Ronna McDaniel, the Republican National Committee chair who has led the party’s election flops in 2018, 2020, and 2022, surfaced yesterday on Faux News for our breakfast entertainment. I assume that most of you don’t start your Sundays by tuning to the falsehood factory, but I’ll get my laughs wherever I can find them, and, sure enough, McDaniel did the job.
The Sunday host put her on the spot: The RNC is drafting a new report, an “autopsy” of its ’22 midterm failures, seeking to highlight the big reasons why the party barely won the House and lost ground in the Senate – and yet, the host noted, this report “doesn’t mention Trump…The former president is clearly the biggest voice in the room for the party. He had great sway in getting candidates through the primaries that didn’t do well in the general (election), missed a chance to retake the Senate. How can you break down 2022 without talking about the president?”
Whereupon McDaniel rolled out a response that never mentioned Trump.
Granted, it’s tough for the RNC leader to mention Trump when her head remains affixed up his rump, but that shouldn’t excuse her response:
“What I will say is, the biggest takeaway we are taking is, independents didn’t break our way (in 2022), which has to happen if we’re going to win in 2024, which usually that’s what causes that red wave. And abortion was a big issue in key states like Michigan and Pennsylvania. And so, the guidance we’re going to give to our candidates is you have to address this head-on…(On abortion) we have to find consensus among Democrats and Republicans.”
Let’s unpack that. Or at least give it a try.
For starters, a toddler can connect the dots better than she can. Independents, particularly independent women, broke for the Democrats last November because Trump was a dead weight on the GOP. His endless “stolen election” lies turned off swing voters and energized the Democratic base; according to the exit polls, 58 percent of all midterm voters viewed Trump unfavorably, while only 39 percent signaled thumbs-up. And it’s a matter of public record that the key Senate candidates he championed – Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, Herschel Walker in Georgia, Blake Masters in Arizona – went down to defeat, as did Trump Mini-Me Doug Mastriano, the MAGA pick for Pennsylvania governor.
A rare candid Republican, New Jersey RNC member Bill Palatucci (a standup guy, as I recall from my long-ago stint as a Jersey political writer), reportedly said the other day: “If (the new autopsy report) doesn’t mention Donald Trump, it’s not worth the paper it’s written on. If you don’t mention Trump, it’s like searching for a light switch with a blindfold on. You’re not going to find the truth. The truth is self-evident.”
McDaniel’s strategy yesterday was to shift the subject from Trump to abortion. That was entertaining as well. She insisted that Republican candidates in 2024 should “address (it) head-on.” And say what, exactly? They’re irrevocably locked into the forced-birth stance that turned off the ’22 independents and energized the Democrats. How can it possibly benefit Republicans to talk about abortion prohibition “head-on” at a time when 64 percent of Americans favor legal abortion in all or most cases? Indeed, three blue states and three red states had abortion on the ballot in 2022 – California, Vermont, Michigan, Montana, Kentucky, and Kansas – and the voters in all six protected abortion rights.
And what’s up with McDaniel’s hilarious plea for “consensus among Democrats or Republicans”? (Long-shot presidential hopeful Nikki Haley also tried that line the other day.) There can never be a “consensus” on abortion when a one-third citizen minority – stoked for prohibition, thanks to the overturning of Roe engineered by Trump’s 6-3 court – insists on forcing its morality, via government muscle, on the landslide majority. Which is precisely what Republicans are trying to do on a state by state basis.
But to truly appreciate McDaniels’ whitewashing of Trump – and to underscore the sad fact that Republicans seem incapable of learning – we need a dose of historical perspective.
Ten years ago, after they lost the 2012 presidential election, they wrote an autopsy to determine what went wrong and what they should do differently. The resulting “Growth and Opportunity Report” featured a sobering diagnosis and offered a few cures. Hold your laughter until you finish the next paragraph.
The report said: “The perception that the GOP does not care about people is doing great harm to the party.” Therefore, the party needed to reach out beyond its base of older white conservatives and connect with young people and people of color, by striking a softer tone particularly on social issues. The report warned: “The Republican party needs to stop talking to itself. We have become expert in how to provide ideological reinforcement to like-minded people, but devastatingly we have lost the ability to be persuasive with, or welcoming to, those who do not agree with us on every issue.” The party needs to “broaden its base” instead of “driving around in an ideological cul de sac.”
So what did the party do in 2016? It nominated Trump. Who proceeded to ignore – with the party’s complicity – every shred of advice in that autopsy report. But the party’s losses in 2018, 2020, and 2022 basically confirm what the party warned against a decade ago. Indeed, the party has lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections (Trump was 0-2), and you’d think that such a dismal track record would prompt the GOP to find space in its report for at least one critical reference to its ever-present criminal defendant.
But these Trump cultists never learn. Instead of the party opening up, they’re determined to double down. To which I say, go for it. I’m reminded of a scene in Citizen Kane (the film debuted 82 years ago today), when a political boss tells the pigheaded protagonist:
“You’re the greatest fool I’ve ever known, Kane. If it was anybody else, I’d say what’s going to happen to you would be a lesson to you. Only you’re going to need more than one lesson. And you’re going to get more than one lesson.”