Rep. Liz Cheney’s (R-WY) defeat Tuesday night put former President Donald Trump a step closer to doing what his staunchest intraparty critics would like to do to him: marginalizing a once-powerful force inside the GOP.
“Never Trump” conservatives do not merely want to replace the former president as a leader of the Republican Party. They want him to be retroactively condemned and repudiated by the party that once embraced him. The political arm of this subset of the GOP is disproportionately made up of operatives associated with former President George W. Bush and the late Arizona GOP Sen. John McCain.
This was always a tall order. The Republican Party moved on from President Richard Nixon, but its future did not belong to leaders who were especially vocal in their criticisms of his Watergate conduct.
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It does, however, come much closer to describing what Trump and his allies have managed to do to the Bushes and Cheneys, along with critical reappraisals of McCain and Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT). Bush, Dick Cheney, McCain, or Romney were on every Republican presidential ticket from 2000 to 2012 — until Trump won the 2016 nomination. A Bush was on the GOP ticket every presidential cycle but one for 24 years.
Dick Cheney cut an ad for his daughter Liz, praising her for leading “the effort to make sure Donald Trump is never again near the Oval Office” because he is the greatest “threat to our republic” in “our nation’s 246-year history.” Bush, the former president, appeared at a fundraiser for the Wyoming congresswoman alongside lieutenants Karl Rove and Harriet Miers. Her Trump-endorsed challenger still beat her by 37 points.
Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush had earlier mounted an unsuccessful primary challenge against Trump-endorsed Attorney General Bill Paxton. Unlike the younger Cheney, Bush 43’s nephew had courted Trump, who even called him “my Bush” and “the only Bush who got it right.” Paxton defeated George P. Bush by 36 points in the runoff.
The 45th president’s role in both races can be exaggerated, but the Bush-Cheney influence over the party even a decade ago cannot be. Both families have been set back by the GOP’s embrace of Trump-infused populism.
Trump’s long march through the GOP began with his humiliation of George P. Bush’s father, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who may well have been the 2000 Republican presidential nominee instead of his younger brother if he had won his maiden campaign for the statehouse in Tallahassee in 1994. Trump repeatedly used Jeb Bush as a foil in the 2014-16 GOP primary debates, branding him “Low Energy” Jeb and treating him as a symbol of the party’s inclination to nominate graceful losers.
Trump also used Jeb Bush as a stand-in for his brother as the reality TV star sought to blaze a different path on immigration and foreign policy. He accused the 43rd president of lying the country into the Iraq War with fallacious claims about weapons of mass destruction. On a debate stage in South Carolina, Trump went further still.
“The World Trade Center came down during your brother’s reign. Remember that,” Trump said. The former president came to South Carolina to campaign for brother Jeb. “I understand that Americans are angry and frustrated, but we do not need someone in the Oval Office who mirrors and inflames our anger and frustration,” Bush 43 said of Trump on the stump in the military-heavy state.
But Trump won the South Carolina primary, finishing 10 percentage points ahead of his nearest rival en route to the nomination and the White House. Jeb Bush finished fourth, with 7.8% of the vote and fewer than 60,000 total ballots cast for him. He dropped out the next day.
“Representatives of the last Republican White House are effectively in exile from presidential politics these days, dispirited by their party’s embrace of Donald J. Trump, the nominee, and feeling betrayed by former friends who are backing him,” the New York Times reported ahead of the 2016 Republican National Convention.
“I can count on one hand the number of people I worked with who are supporting Trump,” Nicholas Burns, a former Bush State Department official, told the outlet of his efforts to rally support for Hillary Clinton that year. Cheney, the former veep, was then an exception. He “indicated to former colleagues that with his daughter on the Wyoming ballot for Congress this year, he had little choice,” according to the New Yorl Times. “That is an understandable rationale to many in the Bush orbit.”
The bad blood persisted over the next four years. By 2020, many who worked for Bush 43 endorsed now-President Joe Biden over Trump. “Joe’s kindness is sorely needed right now. He famously treats the train operator with the same dignity as his fellow senators. As former public servants, we believe that decency in government must not be allowed to die on the vine,” 230 Bush alumni wrote in a letter. “We must take a stand and insist that it returns to the Office of the President.”
One erstwhile Bush aide called on Republicans “to reject Donald Trump and [his] lawless administration.” They weren’t alone.
More than 100 former McCain staffers signed a pro-Biden letter protesting Trump’s “lack of competent leadership.” Over 30 ex-Romney aides wrote that “every corner of America is suffering at the hands of President Trump’s erratic, inept, self-absorbed governing style.” But the Bush alumni were most numerous.
Biden won, but the Republican crossover was minimal. Trump-endorsed candidates are generally faring better in primaries now. A major GOP opposition research group ousted its chairman, a longtime Republican official, over his boosting Cheney in the Wyoming primary. And Trump still leads in polls for the party’s presidential nomination, usually by a substantial margin, even after Jan. 6, two impeachment trials, and the Mar-a-Lago raid.
“The Bush family name is essentially what the Romanov family name is in Russia,” Cal Jillson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University, which houses the George W. Bush Presidential Center, told the Texas Tribune earlier this year. “There’s still somebody out there claiming to be czar but nobody’s listening.”
Liz Cheney’s primary defeat was preceded by the loss of her chairmanship of the House Republican Conference and replacement by a Trump ally. Wyoming’s GOP state central committee disavowed her last year.
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What Romney, McCain, the Bushes, and even the Cheneys have lost in Republican support, they have gained in Democratic esteem, whereas a successful Never Trump movement would mean the bipartisan rejection of the 45th president. By 2018, George W. Bush’s favorability had rebounded to 61% in a CNN poll from just 33% when he left office in 2009. Trump’s political future and personal legal situation remain unclear.
It’s nevertheless a stunning sign that many who would like to exile Trump from the Republican Party are being exiled themselves.
