TOP REPUBLICAN OFFICIALS ARE BACK TO THEIR FULL SUPPORT OF TRUMP LOYALISTS

 

           …Kevin McCarthy meeting with Donald Trump in Mar-a-Lago

 

Top GOP officials continue to champion Trump’s falsehood of widespread election fraud.

 

The nation’s two most powerful elected Republicans have signaled that they are ready to look past questions of responsibility for the violence at the Capitol Riots.  It was an attempt that left a Capitol Police officer and four rioters dead.  The number one issue of the Republican Party is to try to position it to reclaim its power in 2022.

Because of this being their number one goal, the GOP is backing away from confronting Trump and his loyalists after the Capitol insurrection.  They are now embracing the loyalists instead

Yes, the Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell did announce a little more than a week ago, that the mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol had been “provoked” by Donald Trump.  In addition, the House Minority Leader, Kevin McCarthy had said Trump “bears responsibility” for failing to respond more quickly to the bloody incursion.

But that was then, and they have since done a 180 degree turn.

It started last Tuesday when McConnell (R-Ky.) voted against a procedural motion to proceed with Trump’s impeachment in the Senate.  This, all the while McCarthy (R-Calif.) was planning to meet with Trump in Florida on Thursday, for mending relations that were frayed by the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

These efforts from the top of the GOP serve to accommodate Trump’s most fervent supporters as these top officials continue to champion Trump’s falsehood of widespread electoral fraud.   The same fraud that motivated the attack on Jan. 6.  These top Republicans are also seeking retribution against the few Republicans who have called for accountability from Trump and the party’s conspiracy-minded elements.

Minority Leader McCarthy has already rewarded committee assignments to new pro-Trump firebrands such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.).  She is a QAnon supporter who in the past appeared to ask for violence toward Democratic leaders such as Nancy Pelosi.  Other members of Congress, including Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), have promised to inflict punishment on GOP colleagues who voted for Trump’s impeachment.

For party leadership and top GOP election strategists, video of protesters pummeling Capitol Police officers or chanting for the death of Vice President Mike Pence has proved to be a moot point against their goal to quickly return to power. They have been calling for more of the party having common support, even with those holding white extremist views.

“The issue is, will the Republicans let whatever their splits are, to prevent them from making inroads in 2022, or will Democrats succeed in making Donald Trump the issue?” said Ari Fleischer, a former White House press secretary and Republican consultant.

Operating from Florida, Trump’s advisers have been encouraging party leaders to move on from impeachment and refrain from further criticism of the former president.  This is even as they plot retribution against Republicans who opposed Trump’s final effort to overturn the election.  Trump campaign advisers have commissioned and circulated to GOP lawmakers their latest polling that shows Trump as still formidable in their individual states.  They made it clear that he would seek revenge for any votes or comments against him.

“We cannot take the House and the Senate back without Trump’s help. That’s just a fact,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who has also called for prosecuting every person who illegally entered the U.S. Capitol, but opposes impeachment.

Shaping the Republican strategies is the relatively strong position in which they think they now find themselves.  Democrats govern from a far weaker position than they did at the start of the Obama administration.  Especially with the Senate evenly divided and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) holding only a 10-seat advantage heading into off-year elections.  Elections that are usually always damaging to the party holding the White House.  We have forgotten that the Republicans expanded the number of governorships to 27 last year and control more than 60% of state legislative chambers, after the recent winning of the New Hampshire House and Senate.

That landscape sets the party up well, Republicans say, especially if they are able to make the gains they expect through redistricting in the coming year.  Even if Trump has largely been repudiated by those outside his party, recent polling has shown overwhelming support for Trump among voters who lean Republican.  Today, 79% approve of how he handled the presidency and 57% say the Republican Party should follow Trump’s leadership after the January 6^th attack on the Capitol.

Many have argued that President Donald Trump's efforts amounted to an attempted coup on Jan. 6. Was it?  And why doesn’t that matter?

“There are a lot of Republicans who hold their nose, but if you want to win, there are 6 million voters in 2016 who didn’t show up in 2018,” said a House Republican political strategist.  To comment more frankly about Republican dependence on Trump’s most loyal fans. “They are a voting coalition that matters in this country. They have a voice, and they are going to make that voice heard.”

These numbers have taken away any Republican appetite for picking fights with the more divisive, conspiratorial and militant elements of the party. Instead, the sentiment has gone the other way.

