Some Thoughts on the Republican Donald Trump, and All the Other Republicans, Mormon or Otherwise, I Know (and Sometimes Love)

[Note: this is a long and very party-centric set of musings for the day before the presidential election ends and the real electoral and legal chaos begins. For many, that’s a turnoff. But I’m both a scholar of American politics as well as a politics nerd, so that’s what you get. Read on, if you feel so inclined. And yes, this an expansion/revision of a piece published by Insight Kansas, in The Wichita Eagle and elsewhere, over a week ago. Cross-posted to By Common Consent.]

For a great many people—though not, I think, quite as many as some people suppose—in America over the past eight years or so, the problem of Donald Trump and the Republican party is entirely straightforward. Trump is an awful person, who represents awful things—as my fellow Kansas writer Joel Mathis summarized it on Saturday, his whole approach to representative politics has always involved divisiveness, cruelty, and threats of (and sometimes actual) violence--and so anyone who supports him, and any party he is part of, must be, by definition, awful, full stop.

Both personally and professionally, I have a hard time imagining how anyone with a lick of political sense could fail to recognize how potentially counter-productive doubling-down on that attitude is—to say nothing of how arguably un-Christian it is for those of us who take the command to love one’s enemies seriously, and who therefore should be very conscious of the costs to our ability to draw a line between our opinions and electoral divisiveness, cruelty, and possible violence, when it comes to labeling any other human being or group of human beings by definition “awful” (or “evil,” or “garbage,” or “scum,” or "demonic," or “deplorable,” or whatever you prefer). I’m not denying that it’s hard to avoid that doubling-down; civil discourse, maintaining a full-throated defense of one’s beliefs while showing love and respect to others, is really hard when basic civic norms seem to have collapsed. But still, I think that is what both democratic citizenship and Christian discipleship call on us to do. The fact that many smart and good people I know, who appear to me in all other areas of their lives to sincerely affirm both of those aforementioned principles, apparently do in fact double-down on all-or-nothing anger nonetheless, just shows that it’s my imagination that’s lacking. 

Do I think Trump is an awful human being? Yes, absolutely; my opinion of him—“personally corrupt, administratively irresponsible, stupidly (and often gleefully) divisive, and politically destructive”—hasn’t changed in the past four years. Do I think that everyone that supports Trump is therefore also awful? No, because “supports” is a broad term, one which technically includes everyone from Stephen Miller, a convicted felon and an unrepentant racist immigrant-basher, and my mother, a wonderful 79-year-old woman whom I love dearly. I mean, they both voted for Trump, so QED, right?

There is a cohort of the politically awoke and online—though again, I am convinced, by both the data on split-ticket voting and personal observation, that the polarizing “Big Sort” of American voters into two rival tribes hasn’t eliminated cross-party familial and social relations nearly to the extent some believe—who might well insist that, whatever the manifold differences between my mom and Stephen Miller, in the present environment they belong in the same category. I can understand that formulation, in the same way I can understand—and even defend as coherent—that formulating of political opinions which leads people to become single-issue voters: that literally nothing else matters except where a candidate stands on stopping abortion, or where a candidate stands on ending the war in Gaza, etc. But however coherent it may be to conclude that if X is awful—a fascist, perhaps, or even, in Trump’s maddeningly nonsensical claim, a “Marxist, communist, fascist, socialist”—then everyone who does something so extreme as to cast a vote in favor of X must therefore be fully baked into X’s awfulness, no matter what they claim, it remains, I am convinced, a deeply unhelpful and, frankly, immature thing to believe.

 [Note: in terms of Trump himself, I continue to think “fascist-adjacent” remains the best label. He isn’t the only authoritarian-wanna-be to have occupied the White House or tried to do so, but the cult of personality, exclusion, and resentment which his rise has lent dominance to within an major political party is, I fear, quite arguably unique in our history (Huey Long, maybe? or Theodore Bilbo?), and deserves to be noted, and feared, as such.]

So, a little pedantic social psychology here. Human beings, both singly and in groups, always act in ways that can be assessed on multiple planes of judgment: historical, religious, strategic, aesthetic, and more. To ignore those different planes—which usually means ignoring all the sorts of things you can know about a person that you’ve actually spent face-to-face, real-world time with, someone you’ve listened to and lived alongside, and instead just focusing on random statements forwarded on social media—is to do something intensely reductive, and therefore almost certainly something that fails to take your fellow human beings seriously, in the way that I think the fundamentals of Christianity, to say nothing of the basic premises of any belief in democracy, particularly of the participatory sort, necessitates.

