Trump’s final days expose Republican fault lines
The five Republicans who represent Wisconsin in the U.S. House all voted against impeaching President Donald Trump after his supporters stormed the Capitol.
But they have not acted and spoken in lockstep amid the chaos of Trump’s exit.
They’ve handled the final days of this presidency in different ways, reflecting the divisions and turmoil Trump has spawned within the GOP on his way out the door.
Scott Fitzgerald and Tom Tiffany voted to overturn an election.
Mike Gallagher, Glenn Grothman and Bryan Steil did not.
They’ve differed in their public comments about Trump as well
Grothman used his brief floor time in the impeachment debate to heap praise on the outgoing president’s record in office.
Steil was conspicuous in his silence about Trump throughout the fierce debates of the past two weeks over impeachment, the Electoral College vote and Trump’s role in the Capitol riot.
And Gallagher declared a clean political break, announcing that despite his vote against impeachment, “President Trump has lost my support — permanently.”
Among GOP members of Congress, these lawmakers fall somewhere between Trump’s handful of detractors and his most zealous backers. But in their votes and rhetoric, they embody some of the fault lines we’re likely to see among Republicans in the aftermath of the Trump presidency.
Even as Trump’s approval is drooping in national polls, he retains a hold on many GOP voters and activists, making some Republican politicians loath to criticize him while others are more open than ever in their dismay.
The potential for a schism within the Republican Party can already be seen in Wisconsin, with a few GOP activists publicly decrying Trump’s hold on the party but others angry at the party for not fighting harder for Trump.
The potential to shape Republican political careers is also real. Take Gallagher, a rising figure in the party and a possible candidate one day for statewide office. His vote against impeachment was criticized by Democrats and some antiTrump conservatives. But his self-declared “break” with the president cuts in the opposite direction. Will it hurt him in his own party? Will it enhance his appeal outside the GOP base?
Here is a look at where these five House members from Wisconsin have differed on key questions that gripped Congress and the nation in the final weeks of Trump’s term:
Trump’s role in the attack on the Capitol
Gallagher has been by far the most critical of the president. As the Capitol was occupied, he said on Twitter, “Mister President, you have got to stop this. You are the only person who can call this off. … The election is over. Call it off.”
In a column, Gallagher wrote that Trump in his Jan. 6 speech to supporters inflamed the crowd even if he “did not tell them to lay violent siege to the Capitol.”
“President Donald Trump bears responsibility for the tragic events of Jan. 6. He lied to his supporters, insisted that his ‘sacred landslide’ election was stolen, and suggested that Vice President Mike Pence should or even could reverse the outcome. He then dithered for hours as the vice president, the Congress and its employees were in mortal danger, castigating Pence as a coward,” Gallagher wrote.
Grothman has both criticized and defended the president. He said on the day of the siege that Trump should be doing more to defuse the situation and said later that week that “the president did gin up this day to be more than it should have been.”
But on the House floor Wednesday, Grothman defended Trump’s speech, saying the president “clearly said he wanted peaceful and patriotic demonstration. He did say he wanted people to fight like hell, or we’re not going to have a country anymore, but that’s obviously standard hyperbole and was not meant to (spur) physical fights.”
Fitzgerald was asked at a Wispolitics.com forum Thursday if he agreed with GOP House leader Kevin McCarthy that Trump bore responsibility for what happened.
“I don’t think we know yet,” he said. Fitzgerald voiced skepticism that Trump’s speech ignited the riot but said, “I think he definitely fired up that crowd in a way that some people may have believed he meant, ‘Go to the Capitol and intimidate.’ If that’s the way those people perceived it, that’s troubling.”
Steil has neither criticized nor defended Trump’s conduct on Jan. 6. He offered no public comment about Trump’s role in the riot and his office did not respond to requests for comment.
Overturning the election
All five Republicans criticized the way the election was conducted in Wisconsin.
