How Badly Will Trump Hurt The GOP In November? They Deserve The Worst

Over the weekend, the New York Times published an OpEd by Peter Wehner, The Full-Spectrum Corruption of Donald Trump. "There’s never been any confusion about the character defects of Donald Trump," Wehner, a former Reagan and Bush staffer and senior fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center began. "The question has always been just how far he would go and whether other individuals and institutions would stand up to him or become complicit in his corruption." He has long been concerned that Trump "would redefine the Republican Party in his image. That’s already happened in areas like free trade, free markets and the size of government; in attitudes toward ethnic nationalism and white identity politics; in America’s commitment to its traditional allies, in how Republicans view Russia and in their willingness to call out leaders of evil governments like North Korea rather than lavish praise on them. But in no area has Mr. Trump more fundamentally changed the Republican Party than in its attitude toward ethics and political leadership."

A party that once spoke with urgency and apparent conviction about the importance of ethical leadership-- fidelity, honesty, honor, decency, good manners, setting a good example-- has hitched its wagon to the most thoroughly and comprehensively corrupt individual who has ever been elected president. Some of the men who have been elected president have been unscrupulous in certain areas-- infidelity, lying, dirty tricks, financial misdeeds-- but we’ve never before had the full-spectrum corruption we see in the life of Donald Trump.

For many Republicans, this reality still hasn’t broken through. But facts that don’t penetrate the walls of an ideological silo are facts nonetheless. And the moral indictment against Mr. Trump is obvious and overwhelming. Corruption has been evident in Mr. Trump’s private and public life, in how he has treated his wives, in his business dealings and scams, in his pathological lying and cruelty, in his bullying and shamelessness, in his conspiracy-mongering and appeals to the darkest impulses of Americans. (Senator Bob Corker, a Republican, refers to the president’s race-based comments as a “base stimulator.”) Mr. Trump’s corruptions are ingrained, the result of a lifetime of habits. It was delusional to think he would change for the better once he became president.

Some of us who have been lifelong Republicans and previously served in Republican administrations held out a faint hope that our party would at some point say “Enough!”; that there would be some line Mr. Trump would cross, some boundary he would transgress, some norm he would shatter, some civic guardrail he would uproot, some action he would take, some scheme or scandal he would be involved in that would cause large numbers of Republicans to break with the president. No such luck. Mr. Trump’s corruptions have therefore become theirs. So far there’s been no bottom, and there may never be. It’s quite possible this should have been obvious to me much sooner than it was, that I was blinded to certain realities I should have recognized.

In any case, the Republican Party’s as-yet unbreakable attachment to Mr. Trump is coming at quite a cost. There is the rank hypocrisy, the squandered ability to venerate public character or criticize Democrats who lack it, and the damage to the white Evangelical movement, which has for the most part enthusiastically rallied to Mr. Trump and as a result has been largely discredited. There is also likely to be an electoral price to pay in November.

How likely? The new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released yesterday notes that Trump's approval numbers are "remarkably stable" even with all the bad news last week and even though "more than half of voters say he has not been honest and truthful regarding the ongoing special counsel investigation by Robert Mueller." Approval- 44%. Disapproval- 52%.

[F]or Democrats hoping to craft a midterm election strategy, the week's news thus far "represents a fools gold opportunity rather than a silver bullet solution."

...The earlier NBC/WSJ poll-- conducted August 18 through August 22-- showed Democrats with an 8-point lead in congressional preference, with 50 percent of voters preferring a Democratic-controlled Congress and with 42 percent wanting Republicans in charge.

Last month, Democrats were ahead by 6 points on this question, 49 percent to 43 percent.

Voters were split on what concerns them more-- Republicans not providing a check and balance on Trump if they control Congress (46 percent who say this), or Democrats going too far in obstructing the president if they’re in charge (45 percent).

They also were divided on what bothers them more-- a Democratic candidate who supports House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s policies (47 percent), or a Republican candidate who supports President Trump’s policies (45 percent).

...Democrats continue to enjoy an edge in enthusiasm: 63 percent of Democratic voters express a high level of interest in the upcoming elections-- registering either a “9” or “10” on a 10-point scale-- compared with 52 percent of GOP voters who do the same.

