GOP now having to take sides on Trump
Reckoning comes after election losses
Before the votes are even fully counted in the 2022 midterm election, Republicans are starting to face a decision: Do they stick with Donald Trump into 2024 or leave him behind?
For seven years, in office and out, before and after his supporters overran the U.S. Capitol, Trump has exerted a gravitational pull on the party’s base, and through it, the country’s politics, no matter how hard lawmakers, strategists, officials and even his own vice president tried to escape his orbit.
Now, after a string of midterm losses by candidates Trump supported, there are signs of another Republican effort to inch the party away from the former president ahead of his expected announcement on Tuesday of another run for the White House — even as his allies on Capitol Hill demand new acts of fealty to him.
It has not escaped Republicans that this past week represented the third consecutive po
litical cycle in which Democrats ran with considerable success against the polarizing former president. While they rarely spoke his name, Trump formed the background music to their attacks asserting that the Republican Party had grown too extreme.
He was featured in their fundraising solicitations and made cameos in their television ads. The party even meddled in Republican primaries to help Trump-aligned candidates Democratic leaders thought would be easier to beat. Democrats won each of those races.
The tactics helped Democrats cast the election not as a referendum on the current, unpopular president, Joe Biden, but on an even more unpopular ex-president and his allies. It is a strategy they will try again next month in Georgia, where Sen. Raphael Warnock faces a runoff contest against Herschel Walker, a Republican plucked from pro-football retirement by Trump. Already, some are looking beyond that race, dreaming of a 2024 contest that could feature, once again, Trump at the top of the ticket.
“As an American, the idea of another Trump campaign and all of his lies and divisiveness and his efforts to undermine American democracy is an absolute horror show,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. “On the other hand, I got to say that as a politician who wants to see that no Republican is elected to the White House in 2024, from that perspective, his candidacy is probably a good thing.”
But if Trump remains a major motivator for Democrats, Republicans are starting to have to take sides, with his allies in Congress pressuring other Republicans to endorse his 2024 candidacy and a loyal band of senators looking for ways to undercut Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the party’s leader in that chamber and the object of Trump’s scorn.
The divisions were certain to consume the House as well, as Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California is trying to rally support behind his bid to be speaker of the House. Jason Miller, a strategist assisting Trump with his campaign announcement, warned Friday, speaking on Steve Bannon’s internet radio show, that McCarthy “must be much more declarative that he supports President Trump” in 2024.
Some Republicans speaking out now have previously enabled Trump and his policies, either through public support or silence. While they long privately claimed to disdain Trump’s politics, they were fearful of crossing the party’s base.
Calls to move on
Now, the party is reaping political consequences. Trump-backed candidates lost key Senate races in Pennsylvania and Arizona, as well as several House races from Alaska to North Carolina. On Saturday, Democrats were one Senate seat away from maintaining their control in the chamber and were neck-andneck in an unsettled race in Nevada. In the House, despite predictions of a GOP wave, neither party had secured a majority.
Since Tuesday’s election, the Wall Street Journal editorial page and the New York Post — owned by conservative media baron Rupert Murdoch — called for Trump to be tossed aside. Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears of Virginia and Robin Vos, the powerful Assembly speaker in Wisconsin — both major Trump allies during and after his presidency — said Trump shouldn’t be the party’s presidential nominee in 2024.
Republican moderates used
the moment to bemoan the party’s plunge into conspiracy theories and divisive issues that light up the right-wing media. Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah called for a return to classic fiscal conservatism. Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire said during a SiriusXM Radio interview Friday that Trump risked “mucking up” the party’s chances of winning in Georgia.
And Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, who spoke at a Trump rally in Sioux City days before the election, said on Twitter that it was time to move on from Trump’s pet issue. “Quit talking abt 2020,” he wrote.
Even on the Republican National Committee, the 168-member body that has been among Trump’s most immovable defenders, cracks are beginning to show — over not just messaging, but the messenger.
“We can’t just jump and run and, you know, rah-rah Trump and jump over the cliff,” said Kyshia Brassington, an RNC member from North Carolina, who joined the committee two years ago as the party remade itself in Trump’s image. “I think that we need to look at every one of the viable candidates who can run and win for 2024.”
Andy Reilly, an RNC member from Pennsylvania who served as a delegate for Trump at the last two presidential nominating conventions, said the former president’s intervention in races in Pennsylvania — endorsing Dr. Mehmet Oz for Senate and Doug Mastriano for governor, who both lost Tuesday — had cost the party the elections.
“He is an impediment at this point,” Reilly said.
Trump’s plans to run for president, which he is expected to announce Tuesday, could force the issue in ways not seen since Trump’s first campaign, as party leaders are asked to declare their allegiances to Trump or other potential rivals.
“We need DeSantis,” Rep. Peter Meijer of Michigan said of Gov. Ron DeSantis, who won reelection in Florida by 19 percentage points and has quickly emerged as a favorite in a still-theoretical Republican presidential primary. “That should be lit up in neon and projected onto the side of the RNC.”
Meijer, who lost his primary race to a Trump-backed challenger after voting to impeach Trump, hardly represents party leadership, which has largely stayed silent or pledged support. John Gibbs, the Republican who ousted Meijer, lost the general election to a Democrat.
Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, the third-ranking House Republican, endorsed Trump for president Friday ahead of his anticipated campaign announcement Tuesday.
“President Trump has always put America First, and I look forward to supporting him so we can save America,” Stefanik said on Twitter.
Grip on primary voters
But Americans’ opinions on Trump are not black and white. In a recent New York Times/Siena College poll, 30 percent of voters consistently held views that could be considered pro-Trump, such as planning to support him if he runs in 2024 and saying that his actions after the 2020 election were justified.
Another 39 percent percent of voters consistently held a series of views that could be described as anti-Trump. And nearly 30 percent appeared to hold seemingly conflicting views about him and his actions — either by expressing a mix of sentiments or by declining to respond to one of the questions.
There has been no sign yet that Trump, who spent the days after Tuesday’s election posting on his social media site and issuing statements about his stature in the party, has lost his grip on Republican primary voters — a necessary element in any effort to depose him as the party’s leader.
Discussions over Trump’s role in the Georgia runoff on Dec. 6 are underway, as state and national Republicans try to find the best way to energize their base behind Walker without turning off crucial swing voters in the Atlanta suburbs.