In Donald Trump’s purgatory
Cheney was purged on a voice vote that was so overwhelming that no one even asked for a recorded tally. Her offence was challenging — too vocally for GOP comfort — Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen and that the attempt to overturn the Electoral College vote on January was constitutional and warranted.
Many Republicans privately agree with Cheney on both points, but they don’t want to get into a public fight with Trump.
They want House of Representative leaders to focus on resisting the Biden agenda, and they think Cheney’s insistence on publicly rebutting Trump’s falsehoods was a distraction. She can now say what she wants as a backbencher.
But the GOP problem is less that Cheney won’t let Trump go than that the former president won’t let 2020 go. He can’t accept that he lost, so he’s busy rewriting history to convince everyone he was cheated. He’s making that claim a litmus test for Republican leaders or for candidates who want his endorsement.
That may please the Trump base but it won’t appeal to the swing voters the GOP needs to retake the house and Senate. Trump’s claim that he was cheated in November is the main reason the GOP lost two Georgia Senate seats in the January 5 run-off, thus delivering the Senate to the Democrats. Trump voters stayed home after the then president told them their votes didn’t count. The pre-election polling and voter turnout couldn’t be clearer about this. Joe Biden’s agenda would be stalled now if Trump had put the party first after his defeat.
Mitch McConnell, now the Senate minority leader, has pursued a strategy of silence toward Trump since his condemnation of the former president after the January 6 US Capitol riots by his supporters. His focus is rightly on regaining the Senate in 2022.
But will Trump stay silent about McConnell?
Our guess is that Trump wouldn’t mind if Republicans lose more Senate seats in 2022, which he’d then blame on McConnell as he tries to oust him as Senate Republican leader.
By the way, no one is more delighted by all this than Democrats and the press corps, who want Trump at the centre of GOP politics. The last thing they want is a debate over Biden’s spending blowout, higher taxes, divisive identity and racial politics, and courtship of Iran.
CNN is bereft without their foil.
As for Cheney, she seems intent on continuing her debate with Trump. Fair enough. Someone in the GOP needs to tell Republican voters the truth about 2020. But if she becomes the pet rock of the Republican anti-Trump group, the Lincoln Project, and The Washington Post, she’ll quickly lose whatever influence she has in the GOP.
She’s most credible as a champion of traditional Republican conservatism against Trumpist isolationism and big government. That’s also her best chance to keep her seat in Wyoming.
Perhaps the shock of the Biden house Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s agenda will unite the GOP enough to pick up the handful of house seats it needs to win in 2022.
But that task is harder with Trump plotting revenge and focused as ever on himself above all else. Such is the Republican purgatory of Trump’s ex-presidency.
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House Republicans ousted Liz Cheney from their leadership on Wednesday night, but the GOP’s Donald Trump problem continues. They cannot win without his voters, but they also will struggle to win if the former president dominates the party and insists on re-fighting the 2020 election for the next four years.