trump loves no one but himself, but in this failing, he is far from being unique, certainly if one considers those who are animated by the quest for enormous power or immense wealth. He claims to be moved by something more noble, the love for his country. The love for one’s country is, at the best of times, a debatable virtue, more so at a time when many people the world over appear to be captive to xenophobic fervour. However, assuming that to most people love of one’s country is an admirable trait, it would seem that had Trump loved his country, he would have at once recognised that nothing is more calculated to improve the health of the country and the well-being of his people, never mind the rest of the world, than immediately removing himself from all public life.

There are several schools of opinion around the question of Trump’s run for the presidency. The one with the greatest number of adherents holds that Trump no longer has drawing power and will almost certainly lose the 2024 election if he should become his party’s nominee. These people point out that billionaires have withdrawn their support from Trump, that his own daughter Ivanka has distanced herself from her father’s ambition for the White House, and that even his closest supporters and aides in the White House are wholly alienated from him. The bulk of candidates supported by Trump, all of whom subscribe to the view that the 2020 election was “stolen”, were dumped by the electorate. He is being held largely responsible for the poor showing, as it is being described, of the Republicans in the recently-concluded elections.

The opposing school of thought, within which there are variations, argues that Trump is a “genius”— how Trump loves that word—in reinventing himself. Many of those in this fold, while critical of him, worry that he has an enormous war chest for fighting the election, that his following—otherwise known as “the base”— even if it somewhat shrinking is uncompromisingly behind him, and, more critically, that his politics is divisive. That very divisiveness is, however, construed by some as evidence of the fact that the Republican party is in mortal danger — and that the only imperative for right-thinking people is to ensure that the Democrats do not prevail in the next election. Under these circumstances, even Trump can be supported. A substantial number, now believed to be a third of all Republicans, are not deterred by any adverse poll, or by election results. They have no doubt that Trump continues to be the man who will live up to the slogan for which he is known: Make America Great Again.

What is common to all these views is not just that they are all platitudes. They have all reduced politics to a calculus: The only language that matters is that which revolves around winning and losing. The real question is what Trump’s attempt to gain a second term in the White House tells us about the present condition of the United States. As in India, where virulent intolerance and the sheer abdication of decency and responsibility have produced a public sphere poisonous in the extreme, an entire generation is now lost to the values that one might associate with democracy and humanity. Well-meaning liberals criticise, as they should, Trump’s absolute inability to take responsibility, captured infamously — to take but one illustration — in his March 2020 pronouncement, in response to the charge that his administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic had been faltering and woefully inadequate, that Barack Obama, who left office in January 2017, should have to take the blame. But what of the responsibility of the Republican party which aided, abetted, and felicitated Trump at every turn, and whose members, if widely acceptable canons of moral reasoning were followed, could rightfully be charged with treasonous conduct? One does not have to be a Democrat at all to recognise the depths to which the Republican party has fallen. With or without Trump, the Republican party emanates a stench that is unbearable— and that makes the flatulence of Trump insignificant.

Vinay Lal is professor of History at UCLA. His most recent book is Insurgency and the Artist: The Art of the Freedom Struggle in India (Roli Books, 2022)