Down in the polls, facing calls from his own party to step away from the 2024 presidential campaign, and struggling to keep his party together on the Israel-Hamas war, Joe Biden nonetheless may possess a secret weapon. It’s the Republicans.

On the surface, the GOP could not be better placed for the fall election. Their rival is 81 years old. The public isn’t buying the Biden administration argument that the economy is roaring. Their presumptive nominee actually has been helped, not hindered, by unprecedented post-presidential legal problems. To adapt a phrase from the Democrats’ history, the Republicans’ happy days should be here again. 

But, to recast a phrase from that song, which introduced Franklin Delano Roosevelt at the 1932 Democratic National Convention, the Republicans aren’t singing a song of cheer again. In fact, they can’t get together long enough to sing in one voice that, once they regain the Senate and the White House, “Your cares and troubles are gone/There’ll be no more from now on!”

Instead, their cares and troubles are multiplying. That’s what happens when a fractious party turns a legislative triumph into political upheaval — and when resignations transform a 222-213 majority into a dangerous situation where the GOP can afford only one defection in any floor vote. 

Moments after the Republican-controlled House approved legislation to avert a government shutdown, the knives were out. GOP rebels denounced the legislation and Speaker Mike Johnson. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia filed a “motion to vacate” the office of the speaker, prompting fresh worries that the GOP, which has had two speakers in the past several months, might soon dethrone Johnson, presumably on the conviction that the Louisianan, who opposes gay marriage and abortion rights, isn’t sufficiently conservative. 

It is enough to get The Wall Street Journal, no liberal lodestar, to ask, “So what’s wrong with Johnson now? Apparently because he’s not willing to indulge kamikaze acts like shutting down the government, Johnson is a sellout too.”

The kamikaze act Greene contemplates grows out of the view that Johnson shouldn’t have allowed the spending bill averting a government shutdown to move to the floor. The critiques: The measure defied the unwritten GOP custom that only bills that are supported by a majority of the Republican conference should advance to a vote. Any bill attracting the support of a majority of the Democrats is the political equivalent of a hip-drop tackle. This is a time for confrontation, not cooperation. So what if the government is shut down? 

The counterargument, which Johnson employed: The Republicans cannot become the natural party of American governance if they can’t govern, or at least let the government go about its normal business.

“There’s a difference between being in the majority and being in the minority,” Rep. Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania, one of the 101 Republicans who voted for the spending measure, said in an interview. “In the majority, you have to govern. You can’t just sit back and criticize. There comes a time when you’re in the majority when you have to do the responsible thing, not go on TV and criticize and raise an enormous amount of money for your campaign, which is what some of these people are doing.”

The rebellion on the right isn’t over. Most of the Republican rebels oppose more aid to Ukraine. Johnson supports it. The rebels don’t want the aid package to go to the floor. The speaker insists on taking it to the floor. 

That may be the moment when Greene calls for a vote to remove Johnson from office. That also may be the stranger-things-have-happened moment when the Democrats race to the rescue of Johnson and provide the margin of victory to keep him in power. There would have to be a price for that rescue. The Democrats are discussing that price during the Easter recess.

Then there is Donald Trump’s apparent intention, if he is returned to the White House, to pardon the insurrectionists who mounted a riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and sought to overturn the 2020 election. By more than a 3-to-1 margin, Americans disapprove of the actions of those who forced their way into the Capitol, according to a January CBS/YouGov Poll.

And yet Trump in recent weeks has added fresh emphasis to his support of the rioters. He’s spoken of them as “unbelievable patriots,” described them as “hostages,” and indicated he would pardon them “the first day we get into office.”

The Trump conundrum: He must amplify his rhetoric and radicalize his message to solidify his support. “Trump needs to be controversial to get his free media, which could lead him to do even more of what he is inclined to do naturally — say outrageous things,” said Bruce Cain, a Stanford political scientist who believes that this circumstance can erode GOP prospects in House and Senate races. “This is something Democrats can use in every Senate and House race, asking Republican candidates what they would do if Trump does that day one.

“My guess,” he continues, “is that it further erodes educated Republican and Independent support.”

It already is too much for Lisa Murkowski, a second-generation Alaska senator who won as a write-in candidate in 2010 after being toppled in the GOP primary. She told CNN that she would “absolutely” not support Trump in the fall and said, “I just regret that our party is seemingly becoming a party of Donald Trump.” Sen. Susan Collins of Maine endorsed Nikki Haley and all but said she wouldn’t endorse Trump if he were nominated.

Eleven months ago, after Trump issued incendiary remarks during a CNN town meeting, Biden gleefully went on Twitter, a tactic he borrowed from Trump. “It’s simple, folks,” the president wrote on the social media platform now known as X. “Do you want four more years of that? If you don’t, pitch in to our campaign.”

In recent days, a Morning Consult poll showed Biden making gains on Trump in all but one of the swing states.  

For nine years, the Democrats have waited, wondering when and if Trump might finally go too far — and allow them to peel away some of his support. It hasn’t happened yet. It may never happen. The problem with secret weapons is that they are not always effective weapons.

A Swampscott High School Class of 1972 member, David M. Shribman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.