What’s more, 56 percent of Democratic voters believe November’s elections are more important to them than past congressional elections, versus just 38 percent of Republicans who think that.

“Democrats are going to win [House] seats in 2018,” says Democratic pollster Fred Yang of Hart Research Associates. “The question is: How many will that be?”

“The reason why the Democrats still have the upper hand is the enthusiasm issue,” Yang adds.

The NBC/WSJ survey conducted mostly before the Cohen-Manafort news also finds Republicans with a 14-point advantage in which party better deals with the economy-- their biggest lead on this question in the poll’s history.

National generic polls are not worthless-- nor are they polls that, for example, pit a specific Democrat against a specific Republican in a specific congressional district. It doesn't much matter what voters in the Texas panhandle, TX-13 (Amarillo, Wichita Falls, where Hillary got 17% of the vote) think about Mac Thornberry in his R+33 district. Nor does it matter what New York voters in NY-15 (south Bronx, where Trump got less than 5% of the vote) think about Jose Serrano in his D+44 district. Seats like those just skewer the results in the districts that can swing from red to blue. The polling we need to see are for incredibly close races in NE-02, where Kara Eastman (D) is on the verge of defeating incumbent Don Bacon; in the Southern California districts where Republicans Steve Knight, Mimi Walters, Dana Rohrabacher, Diane Harkey and Duncan Hunter are all on the verge of being defeated by, respectively, Democrats Katie Hill, Katie Porter, Harley Rouda, Mike Levin and Ammar Campa-Najjar; in Washington state, where Republicans Jaimie Herrera Beutler, Cathy McMorris Rodgers and Dino Rossi are looking like they can lose to Democrats Carolyn Long, Lisa Brown and Kim Schrier; in WI-01, where a union iron worker, Randy Bryce, is on the verge of beating a garden variety GOP corporate lawyer, Bryan Steil, and so on. These are the kinds of races that will determine how big the Democratic majority will be in 2019, not national generic polls, that go up and down daily.

Dr. Samir Selmanović is the founder of Faith House Manhattan, an interfaith community of Christians, Muslims, Jews and humanists/atheists. He has served on the Interfaith Relations Commission of the United States National Council of Churches and currently serves as national co-chair of Vote Common Good, which is how Ted Lieu and I have come to know him. This morning he told me that "in its endorsement of Trump, the most organized, outspoken, and influential religious group in America, Evangelical Christians, have essentially abandoned its most prized and potent capacity: faith." He continued:

That was the very high price of Trump. Jesus' teaching is that the world is a safe place to be and do good-- and that his followers, having faith in the power of God, do not need to resort to lying, excluding, and immorality to advantage themselves. Jesus-followers and admirers are invited to live, love, and lead in truth and grace. By contrast, organized Evangelicalism has now opted for the opposite of faith: fear. Leaving their faith in God behind, they have now embraced fear of immigrants, fear of the poor, and fear of liberals. This new creed has, incredibly, abandoned the teachings of Jesus as naive and impotent. The greatest irony of American Evangelicalism today is that it has given up on God's presence in the world and chosen an anti-Jesus criminal as its protector. Evangelicals essentially elected a modern-day Barabbas, thus crucifying their former Lord again. Instead of living the liberating faith of Jesus, they are now living in the confining siege mentality of Trump. Living by faith has given way to living in fear.

We at Vote Common Good are new kind of Evangelicals, who still believe in the Good News of goodness, grace, and truth prevailing in the world. We place our faith in Jesus, whom conventional Evangelicals have given up for another, Jesus, who leads us with power, truth, and grace. Instead of acting on our human fear of being left behind in a changing world, we live in the excitement and the expectancy about what love can and will do in the world as we embrace those we were taught to hate or fear, seeing God everywhere and in everyone. This October we will travel the country with words of courage and songs of faith. We are living and breathing revival and are leaving behind the turncoat Evangelicalism of the past.

Soon, Vote Common Good will be helping Democratic congressional candidates across America, from Bangor, Maine to Orange County, California-- with plenty of stops in between-- Pennsylvania, Texas, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas...