Disloyalty is Trump's secret weapon

[Bloomberg]( Follow Us [Get the newsletter]( Get Jonathan Bernstein’s newsletter every morning in your inbox. [Click here to subscribe](. I’ve seen a [number]( of [perfectly]( fine [articles]( about why and how former President Donald Trump still wields influence over the Republican Party, but c’mon! The main reason that Republican politicians feel stuck with Trump is that they know that he’s capable of turning against their party at the drop of a hat. Yes, Trump is good at tapping into resentment, but plenty of Republican politicians are good at that. Yes, he’s popular among Republican voters, but most politicians are popular among their own party’s voters. Yes, he’s willing to take sides in primaries, but he doesn’t actually have a particularly impressive record of swaying primary voters. No, what’s different about Trump is that unlike any other former president — really, any former nominee — in living memory, it’s that easy to picture him telling his voters to stay home and handing elections to the other party. And that’s why he’s been an impossible dilemma for Republican politicians ever since he emerged as a major candidate in 2015. No one worried about that in 1976, 1980 or 1992, the last three times that an incumbent president lost a presidential election. Oh, yes, Jimmy Carter has occasionally criticized Democrats since his 1976 defeat, and it’s possible to find examples of failed nominees criticizing their party or it’s leading politicians. But full-on rejection of the party? For that, you have to reach deep into the pile of rejected presidential candidates to find a Democrat like Eugene McCarthy or Republican like Pat Buchanan who ran as third-party candidates in 1976 and 2000, respectively, but took very few voters with them. Why? For one thing, a lot of politicians strongly believe in the basic policy orientation of their parties. It may be why they got into politics in the first place, and they know that turning on their party would risk enactment of policies they strongly oppose. For another, many politicians develop deep friendships they would be betraying. Others identify with demographic groups or organized interests that find homes in the party, and don’t want to turn against them even if they don’t care about the party itself. And then there’s reputation. Many retired politicians, such as Carter and Richard Nixon, spend a lot of time and effort trying to rebuild their reputations, especially if they were pushed out involuntarily. That’s obviously not true for all retired politicians — ex-President George W. Bush has done almost nothing active to revive his reputation after the Iraq War debacle, and neither George H.W. Bush or Gerald Ford did much after their electoral defeats — but it does seem to be true for some of them. And for them, turning against their party is a losing move, since it would alienate most of their remaining fans without adding many new ones. Staying above the fray, with occasional electioneering if invited, is surely the safer path if reputation is the goal. None of these factors appear to apply to Trump. And even if they did, Republican politicians are (or should be) aware that Trump does things against his own apparent self-interest all the time, anyway. That’s a big part of why he was such an unpopular president. It’s also worth noting that Trump wouldn’t really get anything from betraying the Republicans other than revenge for perceived slights. That doesn’t mean he wouldn’t do it. If Trump persuaded only 5% or so of Republican voters to stay home or support a third-party candidate, the damage from the top of the ballot to the bottom could be devastating. This gives Republican politicians a strong and continuing incentive to try to accommodate — to try to mange — the former president. Of course, that’s not all that’s going on within the Republican Party. Some politicians and other party actors surely are trying to flatter Trump because they believe (perhaps correctly, perhaps not) that it will propel them to successful careers. Surely others sincerely (if implausibly) believe that Trump really was a great president and that the party is best off with him as their leader as long as he’s willing. But I do think that a lot of them just consider him a threat they need to appease. 1. Paul Campos makes the case that [Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer should announce his retirement now](. 2. Julian Zelizer draws present-day lessons from [the 1974 Wilbur Mills sex scandal](. 3. Nathaniel Rakich on [approval voting in St. Louis](. I like allowing voters to select more than one candidate in party primaries; I don’t like nonpartisan elections. But I also think experimentation in state and local elections is a good idea, even with practices that been tried elsewhere in the world, since part of the question is how U.S. voters take to them. 4. Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern on the [Supreme Court’s cases about religion and the pandemic](. 5. Tim Noah on [President Joe Biden’s support for organized labor](. 6. And Stephen Wolf on upcoming [state supreme court elections](. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. [Click here to subscribe](. Also subscribe to [Bloomberg All Access]( and get much, much more. You’ll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close.  Before it’s here, it’s on the Bloomberg Terminal. Find out more about how the Terminal delivers information and analysis that financial professionals can’t find anywhere else. [Learn more](.  You received this message because you are subscribed to Bloomberg's Early Returns newsletter. 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