Supporters of both Donald Trump and Joe Biden are celebrating the results of the South Carolina Republican primary this weekend, as another step toward the shared goal of the former president securing the GOP nomination. In doing so, they are playing a form of political Russian roulette with the nation’s democratic future.
Unencumbered Democrats had even more voting power than divided Republicans to use the primary to inflict serious damage on Trump’s candidacy and potentially block him from the White House. Trump received 153,00 more votes than his sole Republican competitor, Nikki Haley, but 400,000 registered South Carolinians were eligible to vote in the open GOP primary because they had not participated in the Feb. 3 Democratic non-contest, with Biden effectively unopposed. Just half of those non-votes could have turned the election in favor of Haley and seriously dented Trump’s progress toward the nomination.
But despite the cataclysmic damage to American democracy that Biden and his supporters predict from another Trump presidency, Democratic leaders in South Carolina defiantly declared they were “not going to save her” from Trump. That hands-off approach missed a once-in-a-lifetime early opportunity to save America from Trump before the November election even takes place.
Biden seems to have welcomed the extremely risky strategy of enabling Trump’s third GOP nomination. He regularly assures Democrats that he will dispatch Trump in the fall, possibly relying on the anticipated results of the multiple criminal charges and civil actions against the former president.
Recent polls, however, do not justify such confidence. And even if Biden’s defeat of Trump were assured, it would not satisfy the 70 percent of Americans who don’t want either man back in the White House.
The refusal of South Carolina and national Democratic leaders to encourage voters to exercise their legal rights and vote against Trump in Saturday’s primary was not a matter of keeping their hands clean of internal Republican politics. They showed no reluctance in the 2022 midterms to intervene in open GOP primaries in several states to vote for the least qualified and most extreme Trump-favored candidates they considered easy targets for Democratic attacks in the fall. The cynical strategy worked; Democrats kept control of the Senate and blocked a workable GOP advantage in the House.
Moreover, where ultra-extreme Republicans did win seats, they went on to wreak major mischief as Trump acolytes bent on disrupting the GOP leadership agenda, further tarnishing the Republican brand. As the band of MAGA rebels wielded their disproportionate influence in a razor-thin GOP-controlled House, Democrats relished the legislative paralysis and mocked the political circus.
When the election of a Speaker went on for multiple ballots over three weeks, Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic leader, pledged his members would not intervene in the other party’s internal affairs, foreshadowing the South Carolina Democratic leader’s refusal to intervene for Haley.
Jeffries’s hands-off posture would have been more credible, however, had he exercised his iron-fisted control simply to instruct House Democrats to abstain and let the other side thrash out its differences and choose a Speaker so the business of governing could resume. Instead, when a single Democratic abstention may have enabled the moderate Republicans to prevail, Jeffries maintained his own mathematically impossible candidacy and aligned with the ultra-extremists to block the selection of Kevin McCarthy for 11 ballots.
The embarrassing stalemate was broken only when the Trump-controlled rebels extracted a written McCarthy concession to return to the pre-Nancy Pelosi rules that allowed a single member to call for the vacation of the Speaker’s chair. The Trump loyalists soon exercised that power and ejected McCarthy as Speaker after he worked on a bipartisan deal to keep the government open.
Now, those dozen or so rebels wield their minority power like a cudgel over Speaker Mike Johnson’s head.
The political disfunction has taken on major national security implications as Trump exerts his will on his coterie of congressional followers. Reflecting their political mentor’s longstanding pro-Russia, anti-Ukraine inclinations, several House Republicans — though nothing close to a majority — have escalated their questioning of further U.S. Ukraine aid to outright opposition.
They’ve now demanded that a package of aid to Ukraine (and to Israel and Taiwan) be made conditional on efforts to address the unrestricted flow of illegal migrants across America’s southern border — a critical national security crisis in its own right. That demand was finally met after long Democratic resistance and intense negotiations between Congress and the White House, seemingly achieving the greatest border security progress in decades. But Trump suddenly intervened overtly to oppose the deal, selfishly preferring to have the problem remain as a campaign issue. Congressional Republicans meekly acquiesced.
Efforts to break out separate pieces of the aid package have so far failed as Ukraine suffers the loss of Ukrainian lives and territory from Russia’s relentless attack. The absence of critically needed American weapons and ammunition have weakened Ukraine’s ability to resist, though its will remains as heroically steadfast as ever.
MAGA House Republicans seem determined to facilitate a Russian victory in Ukraine and thus empower Trump’s reckless promise that he would “end the Ukraine war in 24 hours” — apparently by abandoning our ally.
It would be similar to the nominally face-saving withdrawal from Afghanistan Trump agreed to and Biden implemented in such a botched and catastrophic manner. But this time the victors would not be Afghanistan’s radical Islamist Taliban but Vladimir Putin’s Russia, an all-but-formally-declared enemy of the United States and the democratic West. It would be quite a come-down for the party of Ronald Reagan as Putin seeks to reconstitute the Evil Empire.
His partners in anti-Western aggression in China, Iran, and North Korea are taking their own lessons from the spectacle. The world gets more dangerous by the day, and the United States, which once could be relied on to stand in the breach, is rendered increasingly impotent by the worst and weakest elements in both the Democratic and Republican parties. Biden’s old fears and Trump’s new isolationism imperil national and global security and immobilize American leadership.
Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010.