Sen. Susan Collins said Monday that it’s not clear to her if Trump will win the Republican nomination in 2020.
“It’s far too early to tell now,” Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said on MSNBC. “There is a long ways between now and that point.”
It’s almost unthinkable in modern American politics for an incumbent president to fail to secure his party’s nomination; there hasn’t been a serious primary challenge against a sitting president since 1976, when Ronald Reagan ran against Gerald Ford. But Trump is also unpopular nationwide, and has frustrated congressional Republicans with his political leadership.
Collins faulted him, most recently, for failing to immediately condemn white nationalist supporters directly last week. “I think the president failed to meet the standard that we would have expected a president to do in a time like that,” she said during the interview. “There should be no place for hatred, bigotry, and racism in this country and he should have said that very clearly. He did at times, but then he wavered back and forth.”
Party unity, enforced in part by establishment leaders, historically has protected presidents from direct rebellions. Ford’s case is an exception that proves the rule; he had a weaker hold on the Oval Office, as a former House member who rose to the position as a consequence of Richard Nixon’s resignation. But even Ford was able to defeat Reagan’s insurgent campaign.
Trump has struggled to marshal such unity. Collins, for instance, noted that she didn’t support him even in 2016. And she said she can’t predict that he will be nominated again. “It’s too difficult to say,” Collins said.
