Post-Stalinist Republicanism and the Urgent Need for Democrats to Be Bold
Six years ago today, it still seemed plausible that Donald Trump would soon get over his tantrum after losing his reelection bid and that he would in due course leave the White House without much more than a lot of grumbling and scores of failed lawsuits. We know what did not happen next.
I begin today's column with that walk down PTSD Lane to make clear that there is still the possibility of things going very much sideways between now and when the 120th Congress is scheduled to be sworn in at the beginning of January. After a few days of unexpected docility last week, Trump has again started to make noises about election fraud. Although those have thus far not caught fire even with his cultish supporters, recall that an unnamed Trump advisor in November 2020 assured everyone that Trump simply needed to process his grief and that all would be fine. Things only grew worse from there. There is also some possibility of House Republicans doing something crazy at the last minute.
Even ultra-pessimists like me, however, see all of that as highly unlikely. In my first post-midterms column last week, I wrote that "the results do seem to have demonstrated that I have been wrong many times in saying that no loss -- no matter how numerically decisive -- would stop Trump and the Republicans from committing a coup. That counts as good news, right?" And I also noted with relief that some things that could only happen around Election Day -- "swarms of ICE agents or US military harassing voters [or] violence from right-wing paramilitaries" -- had not happened.
Another thing that now seems much less likely is that Trump will try to hang onto power after his current term ends. Of course, "much less likely" is a deliberately vague term, but it is again possible to be happy that I seem to have been wrong in surmising that Trump would only leave office upon his death.
Having spent the past week writing columns fretting about the many ways in which the Democratic Party's creaky leadership could mess up the gift that they have been given, I demonstrated that one can be happy with a new reality but still be quite pessimistic. That is, one can be relieved not to have fallen into an abyss but still be aware that there are people pushing us back toward the cliff. In that light, today's column takes a brief look at what the Republicans might do if the Trump era truly is sunsetting (just as Trump himself is sundowning).
Again, anything could yet happen, but it is worth asking what will happen if Trump does fade out and the Republicans have to move on. A lot of e-ink has already been spilled about the 2028 Republican presidential field, which amusingly is currently being led by three of the worst politicians I have ever seen: Ron DeSantis, Marco Rubio, and J.D. Vance. If I were a Democratic political consultant (and I give thanks every day that I am not), I would be delighted to be told that either the guy that everyone hates, the guy who somehow continues to shrink in stature the longer he is in the public eye, or the most off-putting guy this side of Ted Cruz might be the Republicans' nominee.
But because horse-race analysis is complete nonsense and a waste of time, I mention the current buzz only for entertainment purposes. No one knows, and no one should care at this point, who will be running in 2028. I am much more interested in thinking about the meaning of the headline of this column: "Post-Stalinist Republicanism."
When Trump reoccupied the White House in early 2025, many readers contacted me to ask if I had anything encouraging to say about the future. In a Valentine's Day Verdict column, I expressed my love for the idea that nothing is permanent, including fascism. Trumpism's demise was inevitable, I wrote, because at worst he would someday die without having created the infrastructure of a permanent movement, and because even the most evil dictatorships have always ended, one way or another.
And short of outright despotic autocracies, I also pointed out that somehow the US civil rights movement of the Fifties and Sixties had significantly reduced (but not eliminated, unfortunately) Jim Crow racial oppression. The current MAGA Supreme Court has done horrible things to the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, and other triumphs of that earlier era, but it is still important to remember that people back then had notable successes in overcoming de jure racism that had been in place for nearly a century. (And now Scott Colom will represent Mississippi in the US Senate, which is a very big deal indeed.)
For current purposes, it is the references to Stalin in that Verdict column that most interest me. I invoked the murderous despot's name twice:
Most ominously, we are all holding our collective breath as we wait to see whether Trump’s people will invoke a variation on Stalin’s rhetorical question—“How many divisions has [the Pope] got?”—and openly defy the courts. I should note that there is also a quote from President Andrew Jackson that is more directly on point—challenging the Chief Justice to enforce the Court’s ruling against Jackson—which the Trump team is openly touting. Even so, the new administration is giving off much more of a Stalinist vibe than even the most repellent version of Jacksonian populism, so Stalin’s words seem like the more apt encapsulation of what we are facing.
That passage has held up well, especially now that we know how ruthlessly Trump and his minions pushed their agenda at every level, often losing in the courts but ultimately getting most of what they wanted either by simply ignoring the courts (or gaming them with endless dilatory tactics and simple stalling) and by being bailed out by the Supreme Court Six. And Trumpist tactics have seen many innocent people jailed and killed, both in the manic deportation orgy and in other atrocities such as the hundreds of people killed at sea for being suspected drug smugglers.
In other words, although the scale of the atrocities is not comparable between Stalin and Trump (although there is every reason to believe that Trump and his closest advisors would be happy if they were), the tactics and the pitiless cruelty are strikingly similar.
Looking forward, the second time I dropped Stalin's name in that column was this:
Such succession fights do not, however, necessarily lead to a better outcome. Stalin, after all, was the victor in the deadly game of thrones that followed Lenin’s death in the early days of the Soviet Union, so things can get worse even when that seems impossible to imagine.
And that is the most troubling source of pessimism today. Post-Trump Republicans -- not merely the creeps who want to be President but the entire party and its most ardent true believers -- will face the same problem in the immediate future that they have been dodging for decades: No one likes what they stand for or what they want to do. They can continue to try to cosplay as working class heroes, but that is becoming more and more difficult to pull off. Worse, when their post-2012 "autopsy" told the Republicans that Mitt Romney's loss to Barack Obama should be followed by a more pro-immigrant Republican approach going forward, the party's voters instead turned to Trump.
Will the Republican Party that now faces a non-Trump future end up on the same kind of path that led the USSR through Brezhnev and the rest? If, say, Josh Hawley somehow emerges triumphant in leading his party over the current bigger names, would he do so as a Gorbachev-like reformer or a cowardly version of the wannabe Stalins who populated the Politburo for decades? More bluntly: Who is the person who would convince the Republicans to stop peddling Trumpist hatred, and where would the support for such a person come from within the party?
As an immediate reality, we can see what late-stage Republican Stalinism looks like: Stephen Miller as chief advisor, Jim Jordan leading his party in the House, and Trump threatening to prosecute congressional Democrats who might dare to use their oversight powers. (Todd Blanche's attempt to "dial back" those threats is, at best, weak tea.)
Again, calling the current situation late-stage Trumpism might be wishful thinking. Even if it is, however, there is precious little evidence that post-Trumpist Republicans would have any internal incentives to do anything but tear each other apart while trying to lead a party that will continue to be driven by hatred, grievance, greed, and an utter lack of remorse.
All of which makes it essential that the Democratic Party be led by people who are not going to be lulled into believing that the existential threat to this country has suddenly disappeared.
- Neil H. Buchanan