Trump Once Unified Democrats and Divided Republicans. The Shooting And Debate Turned the Tables.

MILWAUKEE — For nearly a decade, Donald Trump has been the biggest force for unity among Democrats and the biggest source of division in his own party. Now, as Republicans convene to nominate Trump for a third consecutive election, that has been reversed.

His GOP critics have retired, lost, died, capitulated or fallen silent as the former president has all but made the Party of Lincoln a wholly owned subsidiary of his MAGA movement.

And that was before Saturday’s harrowing assassination attempt.

The complete and total, to borrow a phrase, realignment of the GOP into the Party of Trump was nearly complete after he avoided being seriously challenged, let alone defeated, through the primaries. But it was cemented in Butler, Pennsylvania, when Trump escaped death and seconds later rallied his stunned audience to forge a bond few American presidents have enjoyed with their supporters.

With that instant moment of political iconography, Trump is well-positioned to stifle what little intra-party dissent remains in the GOP.

More worrisome for his opponents, and perhaps the country, the shooting and his defiant response will strengthen his case for a brand of strongman politics to which our democracy had mostly been immune. Trump’s clenched fist will strengthen his hand — not only in the campaign but also, should he win, with a party that will prove far less likely to resist his second-term impulses.

Put it this way: To millions of Republican voters, Trump in life was already more beloved than Ronald Reagan is in memory. Consider the power Trump will have over other Republican lawmakers now that he’s survived an assassin’s bullet.

His most significant challenger in the primary, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, got the message. After reports that she would not attend the convention, Haley indicated Sunday she would come and speak in Milwaukee.

Haley was not only the former president’s last standing GOP opponent this year, she was also a symbol of opposition from the pre-Trump party; for months after she dropped out of the race, she still claimed tens of thousands of votes in state after state, as Republican holdouts registered their discontent with the presumptive nominee.

Yet the former president hasn’t just staged a takeover of the Republican Party — he’s also been a singular force in the Democratic Party.

Since 2017, Democrats have owed almost most of their electoral success to a backlash against Trump and Trumpism. The former president birthed and bred a seersucker-to-socialist opposition that endured because enough Bush Republicans, card-carrying DSA members and Americans in between found consensus on a single issue.

President Joe Biden, too, owes his late-career success to this coalition. For millions of voters, the 2020 campaign, primary and general, was a single-issue election and the issue was stopping Trump. And in the four years since, Biden has been insulated from any serious internal opposition because to question him would be a distraction, or worse, from the project of keeping Trump out of the White House.

Up until about 9:20 p.m. on the night of June 27, the anti-Trump opposition was unified in the hopes that 2024 would ultimately be fought on the same grounds. The band could be brought together for one last tour and their soon-to-be 82-year-old standard bearer could dust off those rusty strings just one more time .

However, in the wake of Biden’s catastrophic, and catatonic, debate showing the forces of Stop Trump are now badly splintered.

After all these years of Trump-propelled unity, the coalition is at odds because, while the threat he poses is now even more sobering, the understanding they had to mute internal dissent has come undone.

Instead of spending Biden’s first term determining who could block Trump’s return, they slept-walked into Armageddon. Democrats are now attempting to compress what should have been a three-year-long conversation into three weeks, the summer of the election. And they’re speaking in existential terms about the stakes.

“‘You will never forgive yourself for not doing what you could when you had the chance,’” is how Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), the senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, told me he's addressing those colleagues reluctant to join his calls for Biden to drop out. “Everybody knows that this has to happen.”

It's worth taking a step back to consider this extraordinary moment. Biden’s own congressional allies are attempting to oust him from their ticket and the backstage campaign has been orchestrated in part by the most successful legislator of the era, the president’s longtime ally and the person he called “my Catholic sister.”

Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, convinced Biden will lose, has been working the phones since June 27 in hopes of finding a way to ease him off the ticket.

One of her colleagues was struck to see her chatting, furtively but openly, with Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries last week in a corner of the House Democratic cloakroom in plain sight of a dozen lawmakers.

The extent of Pelosi’s behind-the-scenes role hasn’t been fully revealed and may never be if the former speaker has her way. But I’m told by people familiar with the exchanges that she’s stage-managed phone calls to Jeffries, plotted strategy with the biggest names in Democratic politics and told one former elected official bluntly that Biden’s legacy can’t be destroying their party.

Of course, that was all before the historic events of the weekend. Shortly before the shooting, Biden had sat through a contentious call with a group of moderate House Democrats, a dispute that led one lawmaker to phone me afterward and suggest more calls from the caucus demanding Biden stand down would be forthcoming.

Those haven’t come. The presidential campaign and the Democrats’ campaign against their own nominee have been put on hold while the country absorbs what happened and could have happened in Western Pennsylvania.

Biden, flying back to the White House Saturday night from his Delaware beach home, has sought to project the sort of sober leadership the nation desperately needs. His task, however, is not only to reassure unnerved voters — it’s also to put down, for good, the multiweek rebellion he’s facing in his ranks.

Addressing the nation in a rare Oval Office speech Sunday night, Biden said it's "time to cool it down" and that "politics must never be a literal battlefield."

He impressed even some of his congressional skeptics, but they were quick to note that his next public appearance may not go as well — and that's the problem.

What’s for certain is this: If the president insists on staying in the race, he will do so without the protection the threat of Trump once afforded him within his coalition. The moat has been breached.