Boehner, John A

Subterms

    Latest story

    163 Shares119 Views

    From the Fringe to the Center of the G.O.P., Jordan Remains a Hard-Liner

    by

    Once a tormentor of the Republican Party’s speakers, the Ohio congressman and unapologetic right-wing pugilist has become a potential speaker himself.As a co-founder of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, once antagonized his party’s leadership so mercilessly that former Speaker John A. Boehner, whom he helped chase from his position, branded him a “legislative terrorist.”Less than a decade later, Mr. Jordan — a fast-talking Republican often seen sans jacket, known for his hard-line stances and aggressive tactics — is now one of two leading candidates to claim the very speakership whose occupants he once tormented.Mr. Jordan’s journey from the fringe of Republican politics to its epicenter on Capitol Hill is a testament to how sharply his party has veered to the right in recent years, and how thoroughly it has adopted his pugilistic style.Those forces played a pivotal role in the downfall of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy last week, though Mr. Jordan, once a thorn in his side, had since allied himself with Mr. McCarthy, a California Republican. Now, the same dynamics have placed Mr. Jordan in contention for the post that is second in line to the presidency, a notion that is mind-blowing to many establishment Republicans who have tracked his career.“That notion that he could go from ‘legislative terrorist’ to speaker of the House is just insane,” said Mike Ricci, a former aide to both Mr. Boehner and Speaker Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin. “Jordan is an outsider, but he’s very much done the work of an insider to get to this moment. Keeping that balance is what will determine whether he will win, and what kind of speaker he will be.”The race between Mr. Jordan, a populist who questions federal law enforcement and America’s funding of overseas wars, and Representative Steve Scalise, a staunch conservative and the No. 2 House Republican from Louisiana, continued to heat up on Friday. Both men worked the phones relentlessly seeking support, including making calls with freshman lawmakers, the Congressional Western Caucus and the Main Street Caucus, a group of business-oriented Republicans.On Friday, as they were vying for support, a bloc of Republicans were quietly requesting a change to party rules that would raise the vote threshold for nominating a candidate for speaker, which would make it more difficult for Mr. Scalise to prevail.While Mr. Scalise is amassing dozens of commitments of support, so is Mr. Jordan, which could lead to a bitter and potentially prolonged battle when Republicans meet behind closed doors next week to choose their nominee — or spill into public disarray on the House floor.Mr. Jordan’s rise in Congress to a position where he can credibly challenge Mr. Scalise, who has served in leadership for years, stems from a number of important alliances he has formed over the years. His strongest base of power is his colleagues in the House Freedom Caucus, many of whom consider him a mentor. He has built a solid relationship with Mr. McCarthy, for whom Mr. Jordan proved a reliable supporter and important validator on the right. And he has forged close ties with former President Donald J. Trump, perhaps his most important ally.In a Republican House that has defined itself in large part by its determination to protect Mr. Trump and attack President Biden, Mr. Jordan has been a leader of both efforts. He leads a special subcommittee on the “weaponization of government” against conservatives. He has started investigations into federal and state prosecutors who indicted Mr. Trump, and he is a co-leader of the impeachment inquiry into Mr. Biden that Mr. McCarthy formally announced last month as he worked to appease the right and cling to his post.Mr. Trump endorsed Mr. Jordan for the top House job early on Friday, ending speculation, however unrealistic, that the former president might seek the job himself. (A speaker is not required to be an elected lawmaker.)