There is an American fantasy that power is always seized with a bang: jackboots, tanks, a colonel at the radio station. But that’s not how a self-respecting 21st-century party yields a republic. Today’s Republican Party has refined a quieter art: they hand power over. They call it governing. I call it Coup by Courtesy — the orderly surrender of constitutional authority by officials who would rather be courtiers than legislators.

Start with the telltale confession of the age. In a recent New York Times analysis of the shutdown standoff, a Republican lawmaker offered the institutional epitaph of the 118th Congress: “It’s like we have given up.” The piece frames what members of both parties privately fear — the “steady erosion of congressional prerogative” that threatens permanent damage to the body that’s supposed to be the people’s stage.    The line isn’t just morose; it’s a doctrine. When Congress believes it has no role, it doesn’t. When the legislature narrates itself as a bystander, the executive happily affirms the script.

That script has a form, and the form is vaudeville. Our supposed “coequal” branch has become a troupe of stagehands — tugging ropes, sweeping sawdust, flattering the headliner — while the Ringmaster-in-Chief flexes his spotlight muscles. The tragedy isn’t merely that Donald Trump demands applause; it’s that Republicans in Congress have professionalized the act of applauding, complete with procedural choreography to ensure the clapping never stops.

Exhibit A: the Senate’s recent “nuclear-option” rule change for executive nominees. By collapsing the path to confirmation, Republicans converted the world’s “greatest deliberative body” into a conveyor belt. One Times account is blunt about the stakes: weakening Congress’s vetting role. Majority Leader John Thune even introduced 48 of Trump’s nominees as a single bloc — not a deliberation but a bulk shipment. The new precedent, pushed through 53–45, lets the party in power “unilaterally approve dozens” with “little resistance,” reducing incentives to choose figures who can earn bipartisan support.     

 That is not oversight. That is logistics. Oversight asks “who” and “why”; logistics asks, “how fast.” Republicans answered with a pallet jack.

Exhibit B: culture-war enforcement as party discipline. When a Trump-aligned FCC figure leaned on broadcasters over Jimmy Kimmel, Republicans split — some opposed overt censorship on First Amendment grounds, and the best that could be mustered publicly was a gingerly “be very cautious” about regulating speech.    Note the meta-message: not a defense of pluralism, but a plea for subtler methods. Even dissent arrives as stage direction — keep the music playing, don’t spook the audience, and for heaven’s sake, don’t yank the host mid-monologue while the cameras roll. The point isn’t to stop the loyalty test; it’s to keep it tasteful.

Exhibit C: the Republicans’ cultivated helplessness. In a column urging Congress to restrain Trump’s tariff-and-patronage project — a polite euphemism is “state capitalism” — George Will notes that a fearful GOP could still do something. The subjunctive carries the indictment. If Congress can refuse, and does not, it chooses collaboration over constraint.   

Taken together, you get the Republican permission structure: cultural intimidation that keeps the herd aligned, institutional hollowing that removes speed bumps, procedural sabotage that eliminates scrutiny, and a self-absolving posture that whispers, ‘we’d stop him if we had to’ — but why bother, when the applause is this good?

Let’s be precise about the transformation. This capitulation is not “conservatism.” The conservative instinct is to preserve constitutional forms against the gusts of momentary appetite, especially a demagogue’s. What the party now defends is not an inheritance but a person. Even the Washington Monthly has been reduced to posing the obvious: the word conservative doesn’t describe a movement whose animating principle is the hailing of a single man. The accurate vocabulary lives elsewhere — court politics, patronage states, performance regimes — where law is not a boundary but a prop.

 If you want the constitutional accounting, tally up the conversion steps:

1.    Narrative Surrender. When Members tell reporters that Congress has “ceded its relevance,” they are not lamenting a loss; they justify a choice. If the legislature insists its only function is to ratify the executive’s tantrums or shutdown theatrics, the executive will reciprocate by treating the legislature as a temperamental stagehand.   

2.    Process as Accomplice. The “nuclear option” is often discussed as parliamentary plumbing. Don’t be hypnotized by the jargon. The core effect is to eliminate friction — the friction that the Framers engineered so that dangerous or unfit figures would be exposed in the long corridor of debate. When you bundle 48 nominees, you don’t just speed up the nomination process; you extinguish public memory. No debate, no dossier, no face to attach to the power you’ve just handed out. That’s not efficiency; that’s erasure.   

3.    Culture as Cudgel. The Kimmel episode is minor in policy terms but major in diagnostic value. The complaint isn’t that a late-night host tells jokes; it’s that joking works — humor punctures aura. When a few Republicans caution “be careful” about weaponizing regulators against a critic, it’s not a defense of free speech: it’s a warning not to show the cudgel on camera. The cudgel, mind you, remains available. 

