Why Are Republicans Siding With Trump

‘nobody Is Afraid Of Their Grandfather’

Many Republicans expect Americans will become dissatisfied with record levels of government spending and debt, an increasingly crowded U.S.-Mexican border and new rules and regulations promulgated by the Democratic Congress and the Biden administration.

Pledging to work with the Biden administration on an infrastructure bill, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said he is “hopeful” that “we may be able to do some things on a bipartisan basis – but they got off to a pretty hard left-wing start.”

“We don’t intend to participate in turning America into a left-wing, kind of Bernie Sanders vision of what this country ought to be like,” McConnell told Fox News after the meeting between Biden and congressional leaders.

Fiscally conservative groups are stepping up campaigns against Biden and his spending proposals.

The organization Americans For Prosperity is preparing ads for competitive House districts in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia. Biden wrested those states from Trump in the 2020 election, providing him his margin of victory in the Electoral College.

Some Republican criticism plays off Biden’s age and his occasionally mangled syntax, but that strategy has met limited success. Some of the attacks mirror the ones Trump made in 2020 against “Sleepy Joe.”

“Trump never found a salient way to brand Biden, and Republicans continue to struggle after the election,” Republican strategist Alex Conant said.

With Trump Out Of Office The Republican Party Is Having An Identity Crisis

The Republican Party is out of power on Capitol Hill and deeply divided on issues from the attack on the Capitol to the impeachment of former President Trump. Denver Riggleman, a former Republican congressman and chief strategist at the Network Contagion Research Institute, and Whit Ayres, the president of North Star Opinion Research, join Judy Woodruff to discuss.

Why Its Become More Difficult To Break With The National Party

Many members of Congress used to have local reputations independent of their parties, themselves as fighters for local interests and dollars in Washington. Even if most voters hated Congress, they still liked their own representatives and senators.

But the long-term trends are nationalization and . Voters learn about their own legislators and more about the president, in part due to decreasing reliance on local news. As a result, fewer voters split their tickets, voting for one party’s candidate for president and the other’s for Senate or the House.

Democrats have faced the same problem in trying to distinguish themselves from their party. Voters recognized the independent streak of West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Montana’s Jon Tester in the 2018 midterms, but Missouri’s Claire McCaskill, North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp and Indiana’s Joe Donnelly weren’t able to overcome the Republican lean of their states. Manchin went so far as to appear in ads showing him shooting at policies he disliked and proclaiming “for me, it’s all about West Virginia.” He won a state that Hillary Clinton lost by more than 42 points.

“More members are running scared in the primaries,” political scientist Sarah Treul told me. “Even if they’re actually not having quality challengers emerging, they’re afraid of it happening. And I think a lot of them are spending time trying to figure out how can ward off one of those challengers from even coming to the table.”

Poll: Majority Of Iowans One

Fifty-five percent of Iowans, including a significant portion of Iowa Republicans, say they hope Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, decides not to run for what would be his eighth term in the Senate in 2022, a new poll out of the state shows. 

The new survey from the Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll, conducted by the prominent Iowa pollster Ann Selzer’s Selzer & Co., found that just 28 percent of Iowans hope Grassley will run for another term. Another 17 percent say they are not sure. 

A majority of Democrats and independents say they hope Grassley does not run, a sentiment shared by 35 percent of Republicans. Fifty percent of Republicans, however, say they hope he does decide to run, compared to 11 percent of Democrats and 27 percent of independents. 

Grassley is currently 87 years old and is the oldest Republican senator serving in the body . Grassley’s age has prompted questions as to whether he’ll run again — he’s told reporters he’ll decide later this year and has, in the meantime, filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission to begin fundraising for a possible reelection.

The poll is a mixed bag for Grassley — while he retains a 48 percent approval rating among Iowan adults , it’s his lowest Iowa Poll approval rating since 1982, according to the Des Moines Register. 

The Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll surveyed 775 Iowa adults between March 7-10 by telephone in English. The margin of error is +/- 3.5 percentage points. 

Whats The Matter With Republicans

Trump has given them another chance to break away. Why won’t they take it?

Contributing Opinion Writer

In a sane world, the reaction of Republicans to the “memorandum of telephone conversation” between President Trump and the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, combined with the whistle-blower filed by an intelligence officer describing a White House cover-up, would be similar to the response of Republicans after the release, on Aug. 5, 1974, of the “smoking gun” tape that finally broke the Nixon presidency. Republicans would begin to abandon Mr. Trump, with senior figures urging him in private and in public to resign.

This may be asking too much of Republicans, who have lost their way in the Trump era. One might hope that some of the party’s elected officials would forcefully condemn the president on the grounds that there is now demonstrable evidence that he had crossed an ethical line and abused his power in ways even beyond what he had done previously, which was problematic enough.

But things are very different today than they were in the summer of ’74. Mr. Trump was on to something when he famously , during the 2016 campaign, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, O.K.? It’s, like, incredible.” What most people took to be hyperbole turned out to be closer to reality.

“This storm has more staying power than most,” he added, ominously.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on , and .

The Gop Is Nonetheless Trumps Social Gathering Not Mitch Mcconnells Ballot

The Axios report is exceptional contemplating the truth that President Trump was a sufferer of character assassination by the standard suspects  – the Democrat media – over the past a number of days, but in addition by Republican lawmakers.

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Rep. Liz Cheney accused the President of getting “summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this assault” in describing his actions main as much as the Capitol riots.

“There has by no means been a better betrayal by a President of america of his workplace and his oath to the Structure,” she dramatized.

BREAKING: Home Republican Convention Chair Liz Cheney declares she is going to vote to question President Trump.

— MSNBC January 12, 2021

Mitch McConnell in the meantime, seen the Democrats’ effort to question the president as a method to “assist rid the Republican Social gathering of Trump and his motion.”

? 80% of Trump voters and 76% of Republicans in Battleground states are much less more likely to vote for a Member of Congress/U.S. Senator who votes for impeachment.

“Mitch McConnell Mentioned to be Happy About Trump Impeachment Efforts – The New York Occasions”

— Jason Miller January 12, 2021

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Republicans Now Bragging About Being Trump Big Lie Pushers

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In taking a shot at CNN’s Jake Tapper, Republicans are openly boasting that they’re responsible for spreading democracy-defying conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election. 

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Stefanik and Scalise were specifically among the Big Lie pushers whom Tapper named when discussing his booking preferences last week on Kara Swisher’s Sway podcast. “I might be willing to interview one of them” to “talk about their election lies and what they’re doing,” he said, but he is “not asking for the interview and they’re not eager to do it.”  

The apparent rush among Republicans to publicly tie themselves to Trump’s insurrection-inspiring lies speaks volumes about the state of the party and the ongoing spread of pro-Trump misinformation on cable and social media. News outlets’ continued willingness to book election-deniers, and thus help keep Trump’s bogus and dangerous “fraud” narrative alive, has been a problem for months. Few have been more outspoken about it than The Daily Show’s Matt Negrin, who on Sunday continued to hold news platforms accountable for their role in propagating election-related disinformation: 

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 “This is a five alarm fire for our democracy,” he . 

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Republicans And Their Declared Positions On Donald Trump

In a typical general election year, elected officials readily line up behind their party’s presidential nominee. In 2012, for example, The Hill reported that only four Republican members of Congress had declined to endorse Mitt Romney by mid-September of that year. “All other House and Senate Republicans” had already endorsed the Republican nominee.

But 2016 was not a typical general election year.

Controversial comments from the GOP’s 2016 nominee, Donald Trump, about women, Muslims, , and caused some Republican lawmakers to distance themselves from the businessman, while others outright denounced him.

This page tracked the stances of Republican lawmakers on Trump throughout the 2016 presidential election: Did they support him? Did they oppose him? Or were they somewhere in between? The focus of this page is on Republican members of Congress and Republican governors, but we also have included some information on influential Republicans who have served in Republican presidential administrations.

Why Are Republican Leaders So Angry With Trump Its Not At All Clear

Is the unsustainable Republican coalition — big business interests, xenophobes, racists, misogynists, religious fundamentalists, anti-government absolutists, libertarians, militarists, isolationists, and debt-obsessed ignoramuses — finally cracking apart?

If so, this week might eventually be viewed as the breaking point.

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Even before this week, it was clear that the Republicans were in a love-hate relationship with Donald Trump, who highlights so many of their party’s contradictions.

I therefore wrote a column in which I revisited a fantasy scenario that I had floated in which Republicans en masse had repudiated Trump after he secured their presidential nomination.

My basic argument was that Republicans could have “owned” Hillary Clinton if they had seemed to take the high road by helping her defeat a patently dangerous and unqualified nominee who was not really a Republican in the first place.

Republicans hate Clinton, but maybe their best revenge would have been to make her the most miserable and weak president ever.

As I was editing that column, news broke that Trump had infuriated Republicans yet again, this time by siding with the Democratic leaders of the House and Senate in negotiations over the budget and the debt ceiling.

I quickly added a reference and a link to that story, further strengthening my assertion that Republicans must truly be hating their life choices right now.

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A Look Back: How Presidents Have Used Their First Primetime Tv Address

WASHINGTON — When President Joe Biden makes his first national prime-time address on Thursday night, he’ll be following in a long tradition of presidents focusing their first televised evening speech on a key White House priority.

Biden will use his address — scheduled to begin just after 8 p.m. ET — to commemorate the one-year anniversary of restrictions aimed at slowing the spread of Covid-19. He is expected to talk about the more than 500,000 Americans who have lost their lives to Covid-19, as well as his efforts to increase the number of vaccines available to Americans. The president is set to sign the $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief bill into law Thursday afternoon. 

Here’s how some of Biden’s predecessors used their first major prime-time TV addresses: 

President Donald Trump: Trump made his first national address on Aug. 21, 2017 to discuss his strategy in Afghanistan and South Asia. Unlike many former presidents, Trump didn’t make his first prime-time speech from the White House. Rather, the former president spoke from Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall in Virginia.

Trump used the speech to outline new pillars of his foreign policy plan and to announce he wouldn’t pull all troops out of Afghanistan and South Asia. 

The former president also used the speech to solicit support for his foreign policy strategy from NATO allies. 

Trump also addressed a joint session of Congress in February 2017. 

Conventional Republicans Are In Hassle

Cowardice by some Republicans in siding with Democrats seems to be backfiring because the ballot clearly reveals help for Trump and never squishy lawmakers like Mitch McConnell.

McConnell, regardless of his reported help for ridding the celebration of the President and his supporters, has but to decide to a vote on conviction within the Senate.

However he’s clearly bought a voter downside.

“The survey reveals why Trump might run once more in 2024 if he isn’t convicted — or banned from holding federal workplace — by the Senate,” Axios studies.

“It additionally reveals the peril and alternative for institutionalists like McConnell making an attempt to reclaim the GOP.”

Fox Information persona Tucker Carlson not too long ago commented on what impeachment would imply for the President.

“By impeaching the president throughout his ultimate week in workplace, Congress is not going to achieve discrediting Trump amongst Republican voters,” he cautioned. “In reality, it should improve Donald Trump amongst Republican voters. Clearly!”

Axios’ report and polling appear to substantiate Carlson’s evaluation.

Traditional Republicans Are In Trouble

Cowardice by some Republicans in siding with Democrats appears to be backfiring as the poll clearly shows support for Trump and not squishy lawmakers like Mitch McConnell.

McConnell, despite his reported support for ridding the party of the President and his supporters, has yet to commit to a vote on conviction in the Senate.

But he’s clearly got a voter problem.