But only Tiffany and Fitzgerald voted, along with the majority of GOP House members, to reject the electoral votes of two swing states, Arizona and Pennsylvania. Both said they would have rejected Wisconsin’s electoral votes, too, had there been a vote.
Tiffany made the baseless charge that Milwaukee and Dane county officials allowed “hundreds of thousands of illegal votes to be cast and counted,” an allegation that was rejected by courts.
“I feel like, and many of my constituents feel like, the only way that we can get our voices heard is for somebody like me to object on Jan. 6,” Tiffany said.
Fitzgerald said the Trump campaign made unfounded claims about voter fraud. But he asserted Thursday that 77,000 more people voted in his congressional district than voted four years earlier, suggesting that was because absentee voting was too loosely regulated by election clerks during the pandemic.
(The actual increase in presidential votes cast in the 5th Congressional District was roughly 45,000, not 77,000. And turnout was up significantly throughout the country in 2020. In Wisconsin, it increased the most in rural counties that voted for Trump).
Grothman criticized the effort by fellow Republicans to alter the election, saying it was “absurd and dangerous” for Congress to override results certified by states.
“I ask my Republican friends how they would feel if in 2024 Mike Pompeo were to best Kamala Harris with 275 electoral votes and a Democratic Congress were to throw out Wisconsin’s electoral votes because we have photo ID laws or didn’t have enough voting machines? We would be apoplectic,” Grothman said.
Gallagher called the GOP attempt to overturn the election “constitutional nihilism” and “vast federal overreach.”
Like Grothman and Gallagher, Steil voted against overturning the election, but unlike the others, he did not issue a statement explaining his vote, and his office did not respond to requests for comment.
Impeachment
Wisconsin’s three House Democrats — Gwen Moore, Mark Pocan and Ron Kind — joined other Democrats in that body in backing Trump’s impeachment.
“We all know, whether you say it aloud or not, Donald Trump was responsible for inciting the attacks on our democracy when he should have been the one person protecting it the most, and for that he is unfit to be president,” Pocan said.
The state’s five House Republicans all voted no on impeachment, arguing that it made little sense with so little time left in Trump’s term.
Gallagher said he would have supported a motion to censure Trump instead for his conduct, a step that was also endorsed during the impeachment debate by McCarthy, the top Republican leader in the House.
Asked at the Wispolitics.com forum whether he would have supported censure, Fitzgerald said it was so little discussed among House Republicans, “I just don’t know. … I really don’t have an opinion on that.”
The others did not respond to a request for comment about their stand on censure.
House leadership
Among the 10 House Republicans nationally who supported impeaching Trump was Wyoming’s Liz Cheney, who holds the No. 3 GOP leadership post in that chamber. Because of her support for impeachment, a group of pro-Trump House Republicans is pushing for her ouster from leadership.
Gallagher on Twitter Thursday called Cheney a principled leader and said, “she has my full support.”
The others did not reply to requests for comment on Cheney.
The next two years
With the 2022 midterm elections looming, including races for governor and U.S. Senate in Wisconsin, Trump’s legacy hangs over the GOP, embraced by many in the party, repudiated by some.
Some grassroots Republicans have echoed the rhetoric of the president’s most militant supporters. The chair of the St. Croix County GOP encouraged members online to “prepare for war” and join in “eliminating” leftist tyrants from local office, before taking down those appeals under criticism from the local sheriff and Republican Party and resigning.
Others rebuked the president and his boosters.
“I campaigned very hard for (Trump) all year long ... the behavior since then has been downright embarrassing,” Fond du Lac GOP chair Rohn Bishop said on a local radio show Jan. 7, calling the storming of the Capitol a stain on Trump’s record “he won’t be able to erase.”
“You look at Wisconsin. How in the hell are we going to go into those suburbs and get those Republican women who just didn’t want to vote for Trump to vote Republican when our party is going to try to overturn a legitimately held election?” he said. “We have to be better than that.”