After four years of tolerating Donald Trump’s behavior, rhetoric, and vindictive, transactional nature, in exchange for an all-you-can approve buffet of judges, tax breaks, and executive orders … suddenly GOP leadership finds it has a case of buyer’s remorse.
Kinda-sorta.
One Republican senator who requested anonymity to discuss his conversations with GOP colleagues acknowledged GOP lawmakers should have served as a stronger check on the president over the past four years.
“We should have done more to push back, both against his rhetoric and some of the things he did legislatively,” said the lawmaker. “The mistake we made is that we always thought he was going to get better. We thought that once he got the nomination and then once he got a Cabinet, he was going to get better, he was going to be more presidential.”
Okay, that gets you up to February of 2017. Where have you been the last four years?
But now there’s a sense among a growing number of GOP lawmakers that Trump may have inflicted long-term damage on their party, an anxiety heightened by the debacle of a pro-Trump mob storming and occupying the U.S. Capitol building Wednesday as Congress was meeting to finalize Biden’s election as the nation’s 46th president.
“There’s more concern about the long-term damage to the party than losing two Senate seats in Georgia,” the GOP senator said.
Oh, so the concern isn’t the actual damage Trump has done to the nation, to minorities, to women, to LGBTQ folk, to the environment and climate, to our natural resources, to education, to our standing and alliances abroad, to the social contract, to our health care, to our health, to all these things over the past four years … it’s concern about how that might hurt the Republican party.
Cry me a freaking river.
A second Republican senator who requested anonymity said Trump had inflicted serious damage on his party.
Such concern … that it can only be passed on via anonymous Senators.
Dear Senator Whitefeather: you know how you start to heal/fix the damage to the party? By actually standing up in public and talking about it, not whispering in a parking structure to a reporter from The Hill.
“Every time you think the president has done everything he could possibly do to fuck things up, then he comes out with a tweet, like the election was invalid and the one in Georgia would be invalid,” said the lawmaker, referring to Trump’s tweets Friday declaring the runoff elections to be “illegal and invalid.”
Big talk from someone supposedly in one of the highest offices of the land … afraid to lend their name and face to their words.
The feelings of remorse are only now being expressed privately after Republican senators spent much of the past four years dodging questions about Trump’s controversial tweets, statements and decisions.
They still are dodging.
As to what actual public defiance of Trump has looked like, well, we have this sad example raised up as an exception:
There were exceptions though, such as when Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), said Trump appeared “unsympathetic” after peaceful protesters were pepper sprayed in front of the White House in June so the president could pose with a Bible in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church.
Oh, yes. Clucked tongues and mildly “concerned” rebukes from Susan Collins have been soooooo effective in restraining Trump.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on Thursday said Trump had “tarnished” his legacy by not condemning Wednesday’s “debacle” at the Capitol.
Graham defended his support for Trump over the past four years as being driven by constituents at home who wanted him to work with the president.
“My constituents made me do it” would be more meaningful, Lindsey, if you hadn’t not just worked with him, but become his most outspoken supporter and enabler. Or maybe reading a bit of Burke would be in order.
“The reason I’ve been close to the president is I think he’s done tremendous things for this country. I think the judges he’s nominated have been outstanding choices,” he said. But he said “it breaks my heart that my friend, a president of consequence, were to allow yesterday to happen, and it will be a major part of his presidency.”
“It was a self-inflicted wound, it was going too far,” he added.
Just note that Lindsey actually seems to love all the stuff Trump did. It was just this last froth of post-election paranoia and delusion, leading up to violence in Lindsey’s sacred workplace, that went a bit “too far” and will “tarnish” Trump’s rep.
Asked if he should have spoken out more when Trump crossed the line during his four years in office, Graham acknowledged he could have but also deflected blame on the media for not covering the president more fairly. […] “Could I have done better? Yes. The question: Could you have done better? Could those of you who cover the White House done better? You need to ask yourself that,” he told reporters.
Yes, if only the media had covered Trump “better” and more fairly, he wouldn’t have been driven to incite a riot.
Senate Republican Whip John Thune (S.D.) on Wednesday said Trump’s rhetoric created a political headwind for Sens. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.) and David Perdue (R-Ga.), who both lost races that GOP senators had expected them to win. […] “When your most effective argument is you’re going to be a check and balance against a Biden/Pelosi/Schumer agenda but you can’t acknowledge that Biden won, it puts you in a really difficult position,” he later explained.
Again, the regret is not anything Trump did regarding policy, but how he hurt the GOP by hurting them in the Georgia run-offs. And, indirectly, how Trump is now talking about trying to defeat Thune in his next primary.
Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), who has been a strong Trump ally during his first term …
“First term.”
… late on Wednesday said he does “think the president bears some responsibility” for the violence and chaos on Capitol Hill, which disrupted the Electoral College vote count. “I do think the president bears some responsibility. Certainly, he bears responsibility for his own actions and his own words, and today in watching his speech, I have to admit I gasped,” Cramer said.
A tip of the hat to Sen. Kramer for speaking out loud and laying “some responsibility” on Trump.
Though, to be fair, Cramer — who’s frequently called Trump the “best President of his life” — doesn’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
What really seems to be frustrating Cramer is that the events at the end of Trump’s term in office will overshadow the accomplishments on tax policy, energy and agriculture regulation, and foreign policy that he’s proud to have helped the president enact. “As Republicans distance themselves from Donald Trump, the person we have to hold onto his ideas,” Cramer said.
No regrets over policy, just that Donald turned out to be, um, unstable.
Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), another staunch Trump ally, said he later spoke with Pence, whom he described as furious over the president’s treatment. “I’ve known Mike Pence forever,” Inhofe told the Tulsa World. “I’ve never seen Pence as angry as he was today.”
Ah. We’re regretful and upset because … Donald was mean to his normally-fawning VP. Well, hold the presses.
Inhofe also said that Trump should have done more to stop the rioting. “He’s only put out one statement that I’m aware of,” he said. “This was really a riot. He should have shown more disdain for the rioters. I don’t want to say he should have apologized — that’s not exactly accurate — but he should have expressed more disdain.”
Not apologize but … “express more disdain.”
For all there may be shock, regrets, and (for the most part mild) criticism, Republican politicians remain terrified of Donald Trump — thus the anonymous quotes above.
National Republicans interviewed by The Hill said Trump may have permanently alienated millions of center-right voters who were disgusted by Wednesday’s ugly scene.
But they acknowledged that the president retains enormous political power at the moment, a dynamic that was on full display when a majority of House Republicans voted to throw out Arizona’s Electoral College results hours after their evacuation.
“Trump has less power now, but he could still probably win a primary today, so does he really have less power?” asked former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele.
Yesh, they really think he could still win a primary. Which says more about the rest of the GOP political class than it does about Donald Trump. Regardless, since they think he would win a primary — their only criterion for power and, thus, permission to criticize — they are still treading lightly.
Some pointed to the president’s fervent base of supporters outside of Washington to make the case that Trump’s influence would continue to dominate the party for years to come — as well as the House votes on the Electoral College. The president reportedly received a warm reception Thursday morning when he briefly called into a Republican National Committee members meeting.
Some Republicans argued that people have short-term memories and that the transactional nature of politics would give Trump space to rebuild his image and throw his weight around either as a candidate in 2024 or as a kingmaker in GOP primaries.
So the principled thing to do is … speak off the record, keep your head down, and not publicly criticize Trump. It appears that “regret” isn’t all that strong an emotion.
But the violence in Washington, one former Trump campaign official said, “caused him to lose even loyal supporters.” “Trump is a lonely man today,” the person said.
But not so lonely the anonymous official was willing to go on the record about it.
One Republican operative said that the events drastically diminished Trump’s hold on the party, describing the current dynamic as an “emperor with no clothes” moment because GOP lawmakers are publicly pushing back on Trump at a time when he can’t even respond on social media in usual form. The person expected Republicans to be more willing to publicly push back against Trump going forward, especially if he urges primaries against sitting GOP officials.
Still, the GOP operative acknowledged the potential for Trump to split the party and characterized it as “dangerous,” observing that even if Trump only keeps a grip on 20 percent of GOP voters, Republicans who break with Trump would lose general elections even if they make inroads with independents. […] Republicans undeniably benefit from the enthusiasm Trump generates, particularly in rural parts of the country where the GOP must maximize turnout to be competitive.
So, again, even if Trump’s power plummets to only holding onto a fraction of the GOP, they are so close to losing outright against the Dems that they politically can’t afford to offend him.
I guess that qualifies as “regrets.”
But not, apparently, enough “regrets” to actually do anything differently.
Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) on Friday dismissed calls to impeach President Trump in the wake of riots inside the U.S. Capitol, signaling that the effort will ultimately fall short. […] “You don’t have the time for it to happen, even if there was a reason. So there’s no reason to debate this except just pure politics,” Blunt added. […] Blunt added in a separate interview with KSHB, another Missouri TV station, that impeaching Trump was “not going to happen.”
[…] Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) accused Democrats of throwing politics into the aftermath of the Capitol attacks, adding that impeachment “would not only be unsuccessful in the Senate but would be a dangerous precedent for the future of the presidency.”
[…] Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), who dropped his plans to support challenges to the Electoral College after the attacks, said calls for impeachment are “unhelpful.” “We’re 13 days away from inauguration. This is not the time to keep taking the temperature up. So let’s stand together and govern for the next 13 days,” Daines told a Montana TV station.
Yeah, GOP Senators might have “regrets” over how they failed to “restrain” Trump from damaging their party (if not the nation) … but they certainly have no intention of doing anything about the next few weeks of his increasingly erratic behavior, or back down over the long haul as long as they think Trump may run again, let alone if kicking him and his mob to the curb might mean (gasp) “lost” elections.
I mean, clearly, it’s too late now. If only they’d had another opportunity, even over the last year, to exercise some restraint over Trump.
Oh, well. I’m sure they’ve learned their lesson for when the next mob-darling authoritarian pops up in the party. Right?
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