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But since prediction is often just an expression of desire, Ill tell you what I want to happen. Even though the party richly deserved some sort of punishment, I didnt want the G.O.P. to be destroyed by its affiliation with Trump, because Im one of those Americans who dont want to be ruled by liberalism in its current incarnation, let alone whatever form is slowly being born. But now that the party has survived four years of Trumpism without handing the Democrats a congressional supermajority, and now that Amy Coney Barrett is on the Supreme Court and Joe Manchin, Susan Collins and Mitt Romney will hold real power in the Senate, whatever happens in Georgia well, now I do want Perdue and Kelly Loeffler to lose these races, mostly because I dont want the Republican Party to be permanently ruled by Donald J. Trump.

Obviously, a runoff-day defeat wont by itself prevent Trump from winning the partys nomination four years hence or bestriding its internal culture in the meantime. (Indeed, for some of his supporters it would probably confirm their belief that the presidential election was stolen because look, the Democrats did it twice!) But the sense that there is a real political cost to slavishly endorsing not just Trump but also his fantasy politics, his narrative of stolen victory, seems a necessary precondition for the separation that elected Republicans need to seek working carefully, like a bomb-dismantling team between their position and the soon-to-be-former presidents, if they dont want him to just claim the leadership of their party by default.

That kind of Trump-forever future is what Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz and others are making possible, with their ambitious pandering. Hawley and Cruz both want to be Trumps heir apparent (as though he doesnt already have several in his family), but the deeper they go into the Trumpian dreampolitik, the more they build up the voter-fraud mythos, the more likely it becomes that theyll just be stuck serving him for four more years or longer.

So there needs to be some counterpressure, some sense that dreampolitik has costs. And defeat for two Republicans who have cynically gone along with the presidents stolen-election narrative, to the point of attacking their own states Republican-run electoral system, feels like a plausible place for the diminishment of Trump to start.

I dont think that diminishment is necessary to save the American republic from dictatorship, as many of Trumps critics have long imagined, and with increasing intensity the longer his election challenge has gone on. Whatever potentially crisis-inducing precedents Republican senators are establishing this month, the forces and institutions technological, judicial, military that could actually make America into some kind of autocracy are not aligned with right-wing populism, and less so with every passing day.

But Trumps diminishment is definitely necessary if the American right is ever going to be a force for something other than deeper decadence, deeper gridlock, fantasy politics and partisan battles that have nothing to do with the challenges the country really faces.

Or to distill the point: You dont have to see Trump as a Caesar to recognize his behavior this month as Nero-esque, playing a QAnon-grade fiddle while the pandemic burns. We imported at least one of the new variants of the coronavirus from overseas in the past few weeks like the pandemic itself, the kind of thing a populist-nationalist president is supposed to try to slam the door against but instead of shutting down flights from Britain or South Africa, hes been too busy pushing the stupidest election challenge in recorded history, while slipping ever-closer to blaming the lizard people for his defeat.

See the article here:
Opinion | Why I Hope the Republicans Lose in Georgia - The New York Times