The week
GOP leaders want to ‘bury’ Trump, but avoid ‘making him Jesus’
“The top Republicans want to bury President Trump forever,” Axios reported Wednesday morning, hours before the House ousted Trump a second time. “But they are torn between doing it with a quick death by impeachment or letting it disappear slowly.” A dozen or more House Republicans, including caucus leader # 3, MP Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), Say they will vote for impeachment, and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky. ), allegedly believes that Trump’s actions around the siege of the Capitol last week are impeachment offenses. McConnell is more likely to vote to condemn Trump than not, sources said to Axios. “Republican House leader Kevin McCarthy would love a Trumpless world, but he doesn’t want to stab it with fingerprints,” reports Axios. McCarthy and his “faded caucus see the danger that the impeachment-doom route is, as one prominent conservative said, ‘make you Jesus. … Truly stupid.'” Trump’s allies warn that any Republican who votes for impeachment or the convicted Trump will never win the elections again, although a Politico / Morning Consult poll released on Wednesday morning found that 40 percent of Republicans and Republican-prone independents now say they would vote for Trump if he competed in the primaries of the Republican Party in 2024, up from 53 percent in November. “President Trump’s role in fueling last week’s US Capitol insurrection is negatively impacting his future political prospects – even among his base,” said Kyle Dropp of Morning Consult. Honestly, “it’s hard to know where other Senate Republicans are in this,” MSNBC host Chris Hayes writes in Politico’s Playbook. But if Mitch McConnell is ready to condemn, “it looks like we may – too late – have reached the moment that McConnell and the Trump-era GOP desperately tried to avoid: a Goldwater to Nixon moment when the party decisively breaks with the criminal and dangerous president. Of course, anyone who took that side of the bet in the past four years would be dead now, so I guess I’ll believe it when I see it. “More stories from theweek.com Do Democrats realize the danger they are in? America’s encounter with reality What it always dealt with in ‘Blue Lives Matter’