Extract from ABC News
Analysis
Why — after leading the Republican Party during a period when it lost its majority in the US House of Representatives and the Senate and its power in the White House — does former president Donald Trump still seem to hold the Grand Old Party of Lincoln and Reagan in his thrall?
For US politics watchers, who on the weekend watched on as 43 Republican senators vote to acquit Trump of an act of reckless incitement played out in front of the cameras, that is the $64,000 question.
Or rather, it's the 74,222,593-vote question.
That is the record number of Americans who voted for Donald Trump last November — more than has been cast for any previous president. Unfortunately for them, an even greater number — 81,281,502 — voted for his rival, now-President Joe Biden.
As much as anything else, those numbers sum up the quandary Republicans find themselves in.
They have lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections, and only remain competitive because older white voters, who tend to be more likely to support conservative candidates, also tend to vote in greater numbers in a non-compulsory electoral system.
Those same voters are also the most likely to cast a ballot in next year's house and senate primaries, and the next midterm elections in November 2022 — which will again determine who holds power in congress. They are the voters who initially flocked to Donald Trump.
Beneath the hood of Trump's support base
Trump's victory in 2016 came on the back of a surge in voter turnout among white Americans without a college degree, a group he won by better than a 2-1 margin over Democrat Hillary Clinton. Trump won 6.5 million more voters over the age of 45, despite losing the national popular vote by almost three million.
But that "demographic blowback" which saw some older Americans cast a vote for the first time since Ronald Reagan was on the ballot, was never a long-term strategy — they are literally dying off.
But they aren't dead yet, and neither is Trump's support base.
A CNBC poll last week found 89 per cent of voters without a college degree and 74 per cent of Republicans want Trump to stay active in politics in some way. Almost half of Republicans (48 per cent) want Trump to remain head of their party, while 11 per cent want him to break away and start his own party. It's that final figure that probably worries Republicans more than any other.
Trump has already flirted with the idea of starting his own "Patriot Party" to rival both Republicans and Democrats, and provide a vehicle for a potential third presidential campaign in 2024.
The only time a former president tried to return to office under the banner of a new party, Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, he consigned his former Republican Party to a distant third place.
By raising the "third Party" prospect immediately before his second impeachment trial, then-president Trump was sending a very clear message: "If you abandon me, I'll abandon you, and so will plenty of those 74,222,593 voters."
A clue about this difficult political surgery
Trump is like a drug Republicans are yet to find a way to kick. By most accounts, few Republicans in Congress want him back, and many believe that if a secret ballot had been held in the Senate on the weekend, more than the required number of 17 would have joined with the 50 Democrats to convict him and ban him from holding office in the future.
Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell's speech condemning Trump as "practically and morally responsible" for the deadly January 6 attack on Congress by his supporters, offers a clue about the difficult piece of political surgery he is now trying to perform.
"Seventy-four million Americans did not invade the Capitol," McConnell said. "Hundreds of rioters did. Seventy-four million Americans did not engineer the campaign of disinformation and rage that provoked it. One person did. Just one."
Yes, he blamed Trump, but absolved the Republicans who supported him. Still, McConnell has a difficult task ahead, given more than 7 in 10 of those Republicans believe Trump's false claims that widespread voter fraud cost him the election.
In the end, Senator McConnell was among the 43 Republicans who voted to acquit Trump. Despite conceding the Democrats' incitement charges had probably been proven to the standard required in an impeachment, he clung to a tenuous constitutional argument that you cannot put a former president on trial in the senate.
Particularly rich given that it was McConnell himself who refused to recall the Senate to hear the case while Trump was still president.
'You knew damn well I was a snake'
In letting Trump off on a technically, McConnell also issued a clear warning. Trump, McConnell said, "didn't get away with anything ... yet". In doing so he left a threat of his own dangling over the former president —to try and keep Trump in quiet retirement rather than in active competition.
Trump could still face criminal and civil action, and Congress still has the option of invoking the 14th Amendment to prevent Trump returning to office.
Think of it as a good behaviour bond.
The hope of McConnell and many other Republicans is that they can somehow keep Trump's voters without having to keep Trump in 2024.
Once the passions of the past few months subside, they will be hoping the former president will go quietly into the good night of political irrelevance that usually awaits one-termers. But for now, as far as political surgery goes, it has the complexity of separating conjoined twins.
And, as he waits for the right moment for that final break, McConnell would do well to remember one of Trump's favourite quotations, from a song by Al Wilson, about a woman who saves a snake, shelters it, and in return receives a deadly bite.
"Oh, shut up, silly woman," said the reptile with a grin ... "You knew damn well I was a snake before you brought me in!"
John Barron co-hosts Planet America, which airs on ABC TV at 8pm on Friday or on iView.
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