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Donald Trump’s first week of retirement ended well. On Tuesday, only five Republican senators objected to a motion that declared the impeachment of a former president unconstitutional – far from the 17 Republican Party votes that Democrats would need to plead guilty. “He was satisfied, because that is certainly his opinion: that it is unfair and unconstitutional, and he knows that it means that there is no chance of being convicted,” said a close friend who spends time with Trump in Mar-a-Lago . (This source and several other Trump friends and advisers have asked to remain anonymous to speak frankly.) Citizen Trump now feels confident that he will come out with a legal and political victory.
Trump has considered two questions: how to challenge the Senate judgment and how to maintain its political relevance for the next four years. He is receiving dissenting opinions from family, friends and counselors. Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, former White House chief political strategist Steve Bannon and a handful of others are lobbying him not only to defend himself against the charge that he incited the January 6 Capitol uprising, but to use the Senate judgment as an opportunity to go back – lower his allegations of electoral fraud in the key decisive states. “Show everyone the receipts,” is how Bannon puts it, referring to the evidence of fraud that the Trump team claims to have.
The field that favors this combative approach gained momentum (at least in their opinion) when Trump hired the lawyer who will defend him. South Carolina attorney Butch Bowers was recommended to Trump by Senator Lindsey Graham, a friend and official colleague of the JAG. Bowers represented former Republican governors Mark Sanford and Nikki Haley at impeachment and ethics hearings in Columbia, the state capital. But Bowers is also an expert on electoral legislation with a particular focus on legal voter identity testing. This led to speculation that Bowers might try to argue that there was, in fact, a significant fraud that affected the election result.
Daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner, along with friends and informal advisers, including Senator Graham, strongly oppose this approach. They believe it will reinforce images of the crowd of Trump supporters who gathered in Washington for a “Stop the Steal” rally. Graham, who has spoken to Trump at least twice since Joe Biden opened, told him, “You just don’t want to go there,” according to a source familiar with the conversation.
This camp believes that there are other ways – and a long time – to pursue the issue of electoral law reform, and they are asking Trump to lead a movement that seeks that. In the meantime, they say, Trump should try to legally challenge whether the Senate can actually try a president who has already stepped down. And so he should simply fight the impeachment count in the Senate, arguing that at no time did he incite his supporters to violence. His legal team will point out – as his supporters have continually done on social media and conservative chat programs – that he has asked them to march “peacefully and patriotically” to the Capitol to protest the certification of votes from the electoral college.
The group “just go ahead” had been telling Trump that there was no way for Democrats to get the 17 Republican votes needed for sentencing, and Tuesday’s vote made that argument even stronger. When 45 Republican senators, including minority leader Mitch McConnell, voted in favor of the motion that declared a Senate trial unconstitutional, it effectively meant the end of the game, as even some Democrats privately admitted. “The impeachment trial is dead on arrival,” said Sen. Rand Paul, who presented the motion.
That message, said the Palm Beach friend who spoke to Trump and his inner circle, was broadcast. “He will let Bowers deal with the trial in a straightforward manner, without litigating the stuff of electoral fraud. The president will be acquitted again, and then he will use his two acquittals as a badge of honor for his base.”
And then? Before January 6, Trump was likely to run again in 2024, using the “we were robbed” theme as a starting point for a revenge campaign. The Capitol riot and political consequences may have led him to rethink, say two sources. When asked by a journalist last week what his plans were for ’24, Trump’s response was enigmatic: “We will be back somehow.”
Some of his aides are urging him to focus on making Republican-controlled state legislatures ensure that changes in election laws caused by the pandemic are not codified in the future – particularly the widespread use of ballots in the mail. Others are skeptical of this idea. “He doesn’t have the capacity to pay attention to delving too much into the weeds about something like that,” says a friend. “He can do some rallies, but that effort will depend on others.”
Some of his friends speculated that he might try to start a media company – possibly a social media company to compete with Facebook and Twitter, which banned him. But this is much easier said than done; raising the money and hiring the people needed to face a trusted competitor is a lot of work. “There is this perception among illiterate people in business that Trump can just snap his fingers and do things in the media or in the housing market or whatever, but not quite, especially now,” said a Trump business friend. . ” Your ‘brand’ suffered a blow, especially in the areas of media and finance “, says this friend.
Those who pressure him to run for president again say that the idea that his “brand” has been damaged is nonsense. They point to a recent NBC News poll showing that 87% of Republican Party voters still support him, even after January 6. “If he is so hurt, why are Democrats so concerned about his candidacy [in 2024] that they need to accuse you again, “Giuliani asked in his podcast recently. (A Senate conviction would prevent Trump from seeking public office again.)
The next election is still a long way off, and mercurial Trump may change his mind about his political future every day for the next two and a half years. One option that the ex-president would be considering, according to two of his friends, is to give the mantle of “Trumpism” to another person. If he didn’t run, I could see him giving his full support to a Successor similar to that of Trump, “says one of the friends.” Right. “
Who can it be? Until very recently, a name that always came up was former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador Nikki Haley, whom Trump liked. But the former president would have been irritated by Haley’s appearance on Laura Ingraham’s television show in late January. Haley criticized Trump not only for his handling of the January 6 events, but also for his attempts to undermine the results of the November election in the previous two months. This criticism will be seen as an act of disloyalty and will likely rule out Trump’s future support, friends say.
There are other alternatives. The first of them, say Trump’s advisers and friends, is Florida’s young governor, Ron DeSantis. Like Trump, he is irritated by the press; like Trump, he not only favored keeping the economy open during the pandemic, but as governor, he really did. Trump likes DeSantis, admires his combativeness and knows he is smart: “smart as hell,” says Trump’s business friend in Florida. (DeSantis graduated from Yale College and Harvard Law School.) Will Trump, if he chooses not to run, support DeSantis in 2024? ” It’s probably premature to say that, “says the friend,” but yes, I would say, pay attention to that space. “