True, the too-often evil vicissitudes of political life sometimes necessitate reductive, immediate distinctions; you can’t save someone from a lynch mob if you insist upon deliberating as to whether or not extra-judicial mob action might be necessary in any given circumstance. But casting a vote simply isn’t the direct equivalent of that, because absent a voter explicitly affirming such, I just don’t see how someone can meaningfully—in the sense of providing evidence which proves a particular conclusion—discover in the casting of a ballot the same intentionality as swinging a rope over a branch. Passionately insisting on the contrary, that actually every vote fully incorporates the most extreme intentions that anyone can historically connect to said vote, only suggests that one must believe we’re at the point where the electoral agency expressed by actual voters no longer matters—that the incorrect yet sincerely believed intentions of my mother and every other Trump-supporting Republican I know is wholly irrelevant. And if that’s the case, why are you worrying about votes at all? Best of luck with your revolution, I guess. (Though I hope you’ll choose to retreat and form an intentional commune rather than engage in armed revolt, because the record of the latter is atrocious and while the former is often inspiring.)

My mom’s vote for Trump (she believes he’ll keep America out of foreign wars) doesn’t surprise me. She’s a life-long American Mormon, and American Mormons who were born in the 1940s and committed themselves to the socially conservative family model that mostly took over American Mormon culture during the 20^th century, particularly after World War II (the Old Right-style anti-communist paranoia of Mormon leader Ezra Taft Benson being the key factor here), were pretty consistent supporters of the Republican party, and that has only very recently slowly begun to change. My father was a life-long Republican too, and while I want to believe that he would have been like a number of other Mormon Republicans I know—my wife’s parents, some of my brothers, a couple of my oldest friends in my local Mormon congregation here in Wichita, to say nothing of Mitt Romney, the most famous Mormon Never Trumper of them all—and recognized the awfulness of Trump and voted against him accordingly, I actually suspect that he would have stuck with the GOP until the bitter end. Socializing one’s voting history, religious beliefs, and regional environment together can do that, sometimes.

This is the sort of thing that leads some to insist on the terribleness of party politics and partisanship in general; in particular, in the case of my religious tribe, it leads some of those of us who want to nudge the great bulk of the Republican-voting Mormon faithful in a properly anti-Trump direction (especially if they live in Arizona!), to double-down instead on the curious statement the Mormon church leadership made in 2023: that in addition to encouraging members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the official name of my church) to be active citizens and affirming the church’s official neutrality—positions they emphasize every year—the church leadership insisted that “members should…vote for those [candidates] who have demonstrated integrity, compassion, and service to others, regardless of party affiliation. Merely voting a straight ticket or voting based on ‘tradition’ without careful study of candidates and their positions on important issues is a threat to democracy.”

In the same way that I can recognize as coherent (even if stupid) single-issue voting, I can recognize that straight-ticket voting, just supporting every Republican or Democrat down the line, can seem a coherent response to certain conditions—like, for example, party having been so fully captured by single cause or candidate that attempting to stop that party on every level seems like the only reasonable way to express one’s discontent. But thankfully, ticket-splitting is something that, in this moment of intense polarization, is very much an active variable in trying to understand the shape of the 2024 elections. That’s true even here in Kansas, where the historical dominance of the Republican party—there is very close to 2 registered Republican voters for every 1 registered Democrat here in the Sunflower State--exceeds the levels of the Mormon corridor.

A month ago, I spoke at the Dole Institute at the University of Kansas about “The Ticket-Splitting Voter.” (You can watch the whole thing here.) One of the other speakers at the event was Stephanie Sharp, a Republican who served three terms in the Kansas House, who is one of the prime movers behind Women 4 U.S., a national organization of self-identifying conservative women determined to work against Trump’s return to the White House. Meeting and talking with her put me in mind of Mormon Women for Ethical Government—an officially non-partisan body that does not engage in any political recruitment, to be sure, but it’s impossible to read their recent defenses of the election system and condemnations of any refusal to accept election results as anything except a rebuke of Trump, what with his constant lies about the 2020 elections and his preparations to lie some more starting this week. MWEG’s membership obviously includes many Democratic and unaffiliated voters, but given its grounding in American Mormonism, and the fact that it got off the ground essentially as a direct response to Trump election in 2016, the sense in which it, like Sharp’s group, and like dozens of other groups like it, all aim to connect with Republican women turned off by Trumpist Republican leaders whose message of protecting women comes off as condescending is hard to deny. Hence, the essential split-ticket voter of the 2024 election: the Republican woman who supports conservative candidates down the line, because that’s what she believes, but votes for Harris at the top of the ticket, because what he represents takes their party in a direction they don’t want it to go. There won’t be remotely as many such split-ticket voters as there will be women—or men, for that matter—who vote a straight-party line, but there may be enough of them to make a difference.

