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On Tuesday, 45 Republican senators – all but five members of the GOP conference – voted that impeaching a former president for impeachment is unconstitutional, while ensuring that the Senate will not convict him. While the Republican Party appeared to be at a crossroads over its post-Trump future, it now seems to have concluded which direction to go.
“There is a level of support for this president more than during the election,” said Don Thrasher, chairman of the Nelson County Republican Party in Kentucky, who recently voted to censor Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentuckian, for what Thrasher called “attacking the honorary president” in the debate over the certification of election results.
Of the post-presidential fervor for Trump, he said, “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Devotion to Trump, however, is expensive. The party risks tying its future to a single-term president whose deeply polarizing style has cost the party both the House and the Senate during its four years in office. And he made a hole in the party’s suburban foundation that could be irreparable.
Trump’s place in the party landscape seemed less certain after his November defeat and the Capitol insurgency he helped fuel with his bogus allegations of stolen elections. Polls suggested Trump’s influence over the GOP was starting to wane.
But the GOP is still a party in which Trump’s approval rating is around 80%. For Trump loyalists, Trump’s second the impeachment was seen less as an indictment of the former president’s behavior than as a cause to rally around him – a martyr for an aggrieved populist base.
“There are 74 million people who voted for him,” said Charlie Gerow, Republican strategist based in Pennsylvania. “You’re not going to have a mass exodus … At the grassroots level, it’s very, very popular, and I think the party as a whole understands that to be a majority party, you’re going to have to include these enthusiasts of Trump. . “
The real question now may not be how long Trump looms over the GOP, but whether there is room in his shadow for someone else.
In Washington state, several Republican Party county presidents on Monday called for the resignation of Republican Dan Newhouse, who voted for impeachment. The Oregon Republican Party formally condemned “The betrayal” of the 10 members of the House who voted for impeachment. Over the weekend, Arizona Republicans, despite watching their party founder during the Trump era, voted to censor Cindy McCain, former Senator Jeff Flake and Governor Doug Ducey, while re-electing a Trump loyalist, Kelli Ward, as president of the state party.
And in Wyoming – a state that went 70% for Trump in November – the Carbon County Republican Party voted to censor state representative Liz Cheney for her vote to impeach Trump.
Joey Correnti, the president of Carbon County, ranked Trump in his “five best” presidents of all time.
As for the GOP’s posture towards the former president, he said, “If you’re going to get the benefits of the brand, you roll with the brand.”
In recent weeks, the party’s ruling class appears to have taken note of the base’s continued loyalty to Trump – and the impact it could have on its own political outlook. Republican House Leader Kevin McCarthy said after the insurgency on Capitol Hill that Trump was partly responsible for the riot. But then the California Republican said “everyone in this country has a responsibility,” and he worked otherwise to mend his relationship with Trump.
The main contenders for the presidency of the Republican Party in 2024 are also not eager to cross Trump. Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley turned Trump on in the wake of the Capitol Riot, telling members of the Republican National Committee that his “actions since Election Day will be judged harshly by history.”
Most recently, on Fox News, she said, “I don’t even think there is a basis for impeachment.”
“At some point, I mean, give the man a break,” Haley said. “I mean, move on.
Many traditionalist Republicans are hoping this is exactly what GOP voters will do. Republicans were more successful than Trump in the November election. Dozens of Republican voters have voted for unnamed Trump candidates – and they don’t mind the local party operations that anger against more moderate Republicans.
“The crazy base that is the people of Trump, who are the men and women of Trump’s wing, will never leave him,” said Barrett Marson, Republican political strategist in Arizona. But while “Trump still has a hold over the core Republicans base,” Marson said, “in the larger Republican Party, it doesn’t.”
Yet the party’s most Trumpian militant wing controls many state and county party operations. And the once marginal forces unleashed during the Trump era have metastasized within the party.
Millions of Republicans have bought into Trump’s lie that the November election was stolen from him, with a large majority of Republicans saying after the election that they didn’t think it was free or fair. In Hawaii, a Republican Party official recently resigned after posting sympathetic tweets to QAnon conspiracy theory subscribers. The Texas Republican Party continues to use the slogan “We are the storm,” despite criticism of the phrase’s links to QAnon [The party has denied a connection].
Sean Walsh, a Republican strategist who worked in the Reagan and George HW Bush White Houses, suggested that Trump’s pull on the party was so great that “you have to get away from Donald Trump.”
“A lot of party members are quietly hoping that he is gone, and they can make the transition into the future, ”Walsh said.
However, he said: “Elections are decided on such a narrow margin in the States, you don’t have to anger too many activists to see where this has a significant and life-changing impact on your electoral future if you are a politician. . Darwin and politics are very similar: you have to survive to move on. And you can’t survive if you go out and throw Trump hard.
For Republicans who have resisted Trump and faced recriminations from within the party, this is the lesson of the past three weeks. Trump, despite his departure from Washington, remains close to the center of the GOP political universe.
Solomon Yue, the Oregon Republican National Committee member who pushed for the resolution in his state condemning the 10 House Republicans supporting impeachment, described the Republican impeachment vote as reflecting a lack of courage, which, according to him, is “ not made of chickens —. ”
Like other Trump supporters, Yue suspects Trump’s stature in the party will only improve over time, as Republicans who delayed voting for Trump pull out of the Democratic agenda put forward by Joe Biden.
In Kentucky, where McConnell is the state party sponsor, he nevertheless faced the prospect of a resolution on Saturday pushing him to oppose impeachment. While the State party ruled it inadmissible, the mere challenge of its authority raised eyebrows. And he was still criticized at the county level, where Thrasher said he had coordinated with other county presidents on a measure to reprimand him. The chairman of a neighboring county party told Thrasher that one of his constituents, an elderly woman supporting Trump, asked them if they couldn’t get McConnell ‘tar and feathers’, while also volunteering to ” pour the tar ‘itself.
Trump has kept an unusually low profile since leaving, but he said a desire to remain a force in Republican politics. If he rises – whether he supports pro-Trump Republicans in the primaries in 2022 or as a candidate himself in 2024 – whole swathes of the party could bow to his leadership.
Trump “can intervene in just about any state operation – or at least 90% of states,” Thrasher said. “If he interfered in one of the state party elections, it would work in his favor… I know in Kentucky, if he called for the removal of the whole apparatus, we would vote them.
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