You Can’t Spell Groyper Without G-O-P

On Thursday, Donald Trump stood frozen in the Oval Office, an insipid smirk on his face, his back to members of his Cabinet clustering around a man who had just keeled over. It’s a metaphor a minute in that place. The night before — in a video that looked like it took a panicked staffer, a copy of iMovie and an AI video-editor free trial to get it down to only mostly deranged — a slurring, bellowing Trump threatened war on Nigeria. “Leave them alone!” he shouted. “WARNING!””

The problem is, a mind like this is irreplaceable.

This week’s elections underlined the pesky reality that, while tacky is forever, Trump is still mortal, and some repellent goon who wasn’t on NBC’s best-rated reality TV show for years will have to follow him. The president’s obviously increasing dementia, frailty and the fact that blood is coiling above his ankles like the midsection of the Michelin Man already justified an increasing sense of urgency about what comes next for a GOP completely remade in his image. Seeing Trump’s demographic inroads vanish — as Democrats improved in every county in Virginia, won two off-year races in Georgia and elected a Muslim democratic socialist New York City mayor — moved the discussion’s timeline up to tomorrow.

As it happens, the GOP was already in the middle of a debate you might summarize as “How Nazi should we be?,” whose terms are vastly more appealing to most Americans than its other functional expression: “How much do we like JD Vance?” Ordinarily, such a discussion is called CPAC. This week, you might call it survival. 

Spend enough time with postwar American conservatism, and you hear the greatest hits over and over, retitled and in cover versions. The “Know Your Enemy” podcast could be retitled “Guess What’s Back,” without editing a second of run time. Rick Perlstein’s four-volume history of American conservatism from Goldwater to Reagan reads at times like a generations-long story of what happens when an unamended list meets a thesaurus. Pick up a random history — Jessica Mitford’s “The American Way of Death,” say — and there’s the Obamacare backlash cast back in time, a few words changed, only it’s defending your liberty to be charged a 4,000% markup on a coffin that can’t do anything it promises. 

Which is to say that — pace Lee Atwater — the party’s great ideological debates have long amounted to tweaking the racism dial and looking back at the audience to see how they respond. The out-groups change a little, as does the intensity of their demonization. But otherwise you might picture a Klan hood motionless and unchanging, as pop culture whirls around it, haircuts and lapels and skirts shortening and lengthening and kitchens remodeling in constant flux, like the “We Didn’t Start the Fire” video about a cross burning. 

And why should it not be? Winning is winning. Racism began eroding the promise of the New Deal from the start. Conservative eminence William F. Buckley Jr. supposedly wrestled from the beginning with the radical racist elements of his party, and set the template for the resolution of that conflict: appearing to ostracize them while co-opting their message and rebranding it with an extended pinky. Four and a half decades of conservative dominance began with a guy telling fables about welfare queens and a campaign launch endorsing states’ rights to a white audience in the same place they murdered Freedom Riders. No sane strategist would respond to nearly a half-century of rewriting the zeitgeist with any message but, “Keep going.”

Thus we’re on to Cincinnati — or Middletown, halfway to Dayton — the sort of place middle Americans can settle down with a nice Indian girl and disavow her. Despite JD Vance’s complete want of personality and obvious need to clone one from any paternal figure profitable to him, the Republican Party’s perpetual radical-versus-establishment racist debate seems determined to woo the vice president as the obvious dauphin of the MAGA monarchy. The need to attenuate just the right embrace of racism eats away daily at the Heritage Foundation, cradle of Reaganism, just as TV dinner dandy Tucker Carlson and sexually ambiguous goose-stepper Nick Fuentes try to pump more internet groyperism into the building. That neither side has simply used a few select billionaires to effectively kidnap Vance and let him Stockholm Syndrome himself into espousing the right strategy and platform says more about the rot of the party than anything else.

The persistent category error of Republican officials aping Trump and the strategists trying to shape the course of the next generation of the party is that neither the people nor the policies proposed come attached to a person who already spent over 30 years being famous and regularly on TV for the last stretch of media monoculture. A smarter GOP would let the electorate decide and permit themselves another outsider, but they are determined to cement a line of succession for the same reason geriatric Democrats do: because they’re just mortal mediocrities without it. 

That this is all repellent should be immediately apparent even to the lay viewer. Fuentes is more or less “What if YouTube, 8Chan and the husband who beats Connie in ‘The Godfather’ stepped into the teleporter?” and is exactly as appealing as that sounds to normal people. But, as we learned from Fuentes’ rival Charlie Kirk — whose Buckleyesque absorption of the former’s schtick to stay relevant was halted only by his death — the Republicans’ bench for the next generation is made up of people brain-poisoned by the same internet diet and supplemented for 15 years by whatever came out of Trump’s brain full of soup. The next bow tied Heritage fellow started out alt-right curious and followed the tiki torch marchers into the darkness; that obsolete term represents the decency ceiling.

What presents as a personality problem is a symptom of a policy problem. The debate remains stuck at “Is our favorite character from the HBO movie about the Wannsee Conference Reinhard Heydrich going full death’s head, or is it Colin Firth’s dreamy racial-purity lawyer?,” because it can’t change the channel and it can’t move leftward. When you ideologically refuse to offer material opportunities to young people outside of getting in at the bottom of Racism Inc.’s org chart, and when you offer no accelerated advancement except for those who can keep pushing back the rightmost edge, these are your employees. This is a purely capitalist expression of a product meeting its clientele that remains taboo to acknowledge in mainstream media, in a way that an observation like “this biker bar is full of bikers” and “Yankees fans go to Yankee Stadium” is not. 

Trump’s ability to control the party will end with his death. An already increasingly impotent president can’t scheme amongst factions to guarantee a future whose possibility only begins when he ends. Donald Trump’s body politic and body physical rapidly entering their lame-duck period were to be expected. But there is no fill-in for the blank in “long live the____” after the king is dead. To paraphrase Rick Pitino, Trump II is not walking through that door. 

Parties used to plan and game for the last gasps of second terms in the way Russian general staffs thought about German offensives, but as with the pitfalls common to Nazi invasions, Trump thought he could only stay at the top by shooting his generals. There’s a great patriotic war to fight; there are no authorities left to order who may pick up arms. And the only thing left on the ground is white supremacy. 

It sounds vile on paper, and it should be received as vile the more it is broadcast to an America where two-thirds of citizens already disapprove of the Trump administration across the board. May it sound even more vile the louder it gets. As it is, the various court tastemakers and pretenders to the throne are largely famous by the standards of C-Span and the more rancid wings of the rancid former Twitter. If this week’s elections are any indication, we can’t wait for the rest of America to meet them.