Why Republicans — including Trump supporters — should primary the president

Even if all we get is the Trump campaign adjusting itself and listening more to the people's priorities (is the border wall really still their biggest one?) then that in itself is a significant result

The will of the people needs to be heard, just as it was heard when the GOP threw all their weight behind Jeb Bush and were defeated by the public's embracement of Trump (Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty)

Over the next year or so, before the Democratic Party settles on a nominee to take on Donald Trump for the presidency, half the country will be treated to primary debates, town halls, policy discussions, op-eds, legislative trial balloons, campaign platforms, and more. The other half, well … they get rallies.

There’s a way to fix that. Donald Trump must be primaried by a serious opponent. And by more than one, if possible.

Our electoral politics are engineered to ensure voters get the final say in who wins, but not a preliminary say in who gets to compete, or even which ideas should win the day. That’s because the norms having to do with incumbency generate, for the major parties involved in a presidential contest, asymmetrical developmental paths. In other words, because it’s rare for a sitting president to face a primary challenge, every presidential contest featuring an incumbent involves the opposition inviting voters to a robust marketplace of ideas, while the party in power languishes in ideological stasis.

This is why, if you care about conservatism as a governing philosophy and not just as a political success story; if you think a political orientation ought to undergo continual self-examination; if you think four years is a very long time for ideas to go unexplored and unchallenged, then Trump must be primaried.

This will strike many as hopelessly naive. Everybody knows that in politics, ideas are subordinated to political results. An unfortunate but incontrovertible reality is that there is no correlation between winning the battle of ideas and winning at the polls. But there is a pragmatic case for the governing party facilitating a primary challenge to their own leader: doing so is democracy-enhancing in that it is more responsive to the wishes of their voters, and stability-ensuring in that it more frequently makes adjustments crucial to the party’s long-term viability.

A serious primary opponent to Donald Trump would present voters with a meaningfully different political package. That could be a different set of policies, a different set of character traits, or even just a different set of emphases — that is, a re-ordering of Trump’s positions in a way that better aligns with the people’s interests. This last point is important because even if all we get is the Trump campaign adjusting to the hierarchical ordering of policy outcomes the people prefer, that by itself is a significant result.

Perhaps, through a process like this, it becomes clear to everyone — the president, the Party, and so on — that voters want to relegate the southern border wall to something like fifth in importance, rather than first, which was how Trump conceived of it when he shut down the government.

In the first two months of 2019 alone, Democratic voters have been treated to CNN town halls from Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). There is nothing like that happening on the Republican side. Larry Hogan, who is governor of Maryland, has been floated as a potential challenger to Trump in 2020, but as my colleague notes in a column for Arc Digital, this is not the primary challenger we’re looking for.

Last month, former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld, who in 2016 ran for vice president on the Libertarian Party ticket, formed an exploratory committee (the step usually taken prior to announcing a presidential bid), though this time as a Republican. What’s interesting about Weld’s potential candidacy is not Weld himself, who would get trounced in a primary contest against Trump, but whether Weld shows there’s an appetite for a stronger challenge to Trump on the right. Real Clear Politics columnist Frank Miele has suggested Weld’s potential candidacy could function as a “stalking horse” for a figure like Mitt Romney to step in.

The argument against primarying Donald Trump begins and ends with the most elemental consideration in politics: winning. In sports, teams that excel in the regular season sometimes get a bye week in the playoffs — their chances at picking up injuries, experiencing fatigue, and all manner of other liabilities considerably lessens. Make no mistake: a primary challenger would damage Trump, engaging in messaging that can later be co-opted and repurposed by Democrats.

But Trump supporters should keep in mind that it was a robust primary process in 2015-16 that enabled their preferred candidate to rise to the top; the engines of institutional power in the Republican Party had put their weight behind Jeb Bush early on, and resisted Trump for as long as they could. Yet in the end the people’s pick would not be denied. It would be strange, now, to simultaneously view the primary process in 2016 as democratically urgent while conceiving of a 2020 primary contest as ruinous to the will of the people.

Berny Belvedere is the editor-in-chief of Arc Digital, as well as a contributor to the Washington Post, Buzzfeed and the National Review