Just before eight o’clock in the morning on Wednesday, the Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger typed out a gleeful tweet. A few hours earlier, his party’s candidate in the U.S. Senate race in Alabama had gone down to defeat, and Kinzinger couldn’t have been happier—or clearer about who was to blame. A thirty-nine-year-old military veteran from a suburban Illinois congressional district, Kinzinger was used to feeling aggrieved about Steve Bannon and his self-styled Republican revolutionaries. Now that Bannon’s backing of Roy Moore had backfired spectacularly in one of the nation’s most Republican states, Kinzinger tweeted some of that grief right back at him.
“Bannon is a RINO,” Kinzinger tapped out, using the favored conservative insult for “Republican in name only.” “His morally inept strategies are unwelcome here. #YoureFired.”
All day, he got thousands of likes and retweets. One of his commenters was Jeb Bush’s son, Jeb Bush, Jr. “Thank you for your leadership Adam!” he enthused.
The Republican civil war, raging since the 2016 G.O.P. Presidential primaries, when Donald Trump beat the elder Jeb Bush and fifteen others, was back on with a vengeance—only this time, establishment types like Kinzinger were on the offensive. Would Moore’s defeat finally break Bannon’s insurgency against the leaders of his own party and suburban moderates like Kinzinger? Would it end Trump’s strategy of catering to his ever-shrinking base?
Nobody knew the answers to those questions yet, but at least there was time for some post-Moore payback. The Bannon-Moore loss was “a great night for America,” Bob Corker, one of a handful of Senate Republicans who have openly broken with the President, crowed. Trump himself was initially conciliatory, calling Moore’s victorious Democratic opponent, Doug Jones, to congratulate him. Then he quickly turned back to blame, seeking to deflect responsibility to others in the G.O.P., and, over the reported objections of advisers, called Bannon, too. Trump’s alt-right Svengali was not yet purged from the Presidential inner circle.
When I reached Kinzinger by telephone on Wednesday, he sounded optimistic. “I don’t think this will be a definitive blow,” he told me. “But I’m hoping.” Kinzinger said that Bannon’s influence might wane and that, in his view, the election results offered paradoxical good news for Republicans. “Politically, this puts us in a better position,” he said. “Our party has to stand for something. Now there’s a clarity we can’t be the kind of party that accepts the kind of person Roy Moore is.”
Alex Conant, a Republican strategist who advised Trump’s opponent Marco Rubio in last year’s Republican Presidential race, told me that Alabama would hurt Bannon’s standing with G.O.P. donors. What kind of political guru would prod the President of the United States into pushing hard for a candidate like Moore—even after allegations surfaced that Moore had sought sexual contact with teen-agers as young as fourteen? “There’s been a lot of Republican candidates and donors flirting with Steve Bannon, and that stops last night,” Conant said. “Steve Bannon has yet to ever recruit a candidate and deliver him or her to office. Even with Trump, he came in late. He does not have a track record of success.”
Yet Trump, of course, not Bannon, is the real dilemma that the Republican Party faces. Bill Kristol, the founding editor of The Weekly Standard and a charter #NeverTrump Republican, watched the blame game play out for hours on Wednesday. Eventually, he grew tired of the Bannon bashing, and tweeted, “It’s easy to blame Steve Bannon for the Moore debacle. But let’s not allow our attention to be turned away from the man who has done far more to define Republicanism down than Steve Bannon. That man is Donald Trump.”
Just a year after his political upset for the ages, Trump suddenly looked like a political fool, having pushed hard for perhaps the only Republican candidate who could have possibly lost in the red-state bastion of Alabama. Members of the G.O.P. establishment wondered if it would now be easier for beleaguered Republicans in Congress to openly speak out against Trump. Speculation swirled among Republicans about whether Alabama portended sweeping losses for the Party in next year’s midterm elections.
Conant thinks so. “It’s a destabilizing event for his Presidency,” he insisted. “He’s shown that his political support is not transferrable and his capital is largely spent. Other than that,” he laughed, “he’s in great shape.”
The fantasy voiced by anti-Trump Republicans in Washington, one that they would only speculate about off the record, is that Trump’s base grows so small and the losses in next year’s midterms are so large that the President decides not to seek reëlection. Call it the burn-the-Republican-village-in-order-to-save-it scenario. That possibility had Michael Needham worked up when I spoke with him after Moore’s defeat. Needham is the C.E.O. of Heritage Action for America, the lobbying and advocacy arm of the Heritage Foundation, which is known for pushing a hard-line conservative agenda on Capitol Hill and instilling fear in congressional Republicans who buck it.
Since Trump’s win, Needham has worried that establishment types in his own party prefer to see Trump as a temporary nightmare imposed upon the G.O.P. rather than as a symptom of a political movement in crisis. If Trump is just a black-swan event, there’s a solution: no more Trump, no more problem.
But Needham thinks that is a fantasy. A few hours after Moore’s defeat, Needham was dreading a mainstream-G.O.P. victory dance. “There’s a Republican establishment that continues to seem to ignore this populist impulse going on around the country and the forces seeking to harness those impulses toward nihilistic ends,” he told me. “It’s hard to imagine a more nihilistic candidate than Roy Moore. But until our guys get serious saying institutions matter, and having a healthy Party matters, and, equally important, find inspiring policies that speak to this moment and recognize they are not inspiring voters and causing them to lash out in increasingly unconventional ways, we will continue to be stuck in this stalemate.”
Needham told me that he had no doubt that Bannon would not back down from the civil war, or from his nemesis, the Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell. And, in fact, that certainly seems to be the case, based on the angry smoke signals emanating from Bannon’s Breitbart headquarters. (A headline on the Web site on Thursday morning declared, “Bannon Least Culpable!”) Needham said that he was not looking forward to the post-game quarterbacking about Moore, or to the entire next year of midterm-election politicking. “Look, there’s some good policy work being done,” he told me. “But it’s being ignored in exchange for this dumpster fire.”
Just in case I hadn’t gotten the point, Needham returned to it later in our conversation. He said that it wasn’t just the Bannonite nihilists, or the recalcitrant Swamp creatures up in their comfortable Capitol Hill lairs, or even Trump, for that matter, who caused people to support Moore. “There’s an underlying sickness in the Party that is causing people to vote like that,” he said.
