The Way Out

The indictments are the road away from Trump that the GOP just won't take.

The Way Out

Dear Republicans,

You’re out of excuses for Donald Trump, and that’s a good thing.

The sweeping indictments of Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States, on charges of criminal conspiracy and beyond are an ugly reminder of what you’re defending, supporting, and voting for in 2024.

Special Counsel Jack Smith’s indictments make a clear, precise, and damning case against Trump and his collaborators. The indictments by the grand jury in Georgia are an indelible reminder that your political god assembled a crew of fifth-tier lawyers and villains in a conspiracy to overturn a free and fair election.

And all of you are about to own it.

It’s not simply the allegations of Trump’s criminality that will shape your legacy and memory; it’s your determined defense of Trump, your continued public pledges of loyalty, and your embrace of an alternate-reality version of America.

In the fever swamp of MAGA America, Special Counsel Jack Smith is, in the words of dedicated Trump fanboy Hugh Hewitt, “An American Javert” where the real scandal isn’t Trump’s attempt to overthrow a free and fair election but the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop.

These indictments are your chance to put eight years of abnegation and shame behind you. They’re your chance to escape the blast radius of what’s coming. It’s a moment to break from Trump and his movement, not over policy but over Trump’s criminality and corrosive damage to America and its institutions.

A handful of us did in 2016. A few more tricked over the line after January 6th. A few brave, doomed souls have displayed their opposition to Trump in the 2024 Republican Primary, a story that ends well morally but not politically.

But for the rank-and-file elected Republicans, this is a moment you’ve been waiting for.

No, I’m not talking to the gibbering MAGA caucus. Marjorie Taylor Green, Matt Gaetz, James Comer, Paul Gosar, and the rest of the entertainment wing of the MAGA party are irredeemable and unreachable, driven by a perverse set of political incentives.

It’s obvious what many of you are thinking.

First, you worry that Trump has the luck of the Devil and will slither out of accountability for the millionth time in his long, sordid career. It’s a legitimate fear; he punishes allies and friends who stray from him with ferocity and venom unrivaled in politics. Juries are unpredictable. The wheels of justice famously grind slowly.

Next, you fear (and loathe) his base. The furious Boomers and early-Gen Xers who converted the GOP into the MAGA Party spent thirty years on a constant drip of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Alex Jones, and Fox News agitprop, fearmongering, conspiracy, and thinly veiled racial animus before becoming Trump’s political shock troops.

We used them at election time for a generation, then parked them back in the political closet. Now, they’re loose; a monster escaped from the lab. They punish any political deviation from the True Path of Trumpism. They’re the ones who send you death threats when you voice even the mildest concern over his criminality, venality, and lack of morals, grace, and judgment.

Finally, you worry that the country has moved on from the Burkean conservatism of the past and that nationalist populism is the future. Some members of the Senate -- Josh Hawley, J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, and others -- and a growing number of Republican candidates are all-in on the new hotness of unlimited government conservatism and using the power of the state to punish its political enemies and achieve its ideological ends. Although vultures are circling his campaign, Ron DeSantis is the leading proponent of post-conservative application of the power of government for political ends, a position once anathema to Republicans.

The demands of party and purity in the Republican world are as profound and inevitable as gravity, immutable and implacable. Those who have deviated from the path of Trumpism have been expelled, punished, threatened, and defeated in primary after primary.

But the grotesque and dangerous man you continue to support demands your fealty not because he has a policy, a program, or a philosophy with which you agree but because he can only escape justice if he retakes the White House. That’s what you’re voting for; giving Donald Trump’s stooge Attorney General (think Matt Whitaker, without the probity and moral courage) to strike down every charge against Trump, insulating him permanently from legal and criminal liability.

There is no return to the Before Times. You can’t end the embrace of conspiracy, cruelty, and the cult of Trump with the flip of a switch, but you can end your role in it. You’ll decide if Trump will always be a lingering radiation in your lives and legacy, a skein of scar tissue over your reputations and memories. This choice comes not simply because of what you know he did but because your support, collaboration, and encouragement empowered him over the last eight years.

Will your legacy be a Wikipedia entry listing those who ushered in the end of American democracy and the Republic? Will your political and personal legacy be defined not by courage and principle but cowardice and malice? Will you tell your children you knew everything and did nothing just to avoid a primary?

That may describe most Republican leaders today, but it doesn’t have to..

It’s better to be courageous late than never.

These indictments are your way out.

Take it.