Parties have always included within them various factions, and party leaders—whose primary aim is to win elections, of course—will always be incentivized to paper over those divisions, insisting that their party is a “big tent” which can handle dissent over various issues. But dissent over the party’s own presidential candidate? The Bernie Sanders faction of the Democratic party, despite its grievances, made its peace with and grudgingly supported both Hilary Clinton and Joe Biden, and it seems likely the same will go for Kamala Harris. Yet the complete absence of anti-Trump Republicans of real national prominence from the current GOP campaign, from the 2012 Republican nominee for president Mitt Romney to Trump’s own vice president Mike Pence, as well as multiple important Republican voices essentially washing their hands of the GOP, all suggests an even deeper problem on the Republican side.

Even here in Kansas, with its Republican dominance, Trump is commanding only 48% support in the polls, far less than the 56% he won in both 2016 and 2020. The final numbers when all the ballots are counted will almost certainly be above that—I don’t know anyone who thinks there is even the remotest chance Trump could fail to win Kansas. (Ditto for Utah, where Trump’s approval rating stands at a low but still solid 54%.) But the Republican party is facing a real problem here as well as nationally, whether or not it is a problem that will be manifest in the next Tuesday’s results. It’s a problem evident in the decision of a close friend of mine here in Wichita, a deeply conservative man who has voted Republican his whole life, and has basically no political agreement with any of the policies and proposals of the Democratic party, and yet is going to vote, however symbolically, Harris—because of the January 6 riot at the Capitol which Trump abetted, because he is convinced that Trump is going to allow Putin to do whatever he wants in Eastern Europe, because of his personal corruption and disrespect for the rules of the office, and much more. How can a party present itself as representing his preferences, and at the same time that of another friend of mine, a man who—much more typically for Kansas Republican voters—has gone full MAGA, and is convinced that not only did Trump win in 2020 but also that every action he took or winked at in the wake of that election, including the violence of January 6, was entirely justified?

Some Republicans are responding to this divide by denouncing Trump, like Stephanie has, and organizing to help stop his re-election—but that’s exceptionally rare. More common, among those at least willing to speak are, are Republicans like Steven Howe, a current member of the Kansas House, who back in January condemned Trump’s “deceit and lies” and plead with his own party to turn away from their support for the former president, but then came back around to his party and fell in line when November loomed. And then there is U.S. Senator Jerry Moran, the only one of the Republicans Kansans have elected to Congress who has declined to endorse Trump for president. While he’s never condemned Trump directly either, this is a man who, if you’ve paid attention to his careful speeches over the years, clearly has little respect for the nominal leader of his own party. Again, there is basically no chance any of this electorally significant in either my state, in the same way the pleas of well-connected Mormons in Utah will have basically zero chance of moving the great mass of Republican voters in the Beehive state. But it simply underscores a partisan difficulty that will have to be addressed, one way or another.

Parties have endured in American politics because there is no better way to respond to the incentives of our political and electoral system than by organizing into groups which reflect particular interests by promoting particular candidates. The fact that those parties, once their candidates are elected, are going to work to entrench their influence by fully socializing themselves into the institutional and ideological structures through which those who voted for those candidates operate, is simply a by-product of the logic of our constitutional system itself. I’m fully on board with imagining alternatives to that system—but in the shorter term, the reality of cross-party voting, and the potential rise of fusion voting, might be the only routes available to making parties, which at one time genuinely did, however indirectly, manage to reflect and moderate and promote the best versions of the preferences of those who voted for them, do so again.

Of course, in my view, the even shorter-short term solution to the partisan dilemma both posed by and facing (to whatever degree the leaders of the party are willing to admit it) the Republican party is the defeat of Donald Trump. Which, across this country, hundreds of thousands (and potentially even more) of registered GOP voters will contribute to—but many millions more, including my mother, and most of the members of my Mormon congregation, and much of my family and most of my friends and neighbors here in Kansas, won’t. That’s okay. Frustrating, depressing, potentially frightening, but okay, and I mean that—I’m convinced that if Trump becomes president as a result of either outright Electoral College votes or whatever legal and electoral chaos will almost certainly erupt in less than 48 hours, the country will stumble forward (though whether the legitimacy of our constitutional democracy will remains to be seen).

But will the Republican party? Will those stymied Republicans return to the GOP, or join the Democrats, or push for some other yet unforeseen party or party-like formation? I don’t know. But I suspect that any Republican--particularly those of the Mormon persuasion, given that the party re-alignment this division may potentially give rise to could well, given the processes of socialization, impact religious and cultural assumptions which play major roles in one’s church affiliation and much more—who thinks the era of Re-Elected-Trump, or Post-Trump, will be an easy, or easier, one to navigate are probably in for a surprise. (Hopefully whatever surprise the first of those possibilities might pose for the United States won’t be a whole lot worse.)