There’s A Weird Lack Of Urgency Among Republicans Who’d Rather See Trump Not Renominated
The Republican billionaire class deluded itself into imagining that another Republican could defeat Trump and tens of millions of dollars were poured into primary campaigns for Ron DeSantis, Tim Scott (remember him?), Nikki Haley and even Chris Christie. At least Doug Burgum wasted his own millions. Now that reality has sunk in, the billionaires are mostly acclimating themselves to getting on the Trump bandwagon. After all, as horrible as he is— and as big a threat to democracy, etc, etc— they’re all afraid Biden would raise their taxes… even though he hasn’t. Example— Wall Street bankster Thomas Peterffy may be filled with angst over what he calls an “incalculable and unpredictable,” second Trump term, but he’s going to vote for him anyway. “Peterffy’s comments,” reported Sam Sutton, “reflect the collective angst of Wall Street Republicans whose views on Trump are completely divorced from those of the GOP base… high-dollar GOP donors will soon face an uncomfortable decision as to how to proceed… And while some of the finance industry’s kingmakers might blanch at the thought of four more years of President Joe Biden, the potential dysfunction of a second Trump term could raise existential questions about the future of American democracy.”
This past Sunday, Ron Brownstein, posited that neither of the 2 GOP strategies for beating Trump looks feasible. DeSantis’ strategy is based on the idea that Trump can’t be trusted to advance conservative priorities (and neither can Haley). He’s painting himself as the most far right candidate Republicans will have a chance to vote for. “The theory in DeSantis’ camp has been that the only way to beat Trump is to aim directly at his core supporters with a conservative message... But so far, his decision to offer voters what amounts to Trumpism without Trump has returned few dividends. With his Trump-like agenda on immigration and foreign policy, and emphasis on culture-war issues such as transgender rights, DeSantis has alienated many of the centrist GOP voters most dubious of the former president while failing to dislodge many of his core supporters.”
“Haley, in mirror image,” wrote Brownstein, “is grounding her coalition in the party’s center. She has focused on consolidating the centrist GOP voters and donors who have long expressed the most resistance to Trump. That includes moderates, people with at least a four-year college degree, GOP-leaning independents, and suburbanites.”
And that brings us right to Jonathan Martin’s essay from last week: Where Are All the Anti-Trump Republicans? Same place they’ve been since 2015? Very lonely. There just aren’t very many of them and whatever there was… well, by now they’ve largely left the GOP. Martin, however, paints a picture of some floundering Republican elected officials who are too scared of Trump to do much. He added that “Republican officials who have little appetite for Trump’s return would stay mum and enable Trump’s comeback, each of them finding a rationale for their silence, some more compelling than others… The senior officials who worked in Trump’s administration would mute themselves, disagree on whether to go public with their fears about a restoration or just not work in the coordinated, strategic and relentless fashion that’s needed to get through to voters... Those GOP lawmakers who did step up to try to block Trump’s path wouldn’t coordinate their efforts, would disagree on who the best alternative is and thereby muddy their effort and undermine their mission.”
Unlike in 2016, however, those who feel strongest about the risk Trump poses may have the least ability to stop him. It’s a depressing indication of our polarized times that Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) and former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) could only hurt DeSantis, Haley and Christie by publicly rallying to their side.
“If virtually all the GOP governors and senators were to say they would not support Trump, even in the general, I don’t think his poll numbers would be harmed, at all,” Romney told me. “They might even get better. I think the MAGA base dislikes our elected elites as much or more than they dislike Democrats.”
…There is a model for how Trump could be toppled. It’s the way Biden claimed the Democratic nomination in 2020. The moment he won the South Carolina primary it sent an immediate message to Democrats hungry for a candidate who could defeat Trump (sound familiar?) that Biden was their man. With endorsements from his former foes and other party leaders, Biden rolled into Super Tuesday three days later with unstoppable momentum.
That said, there are some, well, very significant differences between then and now. For starters, today’s Democrats are a much more establishment-oriented party than today’s splintered GOP. What happened with Democrats in 2020 is how Republican primaries used to go. Further, Donald Trump is a far more formidable candidate than Bernie Sanders, whom Biden had to overcome.
Just as significant, Trump has a structural advantage this year because his lieutenants worked to frontload the primary calendar and pushed states toward winner-take-all delegate allocations. For all his unpredictable and impulsive tendencies, the former president trusted a trio of aides— Chris LaCivita, Susie Wiles and Brian Jack— to leverage his grassroots strength and reshape the nominating contest in a way that was anything but improvisational.
Which is why, for all of Sununu’s optimism about dominoes falling, some Republicans increasingly believe the only way to keep Trump from the nomination is for him to be convicted of felonies before next summer’s nominating convention
“Are we really going to bring this race down and out before Super Tuesday, when the guy goes on trial,” Christie told me, alluding to the March 4 start of Trump’s case on Jan. 6-related charges in Washington. “That’s why I’m sitting here saying: I’m in through the convention. It’s not that I’m delusional, it’s that nobody else is paying attention to what’s really happening.”
What’s happening, Christie explained, is that the judge presiding over Trump’s case in Washington has given no indication she’ll push back the trial and that former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows has signed an immunity deal with federal prosecutors to avoid charges in exchange for testifying that the former president committed crimes.
Christie isn’t the only person eying the potential March convergence of Trump’s trial and his effectively wrapping up the Republican nomination. No Labels chief Nancy Jacobson last week reached out to influential party figures to ask them if Haley could be persuaded to run on the third-party group’s line if and when Trump drives her out of the GOP primary, a person familiar with her told me
Haley, still eying a future in Republican politics, has little interest in such a mission. In fact, she’s already planning for a showdown with Trump in South Carolina. Her campaign is planning a multi-city fundraising tour of California in February, by when, they assume, she’ll be in a head-to-head finale of sorts and can vacuum all the anti-Trump dollars out west.
For now, though, much of the party’s leadership class is falling in line with Trump or staying on the sidelines. Look no further than the sound of silence coming out of the winter meeting this week of the Republican Governors Association, a group that once rallied to their own (see George W. Bush in 2000) but is now divided. Reynolds, the group’s chair, is for DeSantis, other governors have backed Trump and others still are hanging back to see if Haley can emerge after the first two states.
Back at Stanford, former Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-VA), who lost her seat in the 2018 suburban wave against Trump, said she had seen this movie before.
“Just like in ‘16, all these guys came around too late,” Comstock grumbled. “Like this should’ve been done six months ago. You didn’t know Trump was a threat? You didn’t know he was leading?”
And then there’s the Democratic Party theory of the case, which the same as it was in 2016: Trump is too outré to win. They really believe that. CNN polls released yesterday for Michigan and Georgia showed that if the election were held today Trump would beat Biden in each state— in Georgia by 5 points and in Michigan by 10.