4.    The Helplessness Ruse. In essence, Will’s column reads that Congress could contain Trump’s tariff machine and the broader patronage model, if it dared. That conditional clause is the open secret of Republican leadership. Fear is the fig leaf. The truth is more straightforward: Power enjoyed is power justified.   

This blatant capitulation is why I resist the comforting Trump as a buffoon narrative. Trump is not a clown who lucked into a circus. He is a predator who correctly sized up his zookeepers. His genius — yes, genius — lies in diagnosing the appetites of those around him, recognizing that many Republican legislators want two things more than constitutional dignity: protection from their base and proximity to the troupe’s headliner. Reward those desires, and everything else becomes automatic.

 If you still think this is too harsh, look at the knock-on effects of the nominee’s rule. When speed replaces scrutiny, talent selection collapses. Presidents are incentivized to choose loyalists who can survive a straight-party vote, not stewards who can persuade the opposition. The Senate, relieved of its bargaining role, ceases to be a co-author of the executive branch and becomes a notarization service. In the Times’s telling, the rule’s logic is explicit: less incentive for bipartisan nominees; more power for a simple majority to push through “dozens” at a time. That is a design for patronage, not governance. 

Nor is this some temporary spasm. The Republican party has spent a decade tutoring itself in government by flinch — manufacturing emergencies (debt ceilings, shutdowns) to keep the base in a permanent adrenaline state and to keep Members cowed into “unity.” The new insight of 2025 is not that Trump coerces them; it’s that they pre-coerce themselves. The shutdown reporting captures it more cleanly than any theory: lawmakers in both parties fear lasting institutional damage from the daily “erosion of prerogative,” but the majority’s attitude is resignation. Translation: the damage is the point. A weak Congress is useful to a strongman. 

So, what do we call the regime that emerges when a party treats law like a wardrobe and process like choreography? Not conservatism. Not even populism, which is at least a claim about the people. This is performance statism: a state that performs accountability while operationalizing obedience. In performance statism, oversight becomes B-roll, debate becomes a time slot, and the legislative branch learns to clap on cue. (When the clap is offbeat, a friendly regulator clears their throat.)

I don’t spare the “respectable” apologists, either. The establishment posture — We dislike the man but like the judges/tariffs/deals — is the theology of accommodation. It baptizes the transaction with one hand and signs the surrender with the other. Will is correct that Congress could still do something; the subtext is that it won’t, because doing so would forfeit the immediate pleasures of rule: spoils for friends, pain for enemies, headlines for bosses. 

Here’s the sober part, the part audiences don’t like to hear between jokes: the Constitution cannot defend itself. It has no standing army. It relies on men and women who prefer its constraints to their convenience. When convenience becomes creed, parchment becomes prop. You can see the prop work in real time: bundle nominees; declare “no choice” in a shutdown; tell the press you’re “concerned” about speech regulation optics while keeping the threat in reserve; and call any pushback “process,” not principle. That’s not drift. That’s design.

But if this is Coup by Courtesy, then the counter is Rudeness by Citizenship — the refusal to play along with the choreography. Rudeness looks like insisting on names and hearings for every nominee, not palletizing them into anonymity. Rudeness is committee chairs choosing subpoenas over selfies. Rudeness is the minority using the cameras to explain the scam, not to audition for it. Rudeness is the donor class hearing that Republican “efficiency” is a euphemism for ensuring no one checks the till.

One last taxonomy, for the record:

• Surrender with a story (shutdown fatalism): We have no choice — when they do. 

• Surrender by fixture (rule change): It’s a neutral process — which conveniently concentrates power. 

• Surrender with manners (Kimmel caution): We’re for free speech… tastefully — as long as the censor’s glove stays velvet. 

• Surrender in subjunctive (Will’s “could”): We could act, which is an elegant way of refusing to. 

Call each what it is: complicity.

Suppose Republicans wanted to act like a governing party. In that case, they’d start by re-elevating pain — the pain of deliberation, of hearing nominees one by one, of saying no to a president whose appetites are destructive for the country but great for the show. They’d stop measuring courage by retweets from the boss and instead accept the ordinary humiliation of republican government: compromising in public, losing votes in daylight, and earning back power the hard way — by persuading people, not by bundling them.

Instead, we are treated to a Broadway revival: Handing Over the Keys, with music and lyrics by the current Senate majority and choreography by fear. The curtain rises. The headliner strides out. The stagehands beam. Somewhere, in the dark, the Constitution clears its throat.

The audience has a choice about what happens next. The troupe, thus far, has made theirs.

