For the first time, Donald Trump has inserted himself into a 2018 Republican primary against an incumbent. The president tweeted Thursday morning that it was “great” to see Trump nemesis Jeff Flake of Arizona get a Republican challenger. “Great to see that Dr. Kelli Ward is running against Flake Jeff Flake, who is WEAK on borders, crime and a non-factor in Senate. He’s toxic!” Trump said.
We’re so used to Trump’s shots at Republicans he doesn’t like that the significance of this move is a bit lost. Flake may be the most vocal in his criticism of Trump, but he’s still a Republican senator well within the mainstream of his party and his conference on policy. He’s also in danger of losing his seat in red-but-turning-purple Arizona, which Democrats see as a long-term battleground. Trump may not like Flake, but he’ll want a Republican in that seat after the 2018 midterms. A successful (or even unsuccessful) primary challenge to the incumbent could hurt the chances of that if Trump’s ire keeps pushing Flake’s popularity among Republicans in Arizona downward.
Which is why Mitch McConnell and the National Republican Senatorial Committee were out later on Thursday to reiterate their support for Flake. “Jeff Flake is an excellent senator and a tireless advocate for Arizona and our nation,” said McConnell in a statement sent out by the NRSC. “He has my full support.”
And lest we think Trump’s tweet is just bluster, Politico reports that the president’s allies are actively looking for other challengers to Flake, including former congressman Matt Salmon, former state party chairman Robert Graham, and state treasurer Jeff DeWit. Cable news viewers may remember DeWit as one of the Trump campaign’s more reliable surrogates. (Ward is viewed as a sub-par challenger by Trump world, despite the president’s tweet encouraging her run.)
If Trump’s support for incumbent challengers continues, where does this leave the Republican party, which will be fighting hard to maintain its control of both houses of Congress next year? It’s hard to imagine in recent years any situation where a sitting president and the congressional leaders of his party are at odds in primaries. But it’s another piece of evidence that Trump, explicitly or not, is moving away from the party that gave him its nomination just a year ago.
To be fair, it’s not a one-way street. Elected Republicans have been inching away from Trump, too, a trend that’s been accelerated by the president’s statements in the wake of Charlottesville. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina has been among those out front on this, which has earned him the scorn of Trump via Twitter.
Graham’s fellow Palmetto stater, Tim Scott, joined the fray on Thursday by saying Trump had “compromised” his “moral authority.” The Senate’s only black Republican criticized Trump’s decision to walk back his second-take comments denouncing white nationalism.
“I’m not going to defend the indefensible,” Scott said. “His comments on Monday were strong. His comments on Tuesday started erasing the comments that were strong. What we want to see from our president is clarity and moral authority. And that moral authority is compromised when Tuesday happened. There’s no question about that.”
True, most congressional Republicans have not explicitly rebuked the president; Ted Cruz on Thursday had harsh words for white supremacists, but said he would leave critiquing the president’s words to others. But the GOP isn’t exactly rushing to Trump’s defense either: Fox News’s Shepard Smith said Wednesday that they couldn’t find a single Republican willing to go on air in support of the president’s stance.
Mark It Down—“Nothing has changed. Gary is focused on his responsibilities as NEC Director and any reports to the contrary are 100% false.” —a White House official, responding to questions about whether National Economic Council director Gary Cohn was considering leaving the administration over Trump’s comments on Charlottesville, August 17, 2017.
Today at Camp David—President Trump meets with his national security team at the presidential retreat in Maryland to discuss South Asia. Could a decision on Afghanistan be forthcoming?
Anonymous White House Quote of the Day
WH official: “the President’s Advisory Council on Infrastructure, which was still being formed, will not move forward.”
— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) August 17, 2017
One of the leading public intellectuals who formulated and argued on behalf of a coherent ideology around Donald Trump now says he “sorely regrets” supporting the Republican president. Writing Thursday in the New York Times, Julius Krein said his optimism about Trump and Trumpism was “unfounded.”
“I can’t stand by this disgraceful administration any longer, and I would urge anyone who once supported him as I did to stop defending the 45th president,” he writes.
Krein is no run-of-the-mill Trump supporter. He was one of the earliest intellectuals to gravitate toward Trump. Here in THE WEEKLY STANDARD, he wrote a piece published in September 2015—when Trump was leading in the Republican primary polls but was months from winning his first contest—praising Trump as a “traitor to his class” who deserved to be taken more seriously as a force on behalf of a popular movement. Harvard educated and with a short career in finance, Krein began the anonymous Journal of American Greatness blog during the 2016 election, which evolved into an intellectual journal, American Affairs, that began publishing shortly after Trump’s victory.
What Krein and his other JAG contributors argued was that American conservatism, as then constituted, had failed to stem the cultural and political shifts leftward in recent decades. “We are American patriots aghast at the stupidity and corruption of American politics, particularly in the Republican Party, and above all in what passes for the ‘conservative’ intellectual movement,” the original JAG website (which has since been shut down) wrote of its writers and purpose. “We support Trumpism, defined as secure borders, economic nationalism, interests-based foreign policy, and above all judging every government action through a single lens: does this help or harm Americans? For now, the principal vehicle of Trumpism is Trump.”
Among the pseudonymous contributors to JAG was Publius Decius Mus, whose essays critiquing the modern conservative movement were originally rejected by the Claremont Review of Books. The CRB did eventually publish Decius’s most famous pro-Trump essay, “The Flight 93 Election,” in September 2016. Decius was actually Michael Anton, a former communications aide in the George W. Bush White House. Anton is now the top spokesman for Donald Trump’s National Security Council.
In founding American Affairs, Krein set out to “fill the void left by a conservative intellectual establishment more focused on opposing” Trump, as a New York Times profile of him in March 2017 described it. At the time, Krein cautioned that his journal did not take “intellectual cues” from the new president.
“These are our ideas,” he told the Times. “We hope there’s some overlap, but we aren’t going to sit around cheerleading the administration.”
Writing in the same paper five months later, Krein now notes he had found in candidate Trump a “willingness to move past partisan stalemates [that] could begin a process of renewal.” That renewal, which he says he still hopes for, isn’t happening under President Trump.
“Far from making America great again, Mr. Trump has betrayed the foundations of our common citizenship. And his actions are jeopardizing any prospect of enacting an agenda that might restore the promise of American life,” writes Krein.
From the Archives—“What Makes America Great,” by Daniel Krauthammer, from our May 8, 2017, issue.
Conservatism Watch—My friend Matt Continetti’s eagle eye picked up on this: White House aide Michael Anton (née Decius) will be speaking in a couple weeks on a Claremont Institute-sponsored panel at the American Political Science Association’s annual meeting in California.
This is a story that deserves more attention: “Wasserman Schultz’ ex-IT aide indicted on 4 counts.”
Song of the Day—“Rebellion (Lies)” by Arcade Fire.
