TRUMP DOOMS THE REPUBLICAN PARTY.

What could be worse for a democracy than a president who has spent years persuading millions of ignorant Americans that elections are fundamentally fraudulent unless he wins?

Trump has presented us with an insane choice.

Trump has asked us to believe simultaneously that we live in the greatest democracy on earth, the greatest country on earth, the best place ever, compared to which everything else is nothing, but also in a country where democracy no longer functions.

Such contradictions cannot be sustained forever.

Eventually, they begin to destroy the very movements that created them.

Thus, MAGA has doomed itself and needs to be doomed in order for us to survive.

Let me explain.

History is full of leaders who discovered too late that their lie-based propaganda has a price.

The lie that mobilizes an ignorant crowd of followers today becomes the prison from which tomorrow’s supporters cannot escape.

If people truly believe, for instance, that their votes never count, why would they vote?

If every election is rigged unless their leader wins, defeat becomes proof not of political failure or the need to change your mind or grow or evolve, but of some sort of shadowy cosmic conspiracy.

At that point, politics gives way to mythology.

My recent podcast guest on my show, In Conversation with Frank Schaeffer, which is available on YouTube, was the journalist David Frum.

Frum, who is also an editor at The Atlantic, observed that Trump first demonstrated this self-destructive instinct after losing the 2020 election.

Republicans entered the Georgia Senate runoffs in early 2021 with an excellent chance of retaining control of the Senate.

Instead of encouraging his supporters to vote, Trump devoted himself to convincing them that the election system itself was hopelessly corrupt and rigged against him.

So many Republican voters simply stayed home while Democratic turnout increased.

Republicans lost both seats and, with them, any chance of controlling the Senate.

This was a prime example of the fact that Trump has been, and is, destroying the future of the Republican Party as we approach the midterms.

Why?

Because most politicians place their priority on their party first when elections approach.

Trump only places a priority on himself.

Normal political leaders tell supporters that every vote matters because they need their coalition to remain engaged.

Trump tells supporters that the entire system is rigged and corrupt because his emotional needs require that.

Otherwise, why would his poll numbers be in the toilet unless it was a conspiracy?

Why did he lose an election to Joe Biden?

Why are all his policies backfiring today or being overturned by courts of law as unconstitutional?

And most of all, why is his war of choice on Iran now costing Iran little compared to what it has cost the world economy and the United States, making Trump look as foolish and inept as he is?

Iran is now more powerful than it was before he attacked it.

Everyone knows that but him. (I think he knows it too, but won’t admit it.)

Since none of this could possibly be Trump’s problem from his point of view, or a reflection of his monumental stupidity, it must be some sort of evidence of a deep, shadowy conspiracy.

This is one of the defining characteristics of narcissistic leadership, whether it’s in business, or a father in a home, or a teacher in a university, or a president.

Everything becomes autobiography.

In this instance, national politics ceases to be about schools and health care, and wages, and foreign policy, and inflation, and ordinary families, and the strength of our nation, and the military, and choosing wars that you can win. Instead, it becomes a stage upon which one man struts his grievances, which he then endlessly performs.

That is why Trump so often abandons Republicans running for office.

Their campaigns matter only insofar as they reinforce his personal mythology.

If they lose because his rhetoric discourages turnout or turns people off, or an ICE agent shoots somebody in the face in a town where they are running or live, so be it.

Republicans exist to serve Trump, never the reverse.

The larger tragedy is that millions of decent Americans mistook Trump’s perpetual, terminally narcissistic, psychotic breakdowns for leadership.

Narcissism encourages despair.

Leadership enlarges people’s sense of responsibility.

Narcissism teaches hopelessness.

Genuine leaders say your actions matter.

Trump repeatedly tells supporters that powerful hidden enemies control everything and that their ordinary democratic participation is almost pointless.

That message may soothe his own wounded ego, but it steadily weakens the movement built around him: the Republican Party and the MAGA movement.

