In today's GOP, party loyalty trumps 'moral' responsibility

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell called Donald Trump “practically and morally responsible for provoking” the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection.

Trump’s former attorney general, Bill Barr, likened him to “a defiant nine-year-old” and said he “shouldn’t be anywhere near the Oval Office.” New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu called Trump “crazy.”

But in today’s GOP, apparently, party loyalty trumps “moral” responsibility, and “crazy” is not disqualifying. McConnell plans to vote for the former president again. So do Sununu and Barr. “I think Trump would do less damage than (President Joe) Biden,” Barr said.

Some former Trump advisers are finding it easier than Barr to show the courage of opposing Trump – including notably his first-term vice president, Mike Pence.

“I believe anyone that puts themselves over the Constitution should never be president of the United States,” said Pence, who, in the face of death threats during the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, resisted Trump’s demands to overturn Biden’s victory. But like most other top Republicans opposing Trump in 2024, he said in a Fox News interview in March, “I would never vote for Joe Biden. I’m a Republican.”

Other top Trump advisers refusing to vote for Trump include former Defense Secretary Mark Esper and former National Security Adviser John Bolton. “If his first four years were bad, a second four will be worse,” Bolton wrote in a new forward to his memoir, “The Room Where It Happened.”

In addition, a few current GOP officeholders like Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Maine Sen. Susan Collins and Indiana Sen. Todd Young say they won’t vote for Trump, along with some prominent retired (or retiring) Republicans like former House Speaker Paul Ryan, former Rep. Liz Cheney, former Gov. Chrisi Christie and outgoing Sen. Mitt Romney.

They are the exceptions. Since top Republicans rarely said a bad word about Trump when he was in office, it’s unrealistic to expect they’ll change now. But it says a lot about today’s GOP that so many of its leaders are voting for someone they believe is unsuited, if not dangerous, and most who don’t back him won’t publicly support his only real alternative.

That’s why the recent declaration by Georgia’s former Republican lieutenant governor, Geoff Duncan, stands out. He’s not only voting against Trump, but he’s voting for Biden.

“I am voting for a decent person I disagree with on policy over a criminal defendant without a moral compass,” Duncan wrote in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, reminding all the election ultimately is “a binary choice” between Biden and Trump.

“It’s disappointing to watch an increasing number of Republicans fall in line behind” Trump, wrote Duncan, citing McConnell, Barr and Sununu. “Trump has disqualified himself through his conduct and his character.”

Duncan, who didn’t seek reelection in 2022, said he’ll vote for the rest of the GOP ticket.

“The G.O.P. will never rebuild until we move on from the Trump era, leaving conservative (but not angry) Republicans like me no choice but to pull the lever for Biden,” he added. “At the same time, we should work to elect G.O.P. congressional majorities to block his second-term legislative agenda and provide a check and balance.”

Another recent incident illustrated the thrall in which Trump holds the Republican party. That was the decision by the executive committee of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation to reject Cheney (whose father was Ford’s chief of staff) for its Medal for Distinguished Public Service for fear a re-elected Trump could threaten its tax-free status.

Their action became public when Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer David Hume Kennerly, who was Ford’s White House photographer and remains close to the family, resigned from the foundation’s board. “If the foundation that bears the name of Gerald R. Ford won’t stand up to this real threat to our democracy, who will?” he asked.

The foundation's executive director, Gleaves Whitney, said the executive committee decided on the advice of legal counsel it wasn't "prudent" to honor Cheney, because of the possibility she might seek the presidency. It “might be construed as a political statement and thus expose the Foundation to the legal risk of losing its nonprofit status with the IRS,” Whitney said. It gave its award to former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, a traditional conservative who has stayed out of the current GOP in-fighting.

When Barr said Biden would do less damage than Trump, CNN’s Kaitlin Collins asked him how the current administration’s actions were worse than Trump’s attempts to prevent the 2021 transfer of power. Barr’s response: “Did he succeed?”

But he conceded, “I’m very troubled by it and that’s why it’s not an easy decision, but I think when you have a Hobson’s choice, you have to pick the lesser of two evils.”

James Baker, one of the most esteemed of former Republican officials, used a similar argument in justifying his 2016 and 2020 votes for Trump.

“Baker kept telling himself it was worth it to get conservative judges, tax cuts and deregulation,” authors Peter Baker and Susan Glasser wrote in their Baker biography, “The Man Who Ran Washington.”

Romney told CNN’s Collins that, while he agrees with Trump on most domestic issues, “there’s another dimension besides policy — and that’s character.”

"Having a president who is so defaulted of character would have an enormous impact on the character of America,” he said. “And for me, that’s the primary consideration.”

But clearly it isn’t for most Republicans.

Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. Readers may write to him via email at carl.p.leubsdorf@gmail.com.