Outside the Beltway

The GOP Only Has Itself to Blame

It's their own damn fault.

Steven L. Taylor · Saturday, April 25, 2026 · 2 comments

This Axios headline caught my eye: Term-limited Trump mortgages GOP’s future.

My brain had to first sort out that “Trump mortgages” weren’t some new policy gimmick, but instead the word was being used as a verb.

This led me to read the first line:

President Trump is governing like a man who will never face voters again, mortgaging his party’s future on promises he won’t be around to keep.

And then this towards the end:

 For Republicans, the risk of Trump’s short-sighted bets extends far beyond the midterms.

Regular readers know that I am reticent to assign sweeping blame to whole categories of people (like “the Right” or “the Left” or a given party writ large). I am constantly noting how weak our parties are, and the ability to have coordinated action is limited.

However, on February 23, 2021, the US Senate had the opportunity to convict Trump in his second impeachment trial over his actions on January 6th. The only penalty they could have levelled would have been barring him from ever holding federal office again (he couldn’t be kicked out of office, because he was already done with his first term).

The Senate that day contained 50 members of the GOP elite. Indeed, U.S. senators are among the most elite members of either party. Seven of those GOP elites voted to convict; 43 did not. It would have required 10 more.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell knew Trump was guilty. He said so on the day of the vote:

There is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day.

The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their President.

And yet, after going on for a bit about how bad J6 was, he pivoted to pretend to have a constitutional duty not to convict. He noted:

We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former Presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.

Of course, SCOTUS would eventually essentially give former Presidents a great deal of immunity, and hacks like Aileen Cannon would make prosecutions for obvious crimes impossible.

McConnell’s moral cowardice, as shared by 42 other members of his party, will hopefully go down in infamy.

All of this is to say that the GOP is not passively suffering from Trump’s presidency and the commensurate damage he is doing to their electoral prospects. The highest elected officials in the GOP had the chance to stop this from ever happening, and they gambled that they could ride the Trump wave and benefit from it.

They made a bad bet, and we are all suffering for it.

But whatever they are, they are not passive victims.

Side-note: the picture above, from Trump’s first term, tells quite a story. Speaker Paul Ryan, a more standard conservative, is out of office, having exited politics after a very frustrating two years as Speaker under Trump. Mike Pence, who almost certainly thought being veep would lead to him being the GOP nominee for president, was ousted and sent into exile because he, to his credit, did his constitutional duty on J6. McConnell is now a sad old man who seems to at least have some understanding of what he allowed to happen. I am by disposition not a vengeful man, but I hope that his choice in February of 2021 keeps him up at night. He will retire at the end of this term.