Conservative icon calls for 'carnage' against Trump's GOP

What happened

George F. Will’s call for “carnage” was a demand for sweeping Republican defeats in the November midterms. AlterNet reports that the conservative columnist argued most congressional Republicans had surrendered their independence to President Donald Trump and should be punished electorally for abandoning their role as a check on executive power.

Will urged voters to target lawmakers who enabled Trump, citing trade policy, immigration restrictions, the war with Iran, and anger over gasoline, diesel, and fertilizer prices. He suggested Republican losses from Alaska and Iowa to Texas and Ohio could force the party to reconsider its submission to the president.

His proposed purge was selective. Will endorsed the survival of Maine Senator Susan Collins, praising her handling of Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation, and Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers, who campaigns as a Trump supporter while differing with him on some issues. The election outcomes were not provided in the reporting.

Congress chose submission

Trump holds executive power, but the institutional failure described here belongs equally to Republican lawmakers. They possess votes, investigative authority, control over legislation, and the capacity to resist presidential decisions. According to Will’s account, they chose political survival instead.

That distinction matters. Congress was not merely overwhelmed by a dominant president. Its Republican members repeatedly accepted their own irrelevance because independence carried electoral risk. Their weakness was cultivated, rewarded, and renewed through individual decisions.

The selective reckoning

Will’s exceptions expose the limits of his indictment. Collins is spared partly because she supported Kavanaugh’s confirmation after reviewing his record and the sexual-assault allegations against him. Rogers is spared despite advertising his support for Trump.

The standard is therefore not a clean rejection of presidential domination. It is a plea to preserve selected Republicans whom Will considers sufficiently serious or useful. The party may be “smashed to atoms,” but familiar conservative priorities and favored personnel remain protected.

That is less a revolution than an attempt at internal discipline.

Where blame belongs

The strongest part of Will’s argument is his refusal to make Trump the sole explanation for Republican conduct. A president can demand loyalty; legislators decide whether to provide it. Concentrating every criticism on the executive lets members of Congress pose as spectators to decisions they enabled.

AlterNet’s framing risks turning the story into spectacle by emphasizing a conservative icon’s call for “carnage.” The consequential claim is not that George Will used violent imagery for electoral losses. It is that lawmakers with constitutional power traded it for continued office.

Defeat as institutional medicine

Will treats electoral punishment as the mechanism capable of changing that calculation. His logic is blunt: if surrender carries no cost, surrender becomes the party’s operating model. Republican defeats would matter not as symbolic condemnation but as evidence that obedience to a president can end careers rather than preserve them.

Whether losses would actually restore congressional independence remains unproven. Parties often respond to defeat by intensifying factional loyalty or blaming disfavored candidates. But Will correctly identifies the incentive structure: lawmakers rarely recover principles that voters consistently allow them to discard.

The architecture of abdication

This story reveals a broader pattern of executive expansion built through legislative consent. Presidential power grows not only when presidents seize authority, but when lawmakers find it safer to stop exercising their own.

The resulting system preserves the appearance of separate branches while draining one of them of agency. Elections then become less a contest over policy than a judgment on whether representatives performed the job they already possessed the power to do. Will’s case is ultimately that Republican legislators made themselves politically irrelevant. The sharper conclusion is that irrelevance was their strategy—and only a material penalty can make it unattractive.

Thanks to Alter Net

Source: Conservative icon calls for ‘carnage’ against Trump’s GOP