The GOP war after Jeff Flake denounced Trump

When Senator Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, explained why he had chosen to denounce President Donald Trump from the Senate floor last Tuesday afternoon as being “dangerous to a democracy,” he cited the moment, in 1954, when Joseph Welch, a lawyer representing the Army in the Army-McCarthy hearings, confronted Senator Joseph McCarthy, Republican of Wisconsin. In an op-ed for the Washington Post, titled “Enough,” Flake recalled how Welch’s plain language—“Have you no sense of decency, sir?”—seemed to break the spell of McCarthyism. He had hoped to do something similar.

There are parallels in the two events, in that both McCarthy and Trump seem to have bewitched members of their party with a promise of power, coupled with a fear of being the next target, whether of a hearing or of a tweet. (And the man seated next to McCarthy during the hearings, Roy Cohn, became Trump’s mentor.) But what was particularly powerful about the Welch moment was that he was rejecting an offer of complicity from McCarthy. The Senator had just announced, on national television, that a lawyer in Welch’s firm had once belonged to a left-leaning legal organization, and added that he assumed that Welch hadn’t known. Welch had known, and he said so without hesitation. By contrast, when Flake finished speaking, it was clear that, despite the force of his rhetoric, the spell had not been broken. The G.O.P. still has not come close to addressing its complicity problem.

The Republicans can’t now say that the terms of their bargain with Trump haven’t been fully presented to them. Flake, his voice shaking, used the word “complicity” or “complicit” several times, noting that he was filled with “regret for the compromise of our moral authority, and by ‘our’ I mean all of our complicity in this alarming and dangerous state of affairs.” He said that “silence can equal complicity.” Finally, he asked, “And what do we, as United States senators, have to say about it?”

It was a largely moot question in his case, given that he had just announced that he would not seek reëlection. He has been a consistent critic of Trump, and this has made him one of the President’s constant targets. Flake would have faced a primary challenger next year who has the backing of Trump’s former aide Steve Bannon, and who was far ahead of him in the polls. He tried to present dropping out as an advantage, saying that, for the fourteen months remaining in his term, he would be freer to speak, without “the political consideration that consumed far too much bandwidth and would cause me to compromise far too many principles.”

Flake’s fellow-Arizonan, John McCain, another Trump critic who will not run again, warmly praised his bravery. Yet, in the days that followed, the leaders of the Party went on with their business, as if being charged with selling out the Republic for their own personal political gain were nothing out of the ordinary. No one got notably angry, or acted as though his or her honor had been offended. Immediately after the speech, Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, said that Flake was a “very fine man” whom he valued as a “team player,” and then moved on to procedural measures aimed at passing tax cuts, as part of a large-scale tax-reform bill working its way through Congress.

Admittedly, it had already been a long day for McConnell. It began when Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, who is also not seeking reëlection, appeared on multiple morning broadcasts to say that the President is “utterly untruthful,” and repeated his concern that Trump, if not checked, could set off a Third World War. Those remarks came as the members of the Republican caucus were heading to a lunch meeting with the President about the tax bill. The proposed cuts—including a reduction in the corporate tax rate, from thirty-five to twenty per cent—were meant to be their reward for putting up with tweeted mockery and other outrages, and had, McConnell said, unified the Party. (Trump later called the meeting a “love fest.”) When McConnell was asked about Corker’s remarks, he said only, “There’s a lot of noise out there.”

On Thursday, Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, had a similar response to Flake’s address. “I don’t think the American people want to see us here yelling at each other,” he said, thus placing his colleague’s anguished appeal on the same plane as Trump’s intemperate rants. Senator Lindsey Graham, who has been a Trump critic, responded to Flake’s speech by telling the Times that he had come to enjoy dealing with the President. From this perspective, silence is a virtue. Yet silence speaks, too. Maybe McConnell hopes that, when he finds himself standing next to the President as he says something preposterous, his reputation for cynicism will safeguard his dignity—that no one will believe that he believes what Trump is saying.

Increasingly, though, the Republican ranks are filled not just with cynics who put up with Trump but with true believers. Bannon is promoting far-right primary challengers in elections across the country, with the aim of bringing down the Republican “establishment.” Last week, the Post reported that the Senate Leadership Fund, a super pac close to McConnell, would launch an offensive against Bannon, in part by funding efforts to disparage him personally. The story noted, however, that the pac would not attack Trump, thus dodging what the G.O.P. really needs: a hard-fought referendum on Trumpism. Instead, in a number of upcoming primary races, such as the senatorial contest in Mississippi, the candidates are competing to prove their loyalty to the President.

This is why Flake’s speech, for all its power, felt incomplete. He raised a call to arms—and then sounded the retreat. His argument that he can better speak out against Trump because he no longer has to worry about appealing to the “subset of a subset,” which makes up the Republican primary electorate, comes hazardously close to conceding that the electoral route is no longer a worthwhile or a decent one. Flake’s cry of “Enough” might be taken as “Enough with politics”—as a concession that complicity and political participation are synonymous. That’s a dangerous idea, too.

The country needs people to speak out against Trump, but it also needs Republicans as well as Democrats to run against him. That will require people who still have something to lose to be willing to stake it by putting their names on a ballot. Democracies are meant to be noisy places. Perhaps Flake should start thinking about something beyond a series of lame-duck speeches or a lecture tour. What are his plans for 2020? ♦