A tide is turning in the Republican Party, and all in the Trump administration’s final hour. Events of the past week suggest the beginning of the end of Republican unity under Donald Trump.
The GOP dynamic during Trump’s presidency has been one mostly of comity and consensus, with only a few exceptions. Certainly, Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, Ben Sasse, and Mitt Romney established themselves as frequent Trump contrarians. Murkowski and Collins objected to his appointing Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s successor. Romney voted for impeachment. Sasse complained that he “kisses dictators’ butts.”
Still, other Senate Republicans, for the most part, worked hard to maintain equilibrium with the president, even as they hinted at frustration. “I think he misspoke in response to Chris Wallace’s comment,” Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina said, following Trump’s “stand back and stand by” demand during the first presidential debate, continuing, “He was asking Chris what he wanted to say. I think he misspoke. I think he should correct it. If he doesn’t correct it, I guess he didn’t misspeak.”
Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who votes with Trump almost 94% of the time, offered a discernible sense of resignation in a preelection interview, saying of the president, “He is who he is. You either love him or hate him, and there’s not much in between.” Cornyn went on, “What I tried to do is not get into public confrontations and fights with him because, as I’ve observed, those usually don’t end too well.”
Trump’s post-election pugilism was tolerated, even encouraged, by rank-and-file Republicans and by leadership early on. “Our institutions are built for this,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said a few days after the election. “We have the system in place to consider concerns. And President Trump is 100% within his rights to look into allegations of irregularities and weigh his legal options.” Cornyn concurred, for a time.
That has passed as Republican leaders distance themselves from Trump’s election fight. McConnell warned Republicans against challenging the election results when Congress meets on Wednesday. Senate Majority Whip John Thune suggested doing so would be pointless.
Following the recent announcement of a plan among some Republican senators to reject electors, House Republican Conference Chairwoman Liz Cheney told colleagues that such challenges would “set an exceptionally dangerous precedent, threatening to steal states’ explicit constitutional responsibility for choosing the President and bestowing it instead on Congress.” A number of other Republican senators, including Pat Toomey, Roy Blunt, and Bill Cassidy, have said that they will not challenge the election.
Beyond that, McConnell and company didn’t sign on to Trump’s $2,000 stimulus check push. Most did not share his reservations about the National Defense Authorization Act and voted to override his veto. The first veto override of his entire administration occurred in its twilight, with intraparty harmony at an ostensible low point. This from the Wall Street Journal on the NDAA battle tells a lot about the current state of play: “Mr. Trump has vetoed eight other bills during his time in the White House, with several of them focused on foreign policy and national-security issues, such as U.S. military activity in Yemen, the use of force against Iran, and arms sales to Saudi Arabia. While Republicans had joined Democrats to initially pass those measures, supporters couldn’t muster enough GOP votes to override the vetoes from a Republican president” (emphasis added). Things have changed.
All of these, the election challenges, the $2,000, and the NDAA beef, provided more occasions for division within the Republican caucus, and a number of Republicans have gone the president’s way. A few advocated for higher stimulus checks alongside the president, while most didn’t. Seven Republican senators voted against the veto override. Eleven senators have vowed to reject electors from the swing states that Trump lost unless Congress appoints a commission to audit them, and several House members plan to object, too.
For the election challengers, anyone may guess at their ultimate end, whether it be a sincere quest for truth and transparency or a transactional prove-your-bona fides move to attract Trump supporters and Trump support, or something else altogether. The point is, the Trump-aligned dissenters are in a different place than most of their colleagues on this fundamental question, and that can’t bode well for maintaining force against a Biden administration, or winning Georgia’s Senate runoffs, or other future elections, for that matter.
The GOP has a problem. It’s not so much that those congressional Republicans passing on Trump’s election challenge would never support him again, were he to run. They demonstrated over and over that they can find a way to stand by him even in politically difficult situations if the popular support is there. In 2022 and 2024, the problem will more likely be a participant Trump having no tolerance for those who decided to forgo this particular opportunity to stand by him. He is already calling for Republican South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem to primary Thune in 2022.
Even if not causally, Trump’s fight against the election began a series of splits between him and congressional Republicans that piled up all at once. Trump said it in his phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger: He will not be letting this go. “I don’t care how long it takes me,” he declared.
That sounds to me like his new cause celebre. It sounds to me like a benchmark that other Republicans will have to meet, or else suffer him.
