Susan Walsh/AP Photo 1600 Penn Why Trump’s Going to Win on the National Emergency There’s one arena where the president always succeeds: getting the Republican Party to abandon its principles.

Jeff Greenfield is a five-time Emmy-winning network television analyst and author.

All through the 2016 campaign Donald Trump warned about the menace of immigration by reciting the lyrics of a song called “The Snake,” about a kind woman who takes a snake into her home, only to die when he bites her. The snake tells the woman, “You knew I was a snake before you took me in.”

It is now clear that, consciously or not, Trump was delivering a warning to the Republican Party about what he was going to do to it. Two years into his administration, Trump has recognized that the institutional power of the Republican Party has all the effectiveness of the Maginot Line. He can ignore its leaders, scorn them, or just smash through them with no lasting political damage.


Trump’s declaration of a national emergency along the U.S.-Mexico border is a high point, or low point, of a familiar pattern that is right out of Groundhog Day—or the Netflix series Russian Doll. Again and again, Trump embraces a policy, or reveals a character trait, that hits at the heart of what the Republican Party claims to stands for. In response, there is unhappiness, even anger, but never action. If you think the Republicans in Congress are going to stand up to Trump’s fake national emergency in order to defend the party’s long-held principles, or to assert the constitutional authority of the legislative branch, you haven’t been paying attention for the past three years. Trump said he would win so much that you’d get tired of winning—the lone arena in which this is objectively true is how he has imposed his will on his fellow Republicans, who have surrendered abjectly to him.

That’s why, on the national emergency, Trump is about to win again. Republican officeholders like Maine’s Susan Collins will surely reach for the thesaurus to find appropriate adjectives (“troubling,” “disturbing,” “unsettling”). The naysayers will look over their shoulders at a party base that stands solidly behind the president. And when the rubble clears, Trump will still be standing, and another key element of the catechism—this time, limited constitutional government with a separation of powers that was outlined by James Madison and other framers—will be in ruins.

At times, it’s possible to imagine the president almost willfully testing his party, musing about whether there is any part of its belief system that he cannot compel Republicans to abandon. Is character key to a good leader? White evangelicals, who once overwhelmingly supported that proposition, now reject it by landslide margins. Are deficits a mortal danger to the national economic health? Are international alliances crucial to national security?

It is absolutely consistent with what has happened all through the Trump years that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell—who has often posed as if he were picking up the mantle of the late Robert Byrd as the champion and protector of the Senate’s powers—announced that he would support a national emergency declaration that treats Congress like it has all the lawmaking powers of the New York Times editorial board. Yes, McConnell’s endorsement of the emergency had the feel of a hostage tape, but what matters is that once again Trump has taken the measure of his party. Faced with the prospect of another government shutdown, with heavy costs to the country and to the GOP—the latter being far more influential than the former— McConnell signed off on an assertion of executive power that would have had him apoplectic had any other president tried it. And as of now, there appear to be more than enough Republicans in the House and Senate to sustain a veto should Congress seek to override the president’s emergency declaration.

Where we are is where we have been since Trump descended the escalator in mid-2015: He has a fervently loyal base within the Republican Party that will forgive him any conduct; he has powerful media voices who will provide him aid and comfort under almost any circumstance, and has helped to convince his supporters that anything critical of the president is by definition fake; and he has enough allies in Congress—allied either by conviction or by fear of retaliation or by a willingness to tolerate his behavior in return for tax cuts and a conservative judiciary —to stand with him.

Those of us—the majority of Americans—who are outside of this circle have watched these past few years with a mix of incredulity and anticipation. Any moment now, the CNN megapanels hint every day, Robert Mueller or federal prosecutors in Manhattan will be issuing indictments or a devastating report that will drive the president from office. Soon, a credible Republican—John Kasich? Bill Weld? Larry Hogan? Charlie Baker? Nikki Haley?—will emerge to challenge Trump in the 2020 Republican primaries. Any moment now, Trump himself, driven into panic and despair by a rising tide of condemnation, will resign his office.

What we’ve actually seen, as opposed to what we might hope for, offers a different likelihood. There will be no Republican revolt. Enough of the party will dismiss out of hand any evidence of criminal or impeachable behavior. A loyal attorney general and Supreme Court offer further sources of protection. And while surveys say a solid majority of voters now would refuse to reelect Trump, the combination of the Electoral College and a Democratic Party fully capable of blowing this opportunity makes a Trump second term a reasonable possibility.

About one thing, at least, Trump is correct. This is a national emergency. It is a sign of what he has achieved that his party cannot or will not hear the alarms.