No Fake Makeovers For The Post-Trump GOP

When Democrats were headed for a rout in 2010, they entered the midterm elections frazzled but trying in some rational ways to get back on the right side of the electorate, which they understood to be angry about the state of the economy, and their signature legislative reform, the Affordable Care Act. They stopped talking about health care. (Democrats! Stopped talking about health care!) They promised to focus on creating jobs, and on cutting deficits. They ignored the textbook ways these promises conflicted with one another, because it’s what the confused voting public was demanding.

This strategy didn’t work in any detectable sense. Democrats lost more than 60 House seats. But it’s hard to argue with their theory of the case: When you’ve lost the public’s trust, pander harder.

Three weeks ahead of the 2026 midterms, the Republican Party’s closing pitch to voters is something like this: public executions; easily refuted slander; torturous abuse of black immigrants; bribery; subversion. They are reinforcing many if not all of the reasons the public wants to throw the bums out. The Republican Party’s only surrogates at this point are the dregs of society and the equally despised oligarchs of Big Tech, but I repeat myself.

I think the GOP politicians who survive the midterm will regret this. I also think it might, in a perverse way, be good news for those who fear a post-Trump GOP revival.

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A defeated party will typically behave as if chastened.

Democrats were wiped out across the country in 2010, but Barack Obama won reelection two years later. Would he have survived the backlash if he’d been more stubborn and arrogant in the face of it? I suppose we can’t know for certain, but there was a reason he called it a “shellacking” and then tried in earnest to negotiate austerity bills with the GOP House majority.

Liberals are prone to neurosis, and this is probably the neurosis speaking. But I detect a great deal of dread or despair within today’s resistance about the public’s terrible memory, and the short window it’ll leave Democrats to reconstruct democracy beginning in 2029. What if the bill for Trump’s recklessness comes due under Democrats’ watch, the economy collapses, and the public turns on them? What if voters are just impatient or mired in malaise, and swing back metronomically to the GOP after two or four years?

It’s a reasonable thing to contemplate, at least as a gut check. Just as leading candidates will often run as if they’re narrowly behind—an antidote to complacency—Democrats should plan to do whatever it’ll take to reform our democracy in two years.

But the GOP is behaving in a way that should provide us some solace. They seem utterly incapable of behaving as if chastened. Chastening requires admitting error; it would require criticizing Trump, if not disowning him. And if we reflect on how Republicans managed to win such a comeback landslide in 2010, we can see how difficult it will be for Republicans to repeat history in 2030.

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The backlash to Democrats in 2010 was real, but the numbers were especially lopsided because Democrats had just won back-to-back landslides themselves. They had supermajorities. Even if they’d been overwhelmingly popular, there wouldn’t have been much ground for them to gain. Half of what Republicans pulled off that election was winning back seats they never should have lost.

But the rest was in the pandering.

After losing two consecutive wave elections, the post-Bush GOP behaved as if chastened. They weren’t actually chastened, mind you, but they knew they had to act the part.

First thing they did was forget the words George W. Bush. That was the easy part. Bush was happy to disappear, and Obama was happy to “look forward, not backward.”

Then, they pretended to discover ethics and values.

After Obama won, Republican leaders were willing to admit they’d allowed too much corruption to fester. The Republican corruption of the Bush years wasn’t nearly as severe as Trump-era corruption, but it was quite blatant—aughts Republicans were among the most corrupt political formations in the country’s history to that point.

They also did their predictable two step: After overseeing huge increases in debt and deficits, financed by tax cuts on the rich, a war of choice, and an unfunded Medicare prescription drug benefit designed as corporate welfare for the pharmaceutical industry, they pretended their main failure was that they were too profligate, too liberal. It was time once again for Fiscal Responsibility™️. The GOP’s titular leader was John Boehner, but the real face of the party was its self-described “Young Guns”: The new majority leader, Eric Cantor; the new whip, Kevin McCarthy; and boyish right-wing ideologue, Paul Ryan̵