“Congressman Jim Jordan has been a STAR long before making his very successful journey to Washington, D.C.,” Mr. Trump wrote in a post on his social media platform, Truth Social. “He will be a GREAT Speaker of the House, & has my Complete & Total Endorsement!”Mr. Trump’s endorsement could help Mr. Jordan garner support from his other fellow House Republicans, among whom Mr. Trump is popular. But it is not expected to seal a victory.Representative Warren Davidson, an Ohio Republican who is the whip of the House Freedom Caucus and a supporter of Mr. Jordan, said Mr. Trump’s endorsement was a “positive” for Mr. Jordan because “Trump is widely viewed as the leader of our party.”But, he said, some more mainstream Republicans aren’t thrilled about aligning themselves with Mr. Trump.“There are some folks in moderate districts that are like, ‘Well, that might actually complicate things for me,’” Mr. Davidson said.Mr. Jordan helped undermine faith in the 2020 presidential election results as Mr. Trump spread the lie that the election had been stolen through widespread fraud. Mr. Jordan strategized with Mr. Trump about how to use Congress’s official count of electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021, to reject the results, voting to object even after a mob of Mr. Trump’s supporters attacked the Capitol. His candidacy for speaker has drawn a stark warning from former Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who was the No. 3 Republican and vice chair of the Jan. 6 committee, who said that if he prevailed, “there would no longer be any possible way to argue that a group of elected Republicans could be counted on to defend the Constitution.”In a speech at the University of Minnesota this week, Ms. Cheney told the audience that “Jim Jordan was involved, was part of the conspiracy in which Donald Trump was engaged as he attempted to overturn the election.”Mr. Jordan has defended his actions in challenging the results of the 2020 election, saying he had a “duty” to object given the way some states changed voting procedures during the coronavirus pandemic.His quick rise in the Republican ranks was nearly derailed in 2018, when a sexual abuse scandal in Ohio State University’s athletics program came to light, leading to accusations that Mr. Jordan, who had been an assistant wrestling coach at the time, knew about the abuse and did nothing. Mr. Jordan has said that he was not aware of any wrongdoing.On Capitol Hill, Mr. Jordan initially worked to build some relationships with Democrats early in his career. He and Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, once teamed up on bipartisan legislation to protect press freedom. He counts former Representative Dennis Kucinich, a Democrat from Ohio who is now running Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign, as a friend. Even as Mr. Jordan and Representative Elijah Cummings, the Maryland Democrat who died in 2019, sparred over investigations of Mr. Trump, the two men occasionally found common ground on other Oversight Committee issues.But as Mr. Jordan formed an alliance with Mr. Trump and then became one of his most vocal defenders on Capitol Hill, his relationships with Democrats disintegrated. When Mr. Raskin introduced his press freedom bill this year, Mr. Jordan was no longer listed as a sponsor.Representative Jim Banks, Republican of Indiana, said that Mr. Jordan’s true power lay in the love he commands from base voters, built up through years of defending Mr. Trump and advocating conservative policies on Fox News and in combative congressional hearings. Mr. Jordan is known to fly to districts around the country to help raise money for candidates who are aligned with the House Freedom Caucus — and even for Republicans who are not.Mr. Banks suggested that Mr. Jordan’s credibility with the right would make it easier for the party to unify behind any spending deal he were to cut with Democrats and the White House should he become speaker. Such a deal would be a tall order. Mr. Jordan voted last week against a measure to avoid a government shutdown — an agreement with Democrats that ultimately drove Mr. McCarthy from the speakership.“Jim Jordan is a trusted conservative; he’s well-respected by the base of the Republican Party,” Mr. Banks said. “So when we get to some of these tough spending fights and Speaker Jim Jordan is negotiating with the White House and the Senate, that’s going to help Republicans rally behind him and get to a place where they can vote for those deals.”“This is a different Republican Party today than what it was a decade ago,” he added. “And the Republican Party today is a lot more like Jim Jordan. It’s more of a fighting Republican Party.” More

    More stories

    • 100 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      Can Kevin McCarthy and Joe Biden Fix Washington?

      by

      Among the various reassessments of Kevin McCarthy following his successful debt ceiling negotiations, the one with the widest implications belongs to Matthew Continetti, who writes in The Washington Free Beacon that “McCarthy’s superpower is his desire to be speaker. He likes and wants his job.”If you hadn’t followed American politics across the last few decades, this would seem like a peculiar statement: What kind of House speaker wouldn’t want the job?But part of what’s gone wrong with American institutions lately is the failure of important figures to regard their positions as ends unto themselves. Congress, especially, has been overtaken by what Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute describes as a “platform” mentality, where ambitious House members and senators treat their offices as places to stand and be seen — as talking heads, movement leaders, future presidents — rather than as roles to inhabit and opportunities to serve.On the Republican side, this tendency has taken several forms, from Newt Gingrich’s yearning to be a Great Man of History, to Ted Cruz’s ambitious grandstanding in the Obama years, to the emergence of Trump-era performance artists like Marjorie Taylor Greene. And the party’s congressional institutionalists, from dealmakers like John Boehner to policy mavens like Paul Ryan, have often been miserable-seeming prisoners of the talking heads, celebrity brands and would-be presidents.This dynamic seemed likely to imprison McCarthy as well, but he’s found a different way of dealing with it: He’s invited some of the bomb throwers into the legislative process, trying to turn them from platform-seekers into legislators by giving them a stake in governance, and so far he’s been rewarded with crucial support from figures like Greene and Thomas Massie, the quirky Kentucky libertarian. And it’s clear that part of what makes this possible is McCarthy’s enthusiasm for the actual vote-counting, handholding work required of his position, and his lack of both Gingrichian egomania and get-me-out-of-here impatience.But McCarthy isn’t operating in a vacuum. The Biden era has been good for institutionalism generally, because the president himself seems to understand and appreciate the nature of his office more than Barack Obama ever did. As my colleague Carlos Lozada noted on our podcast this week, in both the Senate and the White House, Obama was filled with palpable impatience at all the limitations on his actions. This showed up constantly in his negotiation strategy, where he had a tendency to use his own office as a pundit’s platform, lecturing the G.O.P. on what they should support and thereby alienating Republicans from compromise in advance.Whereas Biden, who actually liked being a senator, is clearly comfortable with quiet negotiation on any reasonable grounds, which is crucial to keeping the other side invested in a deal. And he’s comfortable, as well, with letting the spin machine run on both sides of the aisle, rather than constantly imposing his own rhetorical narrative on whatever bargain Republicans might strike.The other crucial element in the healthier environment is the absence of what Cruz brought to the debt-ceiling negotiations under Obama — the kind of sweeping maximalism, designed to build a presidential brand, that turns normal horse-trading into an existential fight.Expectating that kind of maximalism from Republicans, some liberals kept urging intransigence on Biden long after it became clear that what McCarthy wanted was more in line with previous debt-ceiling bargains. But McCarthy’s reasonability was sustainable because of the absence of a leading Republican senator playing Cruz’s absolutist part. Instead, the most notable populist Republican elected in 2022, J.D. Vance, has been busy looking for deals with populist Democrats on issues like railroad safety and bank-executive compensation, or adding a constructive amendment to the debt-ceiling bill even though he voted against it — as though he, no less than McCarthy, actually likes and wants his current job.One reason for the diminishment of Cruz-like grandstanders is the continued presence of Donald Trump as the G.O.P.’s personality-in-chief, to whose eminence no senator can reasonably aspire. At least through 2024, it’s clear the only way that Trump might be unseated is through the counterprogramming offered by Ron DeSantis, who is selling himself — we’ll see with what success — as the candidate of governance and competence; no bigger celebrity or demagogue is walking through that door.So for now there’s more benefit to legislative normalcy for ambitious Republicans, and less temptation toward the platform mentality, than there would be if Trump’s part were open for the taking.Whatever happens, it will be years until that role comes open. In which case Kevin McCarthy could be happy in his job for much longer than might have been expected by anyone watching his tortuous ascent.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram. More

    • 75 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      House Republicans Face a Triple Threat

      by

      In the new year, Republicans will hold a majority in the House of Representatives. They will have the opportunity to set the chamber’s agenda, conduct oversight of the White House and amplify their platform in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election.That’s the good news for the G.O.P. The bad news is that Democrats will still hold the presidency and control of the Senate. Also, with the new Congress in January, there will be no more than 222 Republicans in the chamber, just four more than a bare majority.A narrow majority is not in itself sufficient to cripple a majority party. In the past two years, Democrats in the House and Senate proved that.But House Republicans face low odds of success because of a triple threat: a fragile majority, factional divisions and untested leadership. Still, there are steps that party leaders should take to improve their chances of avoiding a partisan circus and perhaps even preside over a productive two years in power — and real risks if they defer instead to extremists in their ranks.The House Freedom Caucus, an assertive faction of 40-odd lawmakers, includes the likes of Jim Jordan of Ohio, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Lauren Boebert of Colorado. Generally, the caucus embraces confrontation over compromise, is disdainful of party loyalty — which extends to the selection of its leaders — and has a track record of killing its party’s own bills. In a slim majority, it holds greater leverage over any legislation.Kevin McCarthy has made assiduous efforts to court the caucus over the past few years to become speaker, yet the caucus members’ skepticism of him in that role remains: In a recent vote for the party’s nominee for speaker, over 30 Republicans voted against him, and at least five conservatives have said that they will oppose him when the full House votes for its next speaker in January. That is more than enough to deny him the speakership, since the nominee must get a majority of the entire House, and no Democrat is expected to vote for Mr. McCarthy.This makes Mr. McCarthy vulnerable. Freedom Caucus members are making demands that could ultimately be fatal to any hope of Republican success in the House. They want rules changes that, among other things, would weaken the speakership by making bipartisan coalitions harder to build, allowing only bills supported by a majority of the G.O.P. to come to the floor. Such a rule would constrain the speaker’s agenda-setting power and make it extremely hard to pass much-needed legislation unpopular with Republicans, like raising the debt ceiling.Mr. McCarthy should not empower the Freedom Caucus at the expense of his own influence. Yes, he has to navigate a delicate path. But if he is elected speaker but gives away the store in the process, it will be a Pyrrhic victory.At the moment, he seems inclined to give away the store. By not refusing caucus demands, he has most likely put himself along a troubled path similar to those of his predecessors Newt Gingrich and John Boehner. Mr. McCarthy has vowed to block an increase in the debt limit unless Democrats agree to spending cuts and suggested that the Homeland Security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, could face impeachment.These ill-conceived pledges create false hopes among Republican lawmakers and voters of what the party can accomplish. It’s true that in seeking the speakership, Mr. McCarthy cannot simply ignore the Freedom Caucus, since it commands more than enough votes to torpedo his quest for speaker and any partisan Republican bill in the next Congress.But political power comes in part from perceptions. If Mr. McCarthy surrenders too much to the caucus, it will reinforce the impression that he is less a leader than a follower and erode the clout he will need to lobby lawmakers on tough votes.Furthermore, if as speaker he consistently defers to the Freedom Caucus, he risks alienating more moderate or swing-district Republicans (or both). Only a handful of these lawmakers would need to cross party lines in order for the minority party to get its way.Republicans have made it clear that we should expect a buzz of activity in oversight hearings and committee-led investigations — possibly of elements of the F.B.I. and the Justice Department and a heavy dose of Hunter Biden.Republican leaders can avoid making Congress look like a space exclusively for partisan show trials by being flexible in their agenda and seeking out majorities wherever they can find them. That could include partisan measures from the party’s Commitment to America platform, like funding for the police as well as some symbolic, non-consequential legislation that will please the party’s base. (Think resolutions that declare lawmaker opposition to “woke” teaching and illegal immigration.)The G.O.P. might also try to pursue bipartisan legislation in areas like health or family care, since securing the votes of minority-party members on bills can make up for any defections within their own ranks. Bipartisan bills also have at least a plausible chance of getting the approval of the Democratic-led Senate and White House that they will need to become law.When it comes to bills that the House must pass, like appropriations and an increase in the debt ceiling, Mr. McCarthy might have to follow in the footsteps of Speaker Boehner, who let party conservatives resist the passage of such measures until, facing economic catastrophe, he deferred to Republican moderates to pass them with Democrats.None of these strategies is a guarantee of success. And with such a slim majority, there is also the possibility, if remote, that the Republican Party loses power altogether because a few of its members resign or die in office or one or more members leave the party. In 1930, enough of the G.O.P.’s lawmakers passed away and were replaced by Democrats in special elections that the party was robbed of its majority.In 2001, Senate Republicans failed to heed the warnings of Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont that he would leave the Republican Party. When he did, control of the Senate flipped to Democrats.Even if Republicans don’t lose power this way, the conditions are far from ideal for House Republicans to take advantage of being a governing party. Don’t be surprised if the next two years in the House of Representatives are more soap opera than substance.But if the party remains in charge in the House and can assuage its right flank, its leaders should take steps to temper expectations, protect their authority and be open to working with Democrats if they hope to build a record of legislative success in what will be a challenging political environment.Matthew N. Green is a professor of politics at Catholic University, a co-author of “Newt Gingrich: The Rise and Fall of a Party Entrepreneur” and the author of “Legislative Hardball.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

    • 100 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Why So Many People Are Unhappy With Democracy

      by

      We pay too little attention to delivering effective government as a critical democratic value. We are familiar with the threats posed by democratic backsliding and the rise of illiberal forces in several democracies, including the United States. But the most pervasive and perhaps deepest challenge facing virtually all Western democracies today is the political fragmentation of democratic politics.Political fragmentation is the dispersion of political power into so many different hands and centers of power that it becomes difficult for democratic governments to function effectively.President Biden has recognized this historic challenge, calling the defining mission of his presidency to be winning the “battle between the utility of democracies in the 21st century and autocracies.”Yet even with unified control of government, the internal divisions of the Democratic Party postponed passage of his bipartisan infrastructure bill for several months and have made it uncertain which parts, if any, of the Build Back Better proposal will be enacted.When democratic governments seem incapable of delivering on their promises, this failure can lead to alienation, resignation, distrust and withdrawal among many citizens. It can also trigger demands for authoritarian leaders who promise to cut through messy politics. At an even greater extreme, it can lead people to question democracy itself and become open to anti-democratic systems of government.The struggle of the Biden administration to deliver on its policy agenda offers a good example of the political fragmentