POLITICAL
MEMO
Marooned at Mar-a-Lago, Trump Still Has Iron Grip
on Republicans
The vilification of Liz Cheney and a bizarre vote
recount in Arizona showed the damage from his assault on a bedrock of
democracy: election integrity.
In the Republican Party, objecting to former President
Donald J. Trump carries little political incentive and a steep price.
Lisa Lerer
By Lisa Lerer
May 8, 2021
Locked out
of Facebook, marooned in Mar-a-Lago and mocked for an amateurish new website,
Donald J. Trump remained largely out of public sight this week. Yet the
Republican Party’s capitulation to the former president became clearer than
ever, as did the damage to American politics he has caused with his lie that
the election was stolen from him.
In
Washington, Republicans moved to strip Representative Liz Cheney of her House
leadership position, a punishment for denouncing Mr. Trump’s false claims of
voter fraud as a threat to democracy. Lawmakers in Florida and Texas advanced
sweeping new measures that would curtail voting, echoing the fictional
narrative from Mr. Trump and his allies that the electoral system was rigged
against him. And in Arizona, the state Republican Party started a bizarre
re-examination of the November election results that involved searching for
traces of bamboo in last year’s ballots.
The
churning dramas cast into sharp relief the extent to which the nation, six
months after the election, is still struggling with the consequences of an
assault by a losing presidential candidate on a bedrock principle of American
democracy: that the nation’s elections are legitimate.
They also
provided stark evidence that the former president has not only managed to
squelch any dissent within his party but has persuaded most of the G.O.P. to
make a gigantic bet: that the surest way to regain power is to embrace his
pugilistic style, racial divisiveness and beyond-the-pale conspiracy theories
rather than to court the suburban swing voters who cost the party the White
House and who might be looking for substantive policies on the pandemic, the
economy and other issues.
The loyalty
to the former president persists despite his role in inciting his supporters
ahead of the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, with his adherents either ignoring,
redefining or in some cases tacitly accepting the deadly attack on Congress.
“We’ve just
gotten so far afield from any sane construction,” said Barbara Comstock, a
longtime party official who was swept out of her suburban Virginia
congressional seat in the 2018 midterm backlash to Mr. Trump. “It’s a real
sickness that is infecting the party at every level. We’re just going to say
that black is white now.”
Yet as
Republicans wrap themselves in the fantasy of a stolen election, Democrats are
anchored in the day-to-day business of governing a nation that is still
struggling to emerge from a deadly pandemic.
Strategists
from both parties say that discordant dynamic — two parties operating in two
different realities — is likely to define the country’s politics for years to
come.
At the same
time, President Biden faces a broader challenge: what to do about the large
segment of the public that doubts his legitimacy and a Republican Party
courting the support of that segment by pushing bills that would restrict
voting and perhaps further undermine faith in future elections.
A CNN poll
released last week found that nearly a third of Americans, including 70 percent
of Republicans, said Mr. Biden had not legitimately won enough votes to win the
presidency.
White House
aides say Mr. Biden believes that the best way to restore some faith in the
democratic process is demonstrating that government can deliver tangible
benefits — whether vaccines or economic stimulus checks — to voters.
Dan Sena, a
Democratic strategist who oversaw the Democratic Congressional Campaign
Committee’s strategy to win the House during the last midterm elections, said
the Republican focus on cultural issues, like bans on transgender athletes, was
a “win-win” for his party. Many Democrats will face only scattershot attacks on
their agenda while continuing to run against the polarizing rhetoric of Mr.
Trump, which helped the party flip suburban swing districts in 2018 and 2020.
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“I would
much rather have a record of siding with Americans on recovery,” Mr. Sena said.
“Which tale do the American public want to listen to — what Democrats have done
to get the country moving again or Donald Trump and his culture war?”
Mr. Biden
predicted during the campaign that Republicans would have an “epiphany” once
Mr. Trump was gone and would revert to being the party he knew during his
decades in the Senate. When asked about Republicans this week, Mr. Biden
lamented that he didn’t understand them anymore and appeared slightly flummoxed
about the “mini-revolution” in their ranks.
“I think
the Republicans are further away from trying to figure out who they are and
what they stand for than I thought they would be at this point,” he said.
But for
much of the past week, Republicans put on vivid display exactly what they now
stand for: Trumpism. Many have adopted his approach of courting white grievance
with racist statements, and Republican-led legislatures across the country are
pushing through restrictions that would curtail voting access in ways that
disproportionally impact voters of color.
