The Really Big Question

 

All of this raises one question that I cannot offer even a guess at.

Is this what the Republican Party has become for the foreseeable future, or is Trump a unique pathology?  I really don’t know.

In the lead-up to the 2022 elections, I was very much afraid that Republicans everywhere would follow Trump’s example and refuse to concede defeat.  In that I was pleasantly surprised.  There have been many elections since 2020, and the rule appears clear.  In elections for offices other than the Presidency, candidates other than Donald Trump (with a few exceptions) will concede defeat.*

In general, when Trump is not around, the Republican Party has not wholly lost its civic virtue. Its candidates (with a few exceptions) concede defeat when they lose, and none has successfully overturned an election.  Despite their razor-thin majority in the House, Republicans voted to expel George Santos.  They have accepted a criminal investigation of Matt Gaetz.  They are keeping the lights on and avoiding government shutdowns and debt ceiling breaches.  These are not very high standards, but they are certainly higher that Trump can clear.

So what happens when, as is inevitable sooner or later, a candidate other than Trump runs for President and loses?

To be clear, I don't believe stories that Trump has galloping dementia.  He has always been rambling and tangential.  His ghost writer for Art of the Deal had this to say about Trump in 1987 when he was 41:

One of the chief things I'm concerned about is the limits of his attention span, which are as severe as any person I think I've ever met.. . . . No matter what question I asked, he would become impatient with it pretty quickly, and literally, from the very first time I sat down to start interviewing him, after about 10 or 15 minutes, he said, 'You know, I don't really wanna talk about this stuff, I'm not interested in it, I mean it's over, it's the past, I'm done with it, what else have you got?' 

People have been speculating that Trump has dementia since 2016 and he keeps going.  Nonetheless, it remains true that time is not Trump's ally, that sooner or later he will necessarily age past his sell-by date.

Which means that some time, sooner or later, there will be a Republican running for President who is not Donald Trump.  And presumably sooner or later a non-Trump Republican running for President will lose.  I am very curious whether the party will accept the outcome when Trump is not the candidate, or whether they have completely assimilated the idea that the Presidency is theirs by right, and that they never have to accept the results if they lose.

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*The first sign of this was actually as early as January 5, 2021, with the Georgia runoffs.