GOP showing intolerance for Trump’s antagonists
Second Republican of 10 who voted for impeachment ousted
WASHINGTON >> The defeat Tuesday of Rep. Peter Meijer of Michigan, the young conservative scion of a supermarket empire who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump, was another sign that the party’s conservative core is bent on casting out those who have dared to break with Trump, who has embarked on a revenge tour aimed at punishing his adversaries.
Meijer was defeated by a far-right challenger endorsed by Trump, becoming the second of 10 Republicans who broke with the party to back impeachment to be ousted in a GOP primary.
Republican voters in the Grand Rapids-based district rejected Meijer in favor of John Gibbs, a former official at the Department of Housing and Urban Development with a history of firing off inflammatory, conspiratorial tweets. He earned the former president’s backing after Meijer supported impeaching Trump for inciting an insurrection Jan. 6, 2021, calling him “unfit for office.”
With Meijer’s loss, more than half the Republicans who voted to impeach Trump — at least six of the 10 — will not return to Congress next year. His defeat underscored the continuing appetite among rightwing voters who form the party’s base to force out those who defied the former president.
Two other Republicans who voted to impeach Trump — Reps. Jaime Herrera Beutler and Dan Newhouse — were also facing challenges Tuesday from Trump-endorsed opponents.
As of Wednesday afternoon, both Herrera Beutler and Newhouse appeared to be faring better, aided in part by an open primary system and a crowded field of challengers. But there were many ballots left outstanding.
In the days after the Jan. 6 attack, Republicans alarmed by the violence, including Meijer, hoped that impeaching Trump would purge him from the party. Instead, they have been the ones to be marginalized and expelled from the GOP ranks in Congress, as primary voters favor those who have adopted Trump’s playbook.
Four Republicans, most of them squeezed by unfavorably redrawn districts, decided to retire rather than run for reelection. Rep. Tom Rice of South Carolina was defeated in June by a Trumpendorsed primary challenger who called Rice’s support of impeachment a betrayal. And Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who has become Trump’s chief antagonist and most vocal critic in Congress as the vice chair of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 assault, is trailing her Trump-endorsed primary opponent significantly in public polls.
The result is that the already thin ranks of moderate and mainstream conservative Republicans in the House are likely to be even thinner next year, with brash, Trump-style candidates replacing them. Should they prevail in November, they will help set the tone for a potential GOP majority in which loyalty to Trump is a driving force.
In another era, Meijer would have been considered a poster boy for the future of the party: a 34-yearold, self-funding, conservative military veteran who served in Iraq and has espoused a hawkish foreign policy, even going so far as to defy the Biden administration by secretly flying to Afghanistan last August to witness evacuation efforts as U.S. troops withdrew.
But on his third day in office, Meijer was evacuated from the House chamber as a violent mob laid siege to the Capitol. A week later, he voted to impeach Trump. In an interview days after his vote, Meijer conceded that he “may very well have” ended his career in Congress.
“But I think it’s also important that we have elected leaders who are not thinking solely about what’s in their individual self-interest, not what is going to be politically expedient, but what we actually need for the country,” he told ABC.
Meijer’s premonition proved correct. By Wednesday evening, he trailed Gibbs by about 4 percentage points.
Hours earlier, The Associated Press had called the race for Gibbs.
Still, Meijer put up a much stronger fight than even some of his allies in Washington had predicted, with suburban voters in his district turning out in strong support of the incumbent. But it was ultimately not enough.