The irony is almost biblical.

Trump might know that if he were following Jesus rather than his own psychosis.

Jesus called people to responsibility.

Trump calls people into grievance.

Jesus continually directed attention away from himself, toward the vulnerable, toward the poor, toward the stranger, and toward the neighbor.

His injuries.

His enemies.

His victories.

His legal troubles.

His popularity.

His humiliation.

His quest for revenge.

Trump contracts it until an entire political movement becomes trapped inside the emotional needs of a single mentally disabled man, and an aging one at that.

Trumpism is not merely a political mistake.

And here’s where I differ from some commentators in what I’m going to say next.

It is a spiritual disorder.

And that’s because idolatry always promises strength while actually delivering weakness.

The Old Testament prophets understood this.

Shakespeare understood this.

The Old Testament prophets mocked idols because people first carved them with their own hands and then became enslaved to what they had made themselves.

The idol cannot speak.

The idol cannot save.

The idol cannot love.

The idol cannot tell the truth.

Yet worshipers slowly became like the object they adored.

Trumpism has followed exactly this pattern.

The movement increasingly speaks Trump’s language, adopts Trump’s resentments, repeats Trump’s fantasies, and eventually inherits Trump’s isolation.

His followers begin by defending him, but they end up inhabiting his fears.

Now that process is already consuming the Republican Party.

Candidates are running for Congress and would like to campaign on inflation, taxes, immigration, public safety, or foreign policy.

Instead, they are continually dragged back into defending claims about stolen elections, shadowy conspiracies, and apocalyptic warnings that leave their own voters wondering whether participating in elections at all is worthwhile.

We are witnessing an extraordinary spectacle in the United States of America right now.

One party is trying to win elections and is led by a man whose central message is that elections cannot be trusted because many voters did not vote for him in a past election, and he can never get over that.

No successful democratic movement can survive such a contradiction forever.

The deeper lesson reaches beyond a mere political party.

It points to a historical fact.

And the fact is this:

Every authoritarian regime eventually collapses under the weight of the leader’s ego.

Loyalty replaces competence.

Flattery replaces honesty.

Reality itself becomes dangerous because reality refuses to cooperate with mythology.

Those who tell uncomfortable truths are expelled, while those willing to repeat obvious falsehoods that everyone knows are falsehoods are promoted and rewarded.

Gradually, the entire organization loses contact with the world outside its own propaganda.

That is why authoritarian systems almost always end by consuming their own supporters.

The people who dedicated themselves to serving the leader discover that the leader was never serving them.

This, for instance, is what is happening right now in Russia, where it is dawning on the Russian people that Vladimir Putin is destroying his country one needlessly killed soldier at a time.

Russian soldiers’ sacrifices were real.

Putin’s loyalty to them never was.

This is also why I return once again to Jesus.

The Gospels present the exact opposite model of leadership.

Christ refuses to manipulate crowds through fear or threat.

He never tells people they are powerless.

He tells them their choices matter.

He never builds his movement upon grievance, or revenge, or conspiracy theories.

He invites people to embrace courage, forgiveness, humility, and hope.

His authority rests not on demanding worship, but on giving himself to others.

Trump’s politics reveal the opposite instinct.

Everything bends toward preserving himself.

Every institution.

Every ally.

Every election.

Every political party.

Exists only insofar as it exists to protect his personal mythology about his personal story.

Such movements can achieve spectacular victories for a season, but they contain within themselves the seeds of their own destruction, because a movement built around one man’s ego eventually dies of that man’s poisoned sense of self, his ego.

So as we approach the midterms, let’s offer a prayer for the Republican Party and for normal candidates who are just trying to run for office, because Donald Trump will doom not only himself, but the Republican Party that has surrendered its principles to him.

History is often kinder to those who lose while telling the truth and admitting their loss than to those who win by abandoning it.

In the end, and this is the thing Republicans have forgotten, reality has remarkable patience.