The GOP state party of Oregon released a statement this week that compared Republicans who voted to impeach Trump a second time to the traitor Benedict Arnold.  They also suggested falsely that the Capitol attack had been a “false flag” effort by Trump opponents.  The state party of Arizona last weekend voted to censure Gov. Doug Ducey (R) for standing by the accuracy of President Biden’s win in the state, a move that was dismissed as unimportant by Ducey’s aides.

In response, McCarthy has focused on finding a way to keep his conference together, giving committee assignments to members such as Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), who tweeted “Today is 1776” before the Capitol riot.  And Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who also urged protests at the Capitol.  Greene, who continues to claim falsely that fraud led to the outcome of the presidential election, has been under attack this week because of past social media posts that agreed with calls for violence against Democrats.

A spokesman for McCarthy called the posts “deeply disturbing” and said the leader would have a conversation with Greene, but no punitive actions have been discussed publicly.

“It’s Donald Trump’s party right now. We haven’t seen any figure leave office like this in the Republican Party since Ronald Reagan,” Trump pollster Jim McLaughlin said. “Trump’s agenda was right, and it was successful, and now he has all the right enemies — the establishment, the radical left and the media.”

For his part, McConnell has not said how he will vote at the end of the impeachment trial and has told others that he will not defend the president’s actions related to the U.S. Capitol attack.   That task that is likely to fall to senators such as Lindsay Graham. But McConnell did allow a lunch briefing Wednesday for senators with law professor Jonathan Turley, who has argued that impeaching Trump after his departure from office is unconstitutional.

Those arguments were compelling to many senators, Graham said.  A person familiar with Senate dynamics said that fewer than five Republicans would vote to convict Trump.

“It’s just a cocktail of disaster for the presidency with impeachment as a tool of retribution,” Graham said.

Josh Holmes, a Republican strategist with close ties to the Senate GOP conference, said the objections to impeachment were multifaceted.  They were different from the question of whether Trump played a role in the riot by protesters he had called to Washington and then urged to march on Congress.

“There are three pieces to it: The first is the constitutionality, which to the vast majority of Republicans is dubious at best.  The second piece is the timing of all this in that,  what are we hoping to accomplish here?  The third piece is that most people want to move on,” Holmes said. “Everyone wants to get to the next chapter much more than they want to re-litigate an extremely unfortunate era of the previous one.”

In a sign of how party leaders are hoping to navigate the coming months, Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel put out a statement Wednesday that condemned Democratic impeachment efforts.  But this was offered without offering any defense of Trump’s actions leading up to the violence at the Capitol.

“Not only is this impeachment trial a distraction from the important issues Americans want Congress focused on, it is unconstitutional, and I join the vast majority of Senate Republicans in opposing it,” McDaniel wrote. “As Democrats continue to sow division and obstruct, Republicans will keep fighting for the American people.”

“We’re going to move ahead into the ’22 cycle, and then the 2024 cycle, and Trump could can have a role if he chooses to do that.  We’ll have candidates that we’re not even talking about now that’ll be put before the American people,” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.).

The greatest concern has been focused in Georgia, where Trump has threatened to go after Gov. Brian Kemp (R) for not trying to overturn Biden’s win in the state.  That is a move that could again split the party as it did this month when Democrats won two Senate runoffs there.  Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) also will face reelection in 2022 and is seen as vulnerable by Republicans after a narrow win in a special election.

“As much as Trump wants to have a fight, the only thing Republicans care about is winning,” said another Republican strategist who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the party’s approach to the midterms.

A small and vocal minority of Republicans have continued to call for a reckoning over the extremist and anti-democratic currents that Trump has encouraged.  Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said Tuesday in an address to the Economic Club of Chicago that Republicans must now make clear that Trump lost the election “fair and square.”

“Five people died with the attack on the Capitol. Five human beings died,” Romney said. “There is no question but that the president incited the insurrection that occurred.”

The Lincoln Project, is a group of Republican and former Republican strategists that has pledged to stamp out Trumpism.  They also have continued to attack members of the party who support Trump, including McCarthy and McConnell.

“This is a submission, a surrender to Trump’s coalition but most importantly to the anti-Americanness of that coalition,” said Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt, a former aide to Vice President Richard Cheney and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). “They are foolish men who continue to believe they are riding the tiger as opposed to riding inside the tiger, which they have been doing for some time.”

Things are so un-stable inside the GOP that the speculation is that the president’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, might run for the open North Carolina seat, or that the president’s daughter Ivanka Trump, might mount a primary challenge to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla).  But this has yet to spark serious hand-wringing about Trump’s intentions.

Copyright G. Ater 2021