There are
also high-stakes electoral considerations. With his deeply polarizing style,
Mr. Trump motivated his base and his detractors alike, pushing both parties to
record voter turnout in the 2020 election. His total of 74 million votes was
the second-highest ever, behind only Mr. Biden’s 81 million, and Mr. Trump has
shown an ability to turn his political supporters against any Republican who
opposes him.
That has
left Republicans convinced that they must display unwavering fealty to a
departed president to retain the voters he won over.
“I would
just say to my Republican colleagues: Can we move forward without President
Trump? The answer is no,” Senator Lindsey Graham said in an interview on Fox
News this week. “I’ve determined we can’t grow without him.”
In some
ways, the former president is more diminished than ever. Defeated at the polls,
he spends his time at his Florida resort playing golf and entertaining
visitors. He lacks the bully pulpit of the presidency, has been banished from
Twitter and failed this week to have his account restored by Facebook. He left
office with his approval rating below 40 percent, the lowest final first-term
rating for any president since Jimmy Carter.
Still, his
dominance over Republicans is reflected from Congress to statehouses. Local and
federal lawmakers who have pushed their party to accept the results of the
election, and thus Mr. Trump’s loss, have faced a steady drumbeat of censure
and primary challenges. Those threats appear to be having an impact: The small
number of Republican officials who have been critical of Mr. Trump in the past,
including the 10 who voted for his impeachment in February, remained largely
silent this week, refusing interview requests and offering little public
support for Ms. Cheney.
Her likely
replacement, Representative Elise Stefanik, publicly promoted herself for the
post and moved to establish her Trump bona fides by lending credence to his
baseless voter fraud claims in interviews with hard-right supporters of the
former president.
The focus
on the election has crowded out nearly any discussion of policy or party
orthodoxy. The Heritage Action scorecard, which rates lawmakers on their
conservative voting records, awarded Ms. Cheney a lifetime score of 82 percent.
Ms. Stefanik, who has a more moderate voting record but is a far more vocal
supporter of the former president, scored 52 percent.
Ms. Stefanik
and many other Republican leaders are betting that the path to keeping the
electoral gains of the Trump era lies in stoking their base with the populist
politics that are central to the president’s brand, even if they repel swing
voters.
After months
of being fed lies about the election by the conservative news media, much of
the party has come to embrace them as true.
Sarah
Longwell, a Republican strategist who has been conducting focus groups of Trump
voters for years, said that since the election she had found an increased
openness to what she calls “QAnon curious,” a willingness to entertain
conspiracy theories about stolen elections and a deep state. “A lot of these
base voters are living in a post-truth nihilism where you believe in nothing and
think that everything might be untrue,” said Ms. Longwell, who opposed Mr.
Trump.
Some
Republican strategists worry that the party is missing opportunities to attack
Mr. Biden, who has proposed the most sweeping spending and tax plans in
generations.
“Republicans
need to go back to kitchen-table issues that voters really care about, sprinkle
in a little culture here and there but not get carried away,” said Scott Reed,
a veteran Republican strategist who helped crush right-wing populists in past
elections. “And some of them are making an industry out of getting carried
away.”
While
clinging to Mr. Trump could help the party increase turnout among its base,
Republicans like Ms. Comstock argue that such a strategy will damage the party
with crucial demographics, including younger voters, voters of color, women and
suburbanites.
Already,
intraparty fights are emerging in nascent primaries as candidates accuse each
other of disloyalty to the former president. Many party leaders fear that could
result in hard-right candidates’ emerging victorious and eventually losing
general elections in conservative states where Republicans should prevail, like
Missouri and Ohio.
“To declare
Trump the winner of a shrinking minority, that’s not a territory you want to
head up,” Ms. Comstock said. “The future of the party is not going to be some
70-year-old man talking in the mirror at Mar-a-Lago and having all these
sycophants come down and do the limbo to get his approval.”
Yet those
who have objected to Mr. Trump — and paid the price — say there’s little
political incentive to pushing against the tide. Criticizing Mr. Trump, or even
defending those who do, can leave elected officials in a kind of political no
man’s land: seen as traitorous to Republican voters but still too conservative
on other issues to be accepted by Democrats and independents.
“It’s
becoming increasingly difficult, it seems, for people to go out on the stump
and defend somebody like Liz Cheney or Mitt Romney,” former Senator Jeff Flake,
who endorsed Mr. Biden and was censured by the Arizona Republican Party this
year, said during a panel appearance at Harvard this week. “About 70 percent of
Republicans probably genuinely believe that the election was stolen, and that’s
debilitating. It really is.”
Lisa Lerer
is a national political correspondent, covering campaigns, elections and political
power. @llerer
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