On Tuesday, 45 Republican senators – all but five Republican Party conference members – voted that putting a former president on trial for impeachment is unconstitutional, almost guaranteeing that the Senate will not condemn him. If the Republican Party appeared to be at a crossroads over its post-Trump future, it now appears to have concluded in which direction to go.
“There is a level of support for this president more than during the election,” said Don Thrasher, president of the Nelson County Republican Party in Kentucky, who recently voted to censor minority leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentuckian, so Thrasher called “impugning the honorary president” in the debate on the certification of electoral results.
Of Trump’s post-presidential fervor, he said, “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Devotion to Trump, however, comes at a great cost. The party is at risk of tying its future to a single-term president, whose deeply polarizing style cost the party both the House and the Senate during its four-year term. And he opened a hole in the party’s suburban foundation that may be irreparable.
Trump’s place in the party landscape seemed less certain after his defeat in November and the Capitol insurrection, which he helped fuel with his false claims of a stolen election. The polls suggested that Trump’s influence on the GOP was starting to fade.
But the Republican Party is still a party where Trump’s approval rating is around 80%. For Trump loyalists, the second Trump impeachment was seen less as an accusation of the former president’s behavior than as a cause to unite around him – a martyr from an offended populist base.
“There are 74 million people who voted for him,” said Charlie Gerow, a Republican strategist based in Pennsylvania. “You are not going to have a mass exodus … At the grassroots level, he is very, very popular, and I think the party as a whole understands that to be a majority party, it will have to include Trump enthusiasts. “
The real question now may not be how long Trump hangs on the GOP, but whether there is room under his shadow for someone else.
In Washington state, several Republican county presidents on Monday called for the resignation of Republican Representative Dan Newhouse, who voted for impeachment. The Republican Party of Oregon formally condemned “The betrayal” of the 10 members of the House who voted for impeachment. Over the weekend, Arizona Republicans, despite watching their party’s founder during the Trump era, voted to censor Cindy McCain, former Senator Jeff Flake and Governor Doug Ducey, while re-electing a Trump supporter, Kelli Ward, as president of the state party.
And in Wyoming – a state that was 70 percent for Trump in November – the Carbon County Republican Party voted to censor state representative Liz Cheney for her vote to impeach Trump.
Joey Correnti, president of Carbon County, rated Trump in his “best five” presidents of all time.
As for the GOP’s stance towards the ex-president, he said: “If you are going to receive the benefit of the brand, you walk with the brand”.
In recent weeks, the party’s ruling class seems to have noticed the base’s sustained loyalty to Trump – and the impact this could have on their own political perspectives. Republican House leader Kevin McCarthy said after the Capitol insurrection that Trump had some responsibility for the riot. But then the California Republican said that “everyone in this country has some responsibility”, and he worked to fix his relationship with Trump.
Not even the Republican Party’s top 2024 presidential candidates are eager to face Trump. Former UN ambassador Nikki Haley attacked Trump after the Capitol rebellion, telling members of the Republican National Committee that his “actions since election day will be judged harshly by history”.
More 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 time,” said Haley. “I mean, move on.”
Many traditionalist Republicans expect this to be exactly what Republican voters will do. Republicans were more successful in the November elections than Trump. Dozens of Republican voters vote for unnamed Trump candidates – and don’t care about the local party operations that are angering the more moderate Republicans.
“The crazy base that is the Trump people, who are the men and women in the Trump wing, will never abandon him,” said Barrett Marson, a Republican political strategist in Arizona. But while “Trump still has control over the central base of Republicans,” said Marson, “in the Republican Party, that is not the case.”
Still, the most activist and Trumpian wing of the party controls many state and municipal party operations. And the once marginal forces unleashed during the Trump era metastasized within the party.
Millions of Republicans believed Trump’s lie that the November election was stolen from him, with a large majority of Republicans saying after the election that they did not consider it free or fair. In Hawaii, a Republican Party official recently resigned after posting sympathetic tweets to QAnon conspiracy theory subscribers. The Republican Party of Texas continues to use the slogan “We are the storm”, despite criticism about the phrase links to QAnon [The party has denied a connection].
Sean Walsh, a Republican strategist who worked at the White Houses of Reagan and George HW Bush, suggested that Trump’s influence on the party was so great that “you have to get rid of Donald Trump”.
“Many in the party silently hope that he will leave and can make the transition to the future, ”said Walsh.
However, he said: “The elections are decided by such a narrow margin in the states, you don’t need to irritate many activists because it has a real significant and life-changing impact on your electoral future if you are a politician. politics are very similar: you need to survive to move on. And you cannot survive if you go out and get rid of Trump hard. “
For Republicans who resisted Trump and faced recriminations from within the party, this has been the lesson of the past three weeks. Trump, despite his departure from Washington, remains close to the center of the Republican political universe.
Solomon Yue, the Oregon Republican National Committee member who defended the resolution in his state condemning the 10 Republicans who support impeachment in the House, described the Republicans’ pro-impeachment vote as reflecting a lack of courage, which he said “is not made of chickens —. ”
Like other Trump supporters, Yue suspects that Trump’s stature in the party will only improve over time, as Republicans who did not vote for Trump retreat from Joe Biden’s proposed Democratic agenda.
In Kentucky, where McConnell is the godfather of the state party, he nevertheless faced the prospect on Saturday of a resolution urging him to oppose impeachment. Although the state party decided out of order, the sheer challenge to its authority was astonishing. AND he is still being criticized at the county level, where Thrasher said he has coordinated with other county presidents a measure to rebuke him. The chairman of a neighboring county party told Thrasher that one of its constituents, an elderly lady who supported Trump, asked if they could not “paint with tar and feathers” McConnell, while offering to “dump the tar” herself.
Trump has maintained an unusually low profile since leaving office, but he indicated a desire to remain a force in republican politics. If he rises – whether supporting pro-Trump Republicans in the primaries in 2022 or as a candidate in 2024 – entire sections of the party may bow in his direction.
Trump “can intervene in virtually any state operation – or at least 90% of the states,” said Thrasher. “If he intervened in any of the party’s state elections, that would be in his favor … I know that in Kentucky, if he asked for the removal of the entire apparatus, we would vote.”