The Next Republican Presidential Candidate Will Tell Us What the Party Really Stands For

Or if it stands for anything at all but power at any cost

Photo by Tabrez Syed on Unsplash

Let’s call it what it was: an attempted coup.

Not just the storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters that left five people dead, but everything the outgoing president has done since his November 2020 election defeat.

The refusal to concede, the near-constant airing of baseless conspiracy theories on voter fraud, the piles of lawsuits, the brazen attempts to pressure local officials to “find" votes. It’s all of a piece.

Everyone knew Donald Trump would be a stress test for American democratic norms. The good news is democracy held. Officials (mostly) did their jobs and the court system treated Trump’s legal team of disgraced conspiracy theorists with the contempt they deserved — even the supreme court packed with Republican appointees didn’t bend to Trump’s will.

Democracy survived, but the thing to remember is that democracy survived this time.

Because the United States still came relatively close to falling into an authoritarian dictatorship. And their would-be dictator was not charismatic, or intelligent, or eloquent, or a strategic thinker. He was, and is, an impulsive…