“The survey shows why Trump could run again in 2024 if he isn’t convicted — or banned from holding federal office — by the Senate,” Axios reports.

“It also shows the peril and opportunity for institutionalists like McConnell trying to reclaim the GOP.”

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Fox News personality Tucker Carlson recently commented on what impeachment would mean for the President.

“By impeaching the president during his final week in office, Congress will not succeed in discrediting Trump among Republican voters,” he cautioned. “In fact, it will enhance Donald Trump among Republican voters. Obviously!”

Axios’ report and polling seem to confirm Carlson’s assessment.

This piece originally appeared in and is used by permission.

Latest From Politics & Policy

These maneuvers have made it easier to ignore the writing on the wall, but now the walls are closing in, making the message inescapable: Texas is not what Republicans are pretending it is. In the 1992 presidential election, 60 percent of the state’s votes were cast in greater Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, and Austin. By contrast, in the 2018 midterms, 69 percent of the electorate came from those areas. But that isn’t the worst news for Republicans. As recently as 2014, 17 percent of the state’s electorate was Hispanic. Four years later, that number is 26 percent, and for all the data suggesting that Texas’s Hispanic population may be more conservative than its California counterparts, state Republicans usually count it as a rousing victory if they’re able to gain a 40 percent share of that demographic.

Meanwhile, the fastest-growing racial group in Texas is Asian Americans, who have seen their numbers surge from 1.1 million in 2010 to an estimated 1.7 million in 2019. In the 2018 gubernatorial election, the incumbent Abbott handily beat Democratic challenger Lupe Valdez by 13 points. But according to exit polls, Abbott lost the Asian American vote by 18 points—still, a better showing than Cruz, who lost that cohort by a margin of 31 points.

The Internal Divide In The Republican Caucus Briefly Explained

For months, McConnell has cautioned Republicans against raising objections to the electoral results, because for every challenge that’s brought by both a House and a Senate member, both chambers will ultimately have to debate and hold a vote on it. And as the Associated Press has reported, McConnell has expressed concerns that these votes could put Republican senators in a difficult position.

Those who do vote with Trump are effectively rejecting voters’ voices and undermining the Democratic process that elections are built on. On the other hand, those who don’t back Trump could face his ire — and potentially that of his supporters — down the line, possibly setting up difficult races that could drain party resources and put the size of the Senate GOP caucus in jeopardy.

This dynamic has already been apparent in the case of Senate Majority Whip John Thune, whose opposed the certification challenges and previously said they would go down “like a shot dog” in the Senate. Since then, he’s been a major target of the president’s attacks, with Trump urging South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem to levy a primary challenge against him in 2022.

A Cruz spokesperson said in a statement, however, “Sen. Cruz is calling for an emergency electoral commission to resolve the deep distrust Americans have in our democracy and restore faith in our system.”

No More Distractions Maybe Maybe Not

Republicans said they were distracted in making the case against Biden by a lack of cohesion, including internal disagreements over what to do about Trump.

Some blamed Cheney, the now-former House Republican Conference chair who argued that the party should move past Trump and stop echoing his lies that the 2020 election was stolen from him. She said those claims triggered the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, an incident Democrats would surely use against Republicans when elections roll around.

‘I will not sit back’: In fiery speech, Rep. Liz Cheney calls Trump a ‘threat’

House Republicans voted Wednesday to demote Cheney from her role as third-ranking Republican. She responded that the GOP would struggle against Biden and his agenda if it continues to embrace Trump and his conspiracy theories.

“To be as effective as we can be to fight against those things, our party has to be based on truth,” Cheney told NBC News.

House Republican Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., who supported demoting Cheney, said voters are disenchanted with Biden and the Democrats. Scalise told Fox News he sees “a lot of really serious concern about the direction that the socialist Democrats are taking us,” and “Biden has embraced that far-left Bernie Sanders agenda.”

“People don’t want this to become a socialist nation, yet you see how far they’re moving,” Scalise said.

