Donald Trump loyalists fear telling it straight will kill careers

A private phone conversation has lifted the lid on behind-the-scenes discussions that are consuming Donald Trump.

A Trump supporter smokes a cigarette while affixing audio cables to a police barricade in Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, six days after the general election on November 9. Picture: Getty Images/AFP

President Donald Trump is “like a heavyweight champion who is behind on points” but still “looking for the knockout he knows is a long shot”, according to an ally who phoned him yesterday.

The fact that the private conversation was revealed by the TV personality Geraldo Rivera suggested an effort by those close to Mr Trump to coax him towards accepting the inevitable, tempered by the need to soothe his hurt feelings.

Mr Trump “seemed particularly aggrieved by the savage attacks on his presidency from the minute he was elected”, Rivera tweeted. “He told me he was a ‘realist who would do the right thing’ when all the legitimate votes have been counted.”

This lifted the lid on behind-the-scenes discussions that are consuming Mr Trump’s time, but there has been a striking absence of senior Republicans willing to dispute his wild allegations of fraud.

Officials who do so risk the sack.

The closest anyone in the senior echelons of the party has come this week to speaking out against Mr Trump was a plea from a group of half a dozen senators for him to allow intelligence briefings for the Biden team, all the while insisting that this was not an admission of defeat.

Mike Pence, the vice-president, has kept quiet publicly, but Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, has actively encouraged Mr Trump’s resistance to the election verdict, saying that there would be a “smooth transition to a second Trump administration”.

What they have in common is presidential ambition. Other vocal backers of Mr Trump’s tactics include Ted Cruz, a senator from Texas, and Marco Rubio, a senator from Florida, both of whom also have their eyes on the Republican nomination in 2024.

Almost no one who is planning to run again as a Republican - whether as president, senator or dog-catcher - wants to risk alienating the president’s support base. Look at what happened to Al Schmidt, city commissioner for Philadelphia, after he said he had seen no evidence of fraud, as alleged by the Trump legal team in its search for vote-rigging: the dreaded presidential tweet soon followed calling him a “RINO”, or Republican In Name Only.

A tweet highlighting Trumpian displeasure will certainly be used against any Republican with hopes of high office by their opponents during the primary process for choosing the party’s candidates. No one wants to become the next Rino.

How long can this go on? Individual state deadlines for certifying the election vote are approaching, but some are still three weeks away. Mr Trump, by all accounts, wants to prevent certification in enough states to keep his hopes alive. Given the fervour of his millions of loyal supporters, and the influence he will retain, perhaps for years, over the direction of the party and its choice of candidates, some senior Republicans may be speaking behind the scenes with the Biden team, but who will dare to speak out in public against Mr Trump?

There is a vacancy for the anti-Trump moderate in the 2024 Republican presidential race.

But are there any votes in it?

The Times