The biggest threat to Donald Trump’s hold on the Republican Party has always come from the ranks of his own supporters, rather than those who have hated him all along. So it’s significant that one of his first backers comes waving at him.
In February 2016, when Rep. Tom Marino became one of the first Republican congressmen to support Trump, he called the decision “one of my life-changing moments” and praised the presidential candidate as a fresh voice that was not beholden to Wall Street. .
At the time, Trump was still in a tight nomination battle with Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, and was struggling to get support from elected officials. Marino, a former district attorney who represented a rural district in northern Pennsylvania, didn’t just support him. He was a loud and proud Trump blower who helped steer his campaign in the state and joined his presidential transition team after he won.
Trump expressed affection for Marino and Lou Barletta, a fellow member of Congress and co-chair of Trump’s Pennsylvania campaign, calling them “thunder and lightning.”
As president, Trump tapped Marino as director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, though Marino backed down after questions about his record with opioids. He resigned from Congress in 2019, shortly after beginning his fifth term, citing recurring kidney problems.
During the Republican primary for governor in Pennsylvania this year, Marino sharply criticized Trump for refusing to support Barletta, who lost that race to Doug Mastriano. Now he is urging his fellow Republicans to move on.
“I think the Republican Party should do whatever it takes to get away from Trump,” Marino said in an interview. “He certainly, I think, cost the party losses in this election that we had in November. I am deeply disappointed in him.”
In an unpublished letter he shared with DailyExpertNews, Marino berated Trump for “acting like a childish bully” by attacking Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who denounced the former president as “Ron DeSanctimonious” when the Republicans began to unite around a possible 2024 alternative.
To secure his support, Marino wrote, Trump should have “grown up and run for president and refrained from calling potential candidates derogatory names.”
Trump, he added, “threw several people close to him under the bus”; “has no idea what loyalty means”; and “has a serious lack of character and integrity.”
Understand the events on January 6
“I will not support Trump, in fact I will campaign against him,” Marino’s letter concluded. “Our country deserves a person who is mature, respectful of others and honest to lead our country.”
Trump’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Trump continues to sink
The evidence that Trump is weakening within the Republican Party is mounting by the day, and Marino’s letter is just the latest indicator.
“GOP primary voters are moving,” said Mike DuHaime, a Republican strategist, nodding to Trump’s worsening polls in hypothetical 2024 matchups. “They are exhausted having to defend his every word and deed,” he added, and want “similar policies and fighting without all the drama.”
Consider the party’s less than resounding response to Monday’s big news: the January 6 commission’s call for the Justice Department to prosecute Trump. The panel also released a scathing 154-page summary of its final report, due out in full Wednesday.
“That evidence has led to a decisive and clear conclusion: The central cause of January 6 was one man, former President Donald Trump, whom many others followed,” the summary reads. “None of the events of January 6 would have happened without him.”
Trump responded with typical gaffe. “These people don’t understand that when they come after me,” he wrote on Truth Social, “people who love freedom gather around me.”
He continued: “It strengthens me. What does not kill me makes me stronger.”
So far there are no signs of that. As Maggie Haberman writes in assessing the damage done both by the former president’s recent actions and by the commission’s investigation, “Trump has significantly diminished, a shrunken presence in the political landscape.”
Two possible presidential candidates — former Vice President Mike Pence and Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson — took the position that Trump had acted recklessly on Jan. 6, though they believed he should not face criminal charges.
Trump also received little political attention in the Senate on Monday. Only one Republican senator, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, has approved his presidential bid.
“The whole nation knows who is responsible for that day,” Sen. Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, told reporters at the Capitol. “Other than that I have no direct observations.”
Senator John Thune, a Republican from South Dakota, said the panel “interviewed some credible witnesses.” West Virginia Senator Shelley Moore Capito, while criticizing what she called a “political process,” said Trump “bears some responsibility” for the riot.
And even in the House — which is still very much Trump country — the response fell far short of a thorough, orchestrated pushback.
Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, the top Republican in the House, perhaps recognizing that he needs moderate Republicans to support his bid for speaker as much as he needs pro-Trump die-hards, said nothing.
McCarthy’s lieutenants dutifully attacked the Jan. 6 panel, but there was no phalanx of pro-Trump surrogates holding court for reporters at the Capitol, no point-by-point refutation of the committee’s key findings.
Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, who is responsible for the Republican message, post a single tweet calling the Jan. 6 inquiry a “partisan charade.” Representative Jim Jordan, the new chairman of the House Oversight Committee, complained that McCarthy should not have put his allies on the panel, which he boycotted after Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected his first two picks. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia went after “communist” Democrats and attacked Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, one of only two Republicans on the committee, as “crybaby Adam.”
More often, Republicans preferred to change the subject: the year-end spending bill opposed by many on the right, the recent wave of migrants along the border, Twitter’s handling of articles about Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020 or the effects of inflation.
Did the January 6 hearings hurt Trump?
Democrats view Republicans’ attitude towards Trump as cynical rather than principled in nature, recalling how much of the party rallied to his side in early 2021 — and then eagerly sought his approval in 2022.
“Had the GOP won the House by a large margin and taken the Senate on the backs of Trump’s candidates, the response to these recent issues would be very, very different,” wrote Dan Pfeiffer, a former communications director for President Barack. Obama. Tuesday in his Substack newsletter.
What this lacks, however, is that the January 6 committee—especially the slick prime-time hearings over the summer, which drew millions of viewers—appears to have been at least a minor factor in Republicans’ losses this year.
One of the few opinion polls to isolate demand came out this week. In surveys commissioned by Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan watchdog group, 46 percent of voters in five battlefield states said the Jan. 6 hearings were a factor in their decision. And a larger group — 57 percent — said they’d had at least some exposure to the hearings.
The poll focused on so-called ticket splitters — Republicans and independents who voted for a Democrat in one race and a Republican in another. In Arizona, 20.9 percent of those ticket sellers said January 6 was a top factor in their vote. In Pennsylvania, that number was only 8.5 percent. Those numbers are quite modest, but every vote counts.
When I recently asked Sarah Longwell, a Republican consultant who worked to defeat election deniers in places like Arizona and Pennsylvania, to assess the role of democracy in the midterm elections, she was cautious.
“I really think we just won an important battle and sent a message to Republicans that election denial and extremism are losing out to swing/independent voters in states that hold the keys to political power,” she said in an email. -mail. But it was too soon, she said, to say that American democracy was “out of the woods.”
So far, the most powerful argument within the Republican Party’s grassroots has not been Trump’s behavior in office, but the increasingly dominant view that his obsession with the 2020 election cost the GOP crucial seats this year.
That may be the most powerful anti-Trump argument of all, said John Sides, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University: that election denial is a political loser.
“All that matters is the interpretation,” Sides said. “If that perception takes root, it doesn’t matter what the real reason is.”
What to read
Top lawmakers in Washington unveiled a massive spending package that the government would keep open until next fall after reaching a compromise on billions of dollars in federal spending, reports Emily Cochrane. Congress faces a Friday midnight deadline to fund the government or faces a shutdown.
The House Ways and Means Committee is considering the release of Trump’s tax returns today. Such a move would entail retaliation from Republicans, writes Alan Rappeport.
Congress has proposed $1 billion to help poor countries deal with climate change, a figure significantly below what President Biden promised, Lisa Friedman reports.
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