Donald Trump and David Duke

Back in 2016, when it looked like Donald Trump was going to win the Republican nomination, but before he drew an inside straight into the presidency, my partner Amy and I were talking about what the Republican party was doing to itself and how it didn’t have to be this way. As I remember it, she said basically that the Republicans as a party could choose to not give the nomination to Trump, that they could deny him and thus save themselves. I agreed, in theory, but didn’t think it would happen.

I’ve been thinking about this, and our subsequent conversations about what Trump being at the head of the Republican party means in larger terms for politics in this country, ever since I finished listening to season 4 of Slate’s Slow Burn podcast, which is about the rise of David Duke in Louisiana. Duke won his first and only election in 1988. I was not long out of high school and wasn’t politically inclined anyway because I was still a Jehovah’s Witness, so I missed a lot of the specifics. I knew who he was and I remember being surprised that he’d been able to win given his Klan and Nazi background, but I didn’t follow it all that closely since I wasn’t going to vote for religious reasons. I was glad he lost both his races for higher office but it wasn’t until I was a good bit older and more politically aware that I thought at all about what Duke represented in a larger sense.

There’s a story in episode 6 of Slow Burn, though, that I hadn’t heard before. It’s 1991, and David Duke has just finished second in the primary for the Louisiana governor’s race, beating incumbent Republican Buddy Roemer and trailing former Governor Edwin Edwards but not by much. Duke had reason to be excited, because between him and Roemer, Republican candidates had gotten 64% of the vote in the primary. And while Edwards had been wildly popular after his first two terms in the 1970’s, his last term had been rocky and his win in the primary wasn’t overwhelming. But a day or two after that primary, some old school, big money Republicans got together and did a fundraiser for Edwin Edwards.

Now you have to understand just how big a deal this was. Louisiana Republicans hated Edwin Edwards. He’d run circles around them at this point for more than 20 years by both being smarter than they were and by building a coalition of black voters statewide and working class whites from south Louisiana and running up the score in New Orleans. There were always a lot of accusations about him being shady, and he did wind up going to prison eventually on bribery charges, but as his admirers liked to say, he never stole from the people. He stole from big corporations and gave money back to the people.

You also have to remember that this was 1991. The Reagan Revolution had already happened, and Louisiana had voted for Reagan twice and George H. W. Bush in the last 3 presidential elections. The state was getting more Republican by the minute and it wouldn’t have surprised anyone if those old guard Republicans had said to themselves about Duke exactly what Republicans in 2016 said to themselves about Donald Trump. That they can handle him. That he’ll grow into the role. But they didn’t. David Duke was the step too far for them, even though he’d gotten 60% of the white vote in his run for Senate the year before.

Now I don’t want to give them too much credit. I’m not sure they even met the bare minimum requirement, given that they didn’t really do any soul-searching about how their party got to the point where they nominated a literal Nazi and that they have since elected a guy who once referred to himself as “David Duke without the baggage” to the House of Representatives (where he currently serves as Minority Whip), but in that moment, when faced with the idea that they could be one step closer to power if only they backed the Nazi, they decided they could wait for the next election.

Nationally, Republicans had that choice in 2016 and most of them made a different one, and so here we are. David Duke lost that race for governor by a landslide, by more than 20 points, but he actually received over 60,000 more votes than he had a year earlier when he ran for Senate against J. Bennett Johnston. There were a lot of factors that went into Duke’s huge loss, but at least one of them was due to some prominent Republicans saying there are some things they wouldn’t associate with. I will always wonder what might have been if people like Mitch McConnell or Paul Ryan, people with actual political power in the Republican party, had said it’s not worth it, had decided to deny Trump the nomination and faced the backlash from their own voters for a cycle as a result. That would be a story to hear.