Mike Pence seems to be cautiously ramping up his criticism of Donald Trump. Asked if he would promise to pardon Trump if he is miraculously elected president in 2024, Pence refused. I find this modestly encouraging simply from the standpoint of wanting to see even small signs of decency from the political right. But why does it feel like pulling teeth to get a Republican to admit that the disgraced ex-president has committed crimes and deserves to do significant prison time?
One reason is spelled out by Jason Willick in a piece for the Washington Post. Willick’s overall point is that Trump has become so dependent on a pardon that he can’t afford to sabotage the eventual Republican nominee, assuming it’s not him. This means he can’t run a spoiler third-party campaign, and he pretty much has to do his best to rally his supporters to the cause of the Republican Party in 2024. This is supposed to be a silver lining for a GOP that is otherwise pretty despondent about Trump’s legal travails and their potential to drag down the ticket.
The party is already having difficulty recruiting congressional candidates because people are reluctant to run for office on a ticket with Trump. But it’s really more complicated than just not wanting to be tarred by association or anticipating that it will be a bad election season for the Republicans. When Trump won the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 2016, he began a rapid transformation of the party from a corporate party to a small donor-driven populist one. Trump’s base consists of many supporters, including former Democrats or simply disengaged voters, who are loyal to him personally rather than to the GOP and its traditional principles. This would be a positive for the party if it was simply addition, but he lost many independent and moderate Republicans in the bargain. Not only did Trump lose the popular vote in 2016 but the Republicans did poorly in the next two federal election cycles.
The result is that the party is weaker today than it was before Trump, but it’s also dependent on his supporters to even maintain the status quo. Without them, they’d have to win back the independents and moderates they’ve lost, and they can’t do that unless a new standard bearer emerges who breaks from Trumpism. Yet, this is almost impossible because the people remaining in the party to vote in primaries are strongly in favor of Trumpism. They certainly don’t want to see their champion imprisoned, and they expect any Republican president to immediately free him if he is behind bars.
This is why Pence deserves some credit for his reluctance to make that promise, but it’s also why he has a snowball’s chance in hell of winning the nomination. As for the other candidates, anyone who wants a chance to win the nomination has to contend with the same conundrum. How can you win the support of Trumpists if you’re not willing to support Trump in his legal fights? And even if you manage to pull off that feat, how can you win a general election if Trump’s supporters are somewhere between unenthusiastic and outright hostile?
It’s a bit of a death spiral. Trump is killing the party but they’re dead meat without him.
As Willick points out, Trump is dying too, and the GOP is his only lifeline. Previously, there was a real concern that the party couldn’t afford to turn Trump into an enemy, but now that he needs a pardon he doesn’t have the luxury of turning his back. His first goal is to win the nomination and the presidency, but his fallback is to get all his competitors for the nomination to promise to pardon him.
You can see how he and the party are tied at the hip, but he’s in the worse position of the two. His personal freedom is on the line and his freedom of maneuver is all but eliminated. As his legal woes mount, it might become more viable for the other candidates to suggest that perhaps he doesn’t deserve a pardon. After all, that’s not a promise the eventual Republican nominee wants to take into the general election.
