The carnival of stupidity that is a Donald Trump-led Republican Party remains the most distracting show on earth. Last week, after a jury found Trump guilty of repeatedly defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll, who has credibly accused the former President of sexual assault, the news was dominated by the eighty-three-million-dollar penalty that Trump will now have to pay because of his big mouth. This week, Trump’s G.O.P. has been hyperventilating over the nation’s most celebrated pop star, Taylor Swift, promoting elaborate conspiracy theories about the liberal-leaning musician and her Super Bowl-bound boyfriend, the Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. Trump, naturally, relished the fight, reportedly insisting that he is “more popular” and has more committed fans than Swift, who endorsed Joe Biden in 2020 and whose prospective support for Biden again seems to have sent the Trumpier corners of the Internet into a frenzy. Even the Wall Street Journal was appalled. Whether it’s “lunacy or it’s theater,” the paper’s conservative editorial board wrote of the “Taylor Swift ‘Psyop,’ ” it reinforced one of the signal problems for the country in 2024: “paranoia on the right” makes the Republican Party and its kooky demagogue “seem, frankly, weird.”
If only weird were the sum of it. The problem, as ever with Trump, is that the performative foolishness serves only to divert attention from the real and serious consequences of the Republican Party’s decision to get behind the defeated ex-President for another go at the White House. It’s hard to imagine a more concrete example of this 2024 dynamic than the debacle unfolding on Capitol Hill, where Trump has demanded that his party kill a major deal linking funding for the wars in Ukraine and Israel with changes in immigration policy designed to stanch the flow of asylum seekers at the U.S. southern border. The deal—still not yet formally unveiled—has been a couple of months in the making. Republicans were the ones who demanded it in the first place.
Whatever the impetus of the current negotiations, whether folly, hubris, or just plain denial, it never seemed realistic to me that the two parties were going to engage with each other in good faith on immigration—arguably the most toxic subject in American politics in the Trump era—and somehow come up with a deal that would pass in an election year with Trump on the ballot. Both parties deserve some censure here. Have they not been paying attention these last eight years? The opportunity to prove his continued dominance over the G.O.P. by tanking any breakthrough was inevitably going to prove irresistible to Trump. He spoke “at length” about it to House Speaker Mike Johnson, Johnson acknowledges, and sure enough Johnson, a nonentity who never would have become Speaker last fall had Trump not approved of him, did what Trump wanted, announcing in unequivocal terms that House Republicans would never go along with the Senate’s bipartisan deal. “Madness,” he called it on Wednesday, in his first floor speech as Speaker. (Though he insists it’s “absurd” to say he was blowing up the deal just to please Trump.)
Tying the fate of Ukraine in its existential fight with Russia to a resolution of the near-irresolvable politics of the American border seems a particularly cruel twist. For Trump, it’s like a gift. Why wouldn’t America’s most noted admirer of the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, want to undercut Ukraine while, at the same time, sinking a package that might look like a real bipartisan win for Joe Biden? Trump wants an issue to run on, not a solution. (And a potent issue it is—recent surveys suggest that Biden is highly vulnerable to the charge that he’s let the border problem fester, with voters in battleground states giving Trump a wide advantage on immigration.) Never underestimate the appeal of personal vengeance to Trump as well—it hardly helps the case that this deal has been the top priority of his remaining nemesis in the Republican Party, the Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell.
You know McConnell is in trouble when Democrats seem to almost be feeling sorry for him. On Wednesday night, at the annual Washington Press Club Foundation congressional dinner, the Senate Majority Leader, Chuck Schumer, went out of his way to assure everyone that the current mess was not McConnell’s fault. “I’ve got ninety-nine problems but Mitch ain’t one,” he joked, though it was unclear whether the audience fully appreciated the Jay-Z reference. McConnell, at eighty-one, and visibly frail since an accident last year, is widely assumed to be on his way out of the Senate. He has long wanted support for Ukraine to be a part of his legacy. For months he has gone to the Senate floor to implore colleagues in his party to stick with the fight. Instead, more and more of them are sticking with Trump, which has led to some awkward moments for McConnell, who, at one point in recent days, seemed to abandon the deal that he himself had asked another Republican senator, James Lankford, of Oklahoma, to negotiate. By Wednesday, McConnell offered a near-admission of failure, suggesting that it may be time to cut loose aid for Ukraine and look for a separate vote to continue funding. At the same time, Trump was in Washington, blasting away at Republicans senators who still support the deal as making a “terrible mistake.”
The spectacle of Trump making Senate Republicans squirm was like an unwanted flashback to his years in the White House, when each week reporters would shove microphones in front of unhappy-looking lawmakers as they came and went from the Party’s weekly luncheon, asking for comment on the latest Trump outrage. On Wednesday, Lankford came out of another contentious Party lunch, and complained that he was having to meet one on one with fellow-Republicans to combat “misinformation.” “Abraham Lincoln said, ‘don’t believe everything you read on the Internet,’ ” he said. Lisa Murkowski, like Lankford and McConnell, is one of the few remaining holdouts among Senate Republicans who have not yet endorsed Trump for another term. She told reporters that her party was to blame for the mess. “It was the Republicans, I will remind you, that told the Democrats months ago that if you want to try to get your Ukraine funding, you’re gonna have to take up the border issue,” she said. “This is what we asked for.”
Amid the recriminations on Wednesday, I happened to go up to Capitol Hill for a long-scheduled conversation with Senator Angus King, a low-key former governor of Maine, who refuses to join either party, though he caucuses with Democrats. King chairs the Senate Armed Services subcommittee that oversees America’s nuclear forces, and is a senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. He was as alarmed as I have ever seen him about the consequences of the whole mess. While Republicans fight among themselves, the Pentagon has already, as of January, run out of congressionally approved funds for its military assistance to Ukraine. In the now languishing bill, Biden has asked for an additional sixty billion dollars to aid the country; many in Washington now expect that, even if a vote on funds for Ukraine eventually happens, Republicans will insist on billions of dollars less for non-military assistance as the price for their votes. But even that may not happen and, in the meantime, the President’s vow to support Ukraine “as long as it takes” looks to be another hollow promise that a superpower divided against itself cannot keep. “I think this would be, if we don’t do it, the most serious foreign-policy mistake of our lifetimes,” King told me. “It will reverberate for fifty years.”
Like the rest of us, King was struggling to make sense of the abrupt pivot by Republicans who were for the border deal before they were against it. When I reminded him that, at one time, many Republicans, as well as most Democrats, said that they were in favor of giving legal status to the so-called Dreamers—hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants who had been brought to the U.S. as children and never lived anywhere else—he quoted the late comedian Mort Sahl: “If you maintain a consistent political opinion in this country long enough, you’ll eventually be tried for treason.” Barack Obama was one of many Presidents who thought there might be a glimmer of hope for a broad bipartisan immigration deal—and he held out a solution for the Dreamers in search of it. But the deal never happened. Instead, Obama enacted a temporary executive fix, one that is still being fought over in the courts now, a decade later. As for the fate of the Dreamers, it says everything that they aren’t even part of the current negotiations. The politics have moved on.
As this latest grand bargain heads toward its increasingly likely demise, with Trump heckling from the sidelines, the rest of the world will once again be gawking at our dysfunction. “My experience around here is: it’s all about timing,” King told me. He recalled Shakespeare’s Caesar: “There is a tide in the lives of men which taken at the flood leads on to victory.” His conclusion: “If they miss this chance to do something serious about the border, there’s no telling when it would come again.” My conclusion is even simpler: Republicans have chosen which tide to take. After Trump, the deluge. ♦