NEW YORK (AP) – The Republican Party still belongs to Donald Trump.
After last month inciting a deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol, the Republican Party considered debugging the former president destroying rules. But in the end, only seven of the 50 Senate Republicans voted to convict Trump in his historic second impeachment trial on Saturday.
For Trump’s loyalists, the acquittal offers a kind of claim and a new connection to the former president’s fire base. And, for Trump Republican Party antagonists, it marks another alarming sign that the party is moving in a dangerous direction with little desire to reconnect with the moderates, women, and college voters that Trump alienated.
Ultimately, the dismissal trial resolution highlights a split in the Republican Party that party leaders, donors and voters will have to navigate as they try to regain control of Congress next year and seek to regain the White House in 2024.
This tension was shown immediately after the vote. After supporting Trump’s acquittal, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., Delivered a speech that echoed some of the highlights of Democratic dismissal managers. asking for Trump’s conviction.
The former president, McConnell said, was “practically and morally responsible for provoking the facts” that led to the insurrection. But he argued that there were no constitutional grounds for the Senate to condemn Trump now that he is out of office, a point of procedure that many adopted in the Republican Party.
History books will show that ten members of the president’s party in the House and seven others in the Senate eventually believed that Trump’s behavior was blatant enough to justify the conviction, and even a lifelong ban on exercising it. future charges. Never before had so many members of a president’s party voted for his removal.
But by most objective measures, Trump’s reach over the Republican Party and its future remains airtight.
Gallup reported last month that Trump’s approval rating among self-described Republicans stood at 82%. And more recently, the University of Monmouth found that 72% of Republicans still believe Trump’s false claims that President Joe Biden won the November election only because of widespread voter fraud.
To have no doubt about Trump’s strength, House Republicans overwhelmingly voted last week to defend a loyal Trump advocate, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. media.
A few days after House minority leader Kevin McCarthy called Trump responsible for the violent attack, McCarthy reversed and made a personal visit to Trump’s estate in Florida to make sure there were no persistent animosities.
Of the seven Republicans who voted to condemn Trump on Saturday, only one faces re-election in the next four years. In fact, in the Trump Republican Party there are very few willing to cross it if they harbor future political ambitions.
One of them, the 2024 prospect, Nikki Haley, who was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under Trump, drew attention this week after telling Politico that Trump’s role in the 6 January essentially disqualified him from running again.
“He’s fallen so far,” Haley said. “He was on a path that he should not have taken, we should not follow him or listen to him. And we can’t let that happen again. “
Another Republican presidential prospect, Senator Ben Sasse, R-Neb., Voted Saturday to condemn Trump and stated that Trump’s “lies” about widespread election fraud endangered “the vice president’s life” and “brought us dangerously close to a bloody constitutional crisis.”
While Sasse could run for president in 2024, he will not face Republican primary voters in Nebraska again unless he runs for re-election in 2026.
Similarly, Republican Party Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana faced censorship from his state party after voting to condemn Trump. But he will not face voters again until 2026, so he is relatively isolated from the political consequences.
Despite McConnell’s criticism, Trump’s most vocal Republican opponents at the moment will likely consist of a collection of retired Republicans on cable news and a “Never Trump” movement facing its own existential challenges.
The Lincoln Project, perhaps the most prominent and best-funded Republican anti-Trump group, comes out of a tumultuous week after revelations that its leaders knew of several allegations of sexual misconduct against a co-founder several months before publicly acknowledging them.
The self-described “main leader” of the organization, veteran Republican strategist Steve Schmidt, left office of the board on the eve of the Senate indictment, a day after the Lincoln Project announced its plans to bring in an outside investigator.
The consequences threaten to undermine the organization’s fundraising appeal and influence, even as the super PAC works to expand its reach through a popular podcast and streaming video channel that goes attract more than 4 million views last month alone.
Even before the crisis, co-founder Reed Galen acknowledged that Trumpism was winning.
“The authoritarian side of the Republican party is the dominant side,” he said. “It simply came to our notice then. At the moment, they have the money ”.
Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist who heads the anti-Trump group known as Defending Democracy Together, said that “what they have shown over the last two months is that Donald Trump was a cancer in the country and in the party, he has metastasized.” .
“I thought we could get over it,” he said. “But now I don’t think so.”
Still, the Republican party faces enormous political risks in the event that its leaders continue to embrace Trump and his brand of normal policies.
Already, dozens of Republican-friendly companies have vowed to stop giving money to Trump’s allies in Congress, cutting off a critical revenue stream just as Republicans hope to regain a majority in the House and Senate in the midterm elections. next year.
Trump’s critics on both sides promise to make sure the business community and voters don’t forget what the former president and his allies did.
“We will remind voters that Republicans were willing to set aside their oaths of office for loyalty to a man and that a man was more important than his constituents, more important than the United States Constitution, more important than democracy than we have in this great nation, ”said Jaime Harrison, chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
But Trump himself is not leaving. Immediately after his acquittal, he issued a written statement promising to re-emerge “soon.”
“Our historic, patriotic, beautiful movement to make America great again has only just begun,” Trump said. “In the coming months I have a lot to share with you, and I look forward to continuing our incredible journey together to achieve American greatness for all of our people.”