Former President Donald Trump is still the central figure in Republican politics, and that’s not a good thing. If party leaders needed any more proof the party’s future is beyond Trump, they need only behold his obvious and public obsession with the 2020 election.
The party must look elsewhere for leadership if they hope to gain ground in 2022.
Most Republican leaders are focused on doing just that: putting together a cohesive platform for GOP candidates that will focus on crime, illegal immigration, and out-of-control federal spending. This platform is promising, and Republicans are hopeful voters will see crime and inflation rates rising and agree with them.
But one person is standing in the way of the GOP’s success: Trump.
Instead of urging his base to look ahead to 2022, Trump continues to demand they spend their time relitigating the election he just lost.
“We didn’t lose. We didn’t lose,” Trump said in Ohio this weekend during his first campaign-style rally since leaving the White House. “It was rigged. We won the election in a landslide,” he continued, calling the 2020 election “the scam of the century and the crime of the century.”
“You know it, I know it, and you know who else knows it?” Trump added. “The fake news knows it.”
Trump even responded to an imaginary critic who urged him to move on from 2020.
“You have to look back,” he insisted. “We won the election in 2020. Who the hell knows what’s gonna be in 2024? We won’t even have a country left. We’re not gonna have a country left. And if we don’t figure it out, we’re not gonna be in a position to win in 2022 or 2024.”
We have written much about Trump’s election falsehoods and why they are not true. But it is worth responding to Trump’s allegation that 2022 and 2024 will be unwinnable for the GOP unless the party caters to his “stolen election” narrative.
While Trump suffered defeats last year in several key swing states he won the first time around, the rest of his party performed fairly well. Republican candidates flipped 15 House seats and held on to several critical Senate seats, which shows Republicans can and will win politically — even during an election Trump believes was rigged against them.
Republicans’ congressional wins in 2020 also prove the election was not a referendum against the GOP, but against Trump. Voters rejected him even as they threw their votes behind other Republican candidates down-ballot. Trump has deluded himself into believing this choice was a deliberate conspiracy, but Republicans need to recognize these results as the warning sign they were: Allowing Trump to dictate the party’s direction will only lead to another electoral loss.
Letting Trump set the tone for the GOP in 2021 and 2022 would be foolish. President Joe Biden took the White House in 2020 by eschewing the insane Russia-gate and “2016-was-illegitimate” talk peddled by Hillary Clinton and his party’s entertainment wing. The House, in which this 2016-relitigating was most prominent, was where Democrats did the worst.
MSNBC viewers and Twitter users aren’t representative of the majority, as it turns out. The bulk of voters don’t like grievance mongers who try to undermine democracy.
Republicans already learned this firsthand in January 2021, when Trump’s ax-grinding and conspiracy-theorizing cost Republicans two Senate seats in Georgia, losing control of the Senate.
The Republican Party has an excellent chance to take back the House and possibly even regain a couple of lost Senate seats in 2022. But to do this, the party must focus on the present, on combating President Joe Biden’s agenda and highlighting how the Democratic Party has failed as the majority party in Washington.
Trump’s first rally proved he’s unwilling to do this. And if Republicans can’t find a way to keep him in check, his ego will defeat the party’s chances at a 2022 comeback before the voting starts.