“It’s always difficult to generate a unifying message when you’re the party out of power,”  GOP pollster Whit Ayres said.

Trump Lost So Why Are Republicans Standing By Him

Normally when a political party loses a presidential election, it engages in a period of reflection to understand what went wrong. In 2012, for example, Barack Obama’s re-election prompted a to explain Mitt Romney’s defeat.

But that hasn’t happened this time around. “The former president has not only managed to squelch any dissent within his party,” The Times’s Lisa Lerer , “but has persuaded most of the G.O.P. to make a gigantic bet: that the surest way to regain power is to embrace his pugilistic style, racial divisiveness and beyond-the-pale conspiracy theories rather than to court the suburban swing voters who cost the party the White House and who might be looking for substantive policies on the pandemic, the economy and other issues.”

Why doesn’t the Republican Party feel the need to rebrand?There are a few theories, as Perry Bacon Jr. at FiveThirtyEight. For one thing, Trump is still a force in the party: Anyone who discusses his shortcomings in the open risks provoking his ire and a primary challenge. For another, despite presiding over a pandemic-induced recession, the Republican Party almost won the White House in 2020: If Trump had done only about one percentage point better in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and about three points better in Michigan, Joe Biden wouldn’t be president.

Full Geoff Duncan Interview: ‘it Hurt Republicans’ To Push Election Fraud Lies

Even though Democrats flipped both Senate seats in 2020, next year’s election is expected to be one of the marquee Senate races of the cycle. Former Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler, who lost to Warnock, has kept the door open to another bid, while other Republicans have been considering it too. Former President Donald Trump recently encouraged Herschel Walker, once a standout football player for the University of Georgia, to run. 

Duncan and other top GOP officials spent much of the past few months defending the state from Trump’s unfounded allegations of massive voter fraud, accusations that he said lost Republicans “credibility” in the state. He went onto criticize Trump’s tone as “divisive” and add that the former president’s “strategy is unwinnable in forward-looking elections.” 

Even so, many Georgia Republicans are supporting widespread new restrictions to election laws sparked in part by Trump’s baseless allegations. The GOP-led legislature is weighing changes such as ending no-excuse absentee voting and limiting weekend early voting.

Duncan opposes the changes to absentee voting, recently vacating his role presiding over the debate on the issue in protest. He also told “Meet the Press’ he was sensitive to concerns that limiting early voting on weekends could primarily hurt black voters since “souls to the polls” drives are popular events at predominately black churches in the south. 

Mike Memoli and Mark Murray

Why Dems Should Forgive Van Drew For Siding With Trump

Rep. Jeff Van Drew was one of just two Democrats in Congress to oppose impeachment hearings.

Tom Moran | Star-Ledger Editorial Board

Who would have guessed that New Jersey would supply one of only two Democratic votes to block the impeachment hearings of President Trump?

Even in swing states like Pennsylvania and Florida, Democrats held fast. But here in Blue Jersey, Rep. Jeff Van Drew strayed from the pack. And now lefty Democrats are clenching little dolls of Van Drew and sticking pins in it.

“We have a Democrat who behaves like a Trump Republican,” says Phyllis Salowe-Kaye, executive director of New Jersey Citizen Action. “Democrats should remove him!”

I’m not so sure. I think Van Drew might have just done Democrats a favor.

Because Van Drew’s district in South Jersey voted solidly for Trump in 2016. If Van Drew sticks his neck out too far, the seat could easily flip back to Republicans, who controlled it for 24 years until he came along in 2018.

“Out on the street, more people are supportive of my viewpoint, no question,” Van Drew says. “Some people understand that it’s very important for Democrats to maintain a majority. Potentially, you could have a Republican House, a Republican Senate, and a Republican president. I think a lot of the folks who are so adamant would be even more disturbed by that.”

Count me among them.

I’ll work that out in therapy. But if you put aside all the emotion, Van Drew makes a strong case.