~ Dunneagin

There is an American fantasy that power is always seized with a bang: jackboots, tanks, a colonel at the radio station. But that’s not how a self-respecting 21st-century party yields a republic. Today’s Republican Party has refined a quieter art: they hand power over. They call it governing. I call it Coup by Courtesy — the orderly surrender of constitutional authority by officials who would rather be courtiers than legislators.

Start with the telltale confession of the age. In a recent New York Times analysis of the shutdown standoff, a Republican lawmaker offered the institutional epitaph of the 118th Congress: “It’s like we have given up.” The piece frames what members of both parties privately fear — the “steady erosion of congressional prerogative” that threatens permanent damage to the body that’s supposed to be the people’s stage.    The line isn’t just morose; it’s a doctrine. When Congress believes it has no role, it doesn’t. When the legislature narrates itself as a bystander, the executive happily affirms the script.

That script has a form, and the form is vaudeville. Our supposed “coequal” branch has become a troupe of stagehands — tugging ropes, sweeping sawdust, flattering the headliner — while the Ringmaster-in-Chief flexes his spotlight muscles. The tragedy isn’t merely that Donald Trump demands applause; it’s that Republicans in Congress have professionalized the act of applauding, complete with procedural choreography to ensure the clapping never stops.

Exhibit A: the Senate’s recent “nuclear-option” rule change for executive nominees. By collapsing the path to confirmation, Republicans converted the world’s “greatest deliberative body” into a conveyor belt. One Times account is blunt about the stakes: weakening Congress’s vetting role. Majority Leader John Thune even introduced 48 of Trump’s nominees as a single bloc — not a deliberation but a bulk shipment. The new precedent, pushed through 53–45, lets the party in power “unilaterally approve dozens” with “little resistance,” reducing incentives to choose figures who can earn bipartisan support.     

 That is not oversight. That is logistics. Oversight asks “who” and “why”; logistics asks, “how fast.” Republicans answered with a pallet jack.

Exhibit B: culture-war enforcement as party discipline. When a Trump-aligned FCC figure leaned on broadcasters over Jimmy Kimmel, Republicans split — some opposed overt censorship on First Amendment grounds, and the best that could be mustered publicly was a gingerly “be very cautious” about regulating speech.    Note the meta-message: not a defense of pluralism, but a plea for subtler methods. Even dissent arrives as stage direction — keep the music playing, don’t spook the audience, and for heaven’s sake, don’t yank the host mid-monologue while the cameras roll. The point isn’t to stop the loyalty test; it’s to keep it tasteful.

Exhibit C: the Republicans’ cultivated helplessness. In a column urging Congress to restrain Trump’s tariff-and-patronage project — a polite euphemism is “state capitalism” — George Will notes that a fearful GOP could still do something. The subjunctive carries the indictment. If Congress can refuse, and does not, it chooses collaboration over constraint.   

Taken together, you get the Republican permission structure: cultural intimidation that keeps the herd aligned, institutional hollowing that removes speed bumps, procedural sabotage that eliminates scrutiny, and a self-absolving posture that whispers, ‘we’d stop him if we had to’ — but why bother, when the applause is this good?

Let’s be precise about the transformation. This capitulation is not “conservatism.” The conservative instinct is to preserve constitutional forms against the gusts of momentary appetite, especially a demagogue’s. What the party now defends is not an inheritance but a person. Even the Washington Monthly has been reduced to posing the obvious: the word conservative doesn’t describe a movement whose animating principle is the hailing of a single man. The accurate vocabulary lives elsewhere — court politics, patronage states, performance regimes — where law is not a boundary but a prop.

 If you want the constitutional accounting, tally up the conversion steps:

1.    Narrative Surrender. When Members tell reporters that Congress has “ceded its relevance,” they are not lamenting a loss; they justify a choice. If the legislature insists its only function is to ratify the executive’s tantrums or shutdown theatrics, the executive will reciprocate by treating the legislature as a temperamental stagehand.   

2.    Process as Accomplice. The “nuclear option” is often discussed as parliamentary plumbing. Don’t be hypnotized by the jargon. The core effect is to eliminate friction — the friction that the Framers engineered so that dangerous or unfit figures would be exposed in the long corridor of debate. When you bundle 48 nominees, you don’t just speed up the nomination process; you extinguish public memory. No debate, no dossier, no face to attach to the power you’ve just handed out. That’s not efficiency; that’s erasure.   

3.    Culture as Cudgel. The Kimmel episode is minor in policy terms but major in diagnostic value. The complaint isn’t that a late-night host tells jokes; it’s that joking works — humor punctures aura. When a few Republicans caution “be careful” about weaponizing regulators against a critic, it’s not a defense of free speech: it’s a warning not to show the cudgel on camera. The cudgel, mind you, remains available. 

4.    The Helplessness Ruse. In essence, Will’s column reads that Congress could contain Trump’s tariff machine and the broader patronage model, if it dared. That conditional clause is the open secret of Republican leadership. Fear is the fig leaf. The truth is more straightforward: Power enjoyed is power justified.   

This blatant capitulation is why I resist the comforting Trump as a buffoon narrative. Trump is not a clown who lucked into a circus. He is a predator who correctly sized up his zookeepers. His genius — yes, genius — lies in diagnosing the appetites of those around him, recognizing that many Republican legislators want two things more than constitutional dignity: protection from their base and proximity to the troupe’s headliner. Reward those desires, and everything else becomes automatic.

 If you still think this is too harsh, look at the knock-on effects of the nominee’s rule. When speed replaces scrutiny, talent selection collapses. Presidents are incentivized to choose loyalists who can survive a straight-party vote, not stewards who can persuade the opposition. The Senate, relieved of its bargaining role, ceases to be a co-author of the executive branch and becomes a notarization service. In the Times’s telling, the rule’s logic is explicit: less incentive for bipartisan nominees; more power for a simple majority to push through “dozens” at a time. That is a design for patronage, not governance. 

Nor is this some temporary spasm. The Republican party has spent a decade tutoring itself in government by flinch — manufacturing emergencies (debt ceilings, shutdowns) to keep the base in a permanent adrenaline state and to keep Members cowed into “unity.” The new insight of 2025 is not that Trump coerces them; it’s that they pre-coerce themselves. The shutdown reporting captures it more cleanly than any theory: lawmakers in both parties fear lasting institutional damage from the daily “erosion of prerogative,” but the majority’s attitude is resignation. Translation: the damage is the point. A weak Congress is useful to a strongman. 

So, what do we call the regime that emerges when a party treats law like a wardrobe and process like choreography? Not conservatism. Not even populism, which is at least a claim about the people. This is performance statism: a state that performs accountability while operationalizing obedience. In performance statism, oversight becomes B-roll, debate becomes a time slot, and the legislative branch learns to clap on cue. (When the clap is offbeat, a friendly regulator clears their throat.)

I don’t spare the “respectable” apologists, either. The establishment posture — We dislike the man but like the judges/tariffs/deals — is the theology of accommodation. It baptizes the transaction with one hand and signs the surrender with the other. Will is correct that Congress could still do something; the subtext is that it won’t, because doing so would forfeit the immediate pleasures of rule: spoils for friends, pain for enemies, headlines for bosses. 

Here’s the sober part, the part audiences don’t like to hear between jokes: the Constitution cannot defend itself. It has no standing army. It relies on men and women who prefer its constraints to their convenience. When convenience becomes creed, parchment becomes prop. You can see the prop work in real time: bundle nominees; declare “no choice” in a shutdown; tell the press you’re “concerned” about speech regulation optics while keeping the threat in reserve; and call any pushback “process,” not principle. That’s not drift. That’s design.

But if this is Coup by Courtesy, then the counter is Rudeness by Citizenship — the refusal to play along with the choreography. Rudeness looks like insisting on names and hearings for every nominee, not palletizing them into anonymity. Rudeness is committee chairs choosing subpoenas over selfies. Rudeness is the minority using the cameras to explain the scam, not to audition for it. Rudeness is the donor class hearing that Republican “efficiency” is a euphemism for ensuring no one checks the till.

One last taxonomy, for the record:

• Surrender with a story (shutdown fatalism): We have no choice — when they do. 

• Surrender by fixture (rule change): It’s a neutral process — which conveniently concentrates power. 

• Surrender with manners (Kimmel caution): We’re for free speech… tastefully — as long as the censor’s glove stays velvet. 

• Surrender in subjunctive (Will’s “could”): We could act, which is an elegant way of refusing to. 

Call each what it is: complicity.

Suppose Republicans wanted to act like a governing party. In that case, they’d start by re-elevating pain — the pain of deliberation, of hearing nominees one by one, of saying no to a president whose appetites are destructive for the country but great for the show. They’d stop measuring courage by retweets from the boss and instead accept the ordinary humiliation of republican government: compromising in public, losing votes in daylight, and earning back power the hard way — by persuading people, not by bundling them.

Instead, we are treated to a Broadway revival: Handing Over the Keys, with music and lyrics by the current Senate majority and choreography by fear. The curtain rises. The headliner strides out. The stagehands beam. Somewhere, in the dark, the Constitution clears its throat.

The audience has a choice about what happens next. The troupe, thus far, has made theirs.

~ Dunneagin