Do you care what happens to Fox News if Donald Trump loses the election? Once you think about this question for a minute or two, it kind of becomes obvious that you should. On the one hand, we already have the Tea Party experience from 2009 to help us imagine the future under a Biden presidency. On the other, there’s this:
One way or another, Trump is almost certain to attempt to maintain some kind of a media presence when he leaves office, so Fox probably will have to contend with him — whether it’s as a contributor on its own airwaves or a competitor.
[Rupert] Murdoch has stopped speaking as frequently as he once did with Trump, but his associates say that those conversations probably will pick up again after Nov. 3, when Trump will either be a second-term president or a free agent on the media circuit.
“Maybe Rupert can just back the truck up and pay Trump to appear on Fox’s air at will,” [Jonathan] Klein, [a former president of CNN], said. “Trump might prefer that to the rigors of having to actually run an actual business.”
This makes is obvious why Trump can’t be allowed to escape justice. It’s a question of national security. Trump’s version of the Tea Party is outright white nationalist fascism. If he merges that with the imperatives of Fox‘s business imperatives, we have a murderous brew that can lead to widespread violence.
Trump needs to be defeated and then he needs to have all his crimes exposed and go to jail. Fox News and the Republican Party need to retool without him, for their good and for the good of the country and the world.
I have no confidence that the Republicans will retool if Trump goes away. They’ll just revert to being the party of Trump without the poster toddler. If Trump’s around, it puts them between a rock and a hard place. Abandon Trump and get fucked. Stay with Trump and get slaughtered.
There is risk. We live in scary times. We may be better off with this risk, the kind that forces a pimple to a head, to one that allows it to be covered over with makeup.
Why will it not go away like the Whig or Federalist parties?
Yes, the relationship between Trump and Fox will be interesting. With the Lincoln Project becoming a media entity and the potential to see Trump create his own right-wing propaganda network, we’re seeing the splintering of right-wing media. That’s not a terrible thing. Unity in messaging is a big deal for the right.
What about Trump and the Republican Party? I think they will want to move on from him personally and maybe even move on from elements of his politics. Well it be possible for Fox and Republicans to stuff Trump down the memory hole? Will they want to?
My suspicion is that the GOP party base is still going to remain intact, and its current leadership is mostly in place. They’re already very illiberal. My guess is they’ll simply look for the next Presidential candidate to be someone who is a bit less rough around the edges and more competent at the whole destroying democratic institutions thing. Trump and his thugs provided the blueprint, and our institutions will not have had much time to rebuild and recover between now and 2024. Look, the next decade or two will be very dangerous. We will have one major party that still embraces democratic governance and another that wants to demolish democratic governance. That kind of dynamic is not healthy in a system that seems unable to sustain more than two major parties. Strap in. It’s gonna be a bumpy ride.
If this research from the V-Dem Institute is on the money, it is unlikely that we’ll see much of a marked change in the GOP, or if we do it will be further toward illiberalism. As it is, the GOP has gone from being more or less a mainstream center-right party that would seem recognizable as such in most of the developed world to that of a party that more closely resembles the ruling parties in places like Turkey and Hungary. That didn’t happen overnight. The shift probably accelerated during the Trump years, but the party was already devolving pretty rapidly in the aftermath of the 2008 election. Besides, the GOP now has QAnon members poised to become elected officials. The party gets much worse before there is any hope of it getting better. And really for the party to finally break its particular fever, it would require multiple electoral humiliations. Whether or not that happens remains to be seen. For those not wanting to deal with data sets, just read the briefing paper toward the bottom of the link I gave you. The table showing how the Democratic and Republican Parties have shifted is quite telling. TL,DR: not a lot of change going in with the Dems, but the GOP’s gone nutso.
Here’s what the Republican Party is going to learn IF Biden wins.
That’s it. There’s no salvaging the Republican Party. As long as the Republican Party exists, this country is IN DANGER.
Tom Cotton was exactly who I had in mind. He’s one of my Senators. He’s dumb as a box of rocks, but much smarter than Trump. There’s some dark money fast-tracking his political career. My state’s DP really screwed the pooch for this election. The candidate they landed on probably was not properly vetted, and mysteriously dropped out a couple hours after the filing period ended. My faint hope is that the Libertarian candidate has a good enough showing to put a few dents in Cotton’s image as electable. In the meantime, all of us need to be educating the public about what the GOP has devolved into. It needs to be made clear as day that the GOP is no longer an alternative when the public gets bored or dissatisfied with the Democratic Party, given that the GOP has almost destroyed our version of democracy once and appears hell-bent on doing so again. Stay on message. Provide facts. Stay cool. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. My personal recommendation to dissatisfied conservatives and moderate conservatives is to either form a new party or join the Libertarians (as they already have something of a developed infrastructure) and rebuild the center-right that way. I have no investment in being governed by a center-right party, so how they choose to make that happen is on them. If they’re adhering to basic democratic values and are willing to argue based on ideas and facts, I won’t stand in their way. If they just go back into the GOP fold? They’re too lost and damaged.
Not the point of your post, but still surprised you didn’t comment on this framing, Martin:
Trump won’t be a free agent after Nov. 3 even if he loses. Unless he resigns, he’ll still be President.
Wasn’t a former PM of Australia trying to bring Murderous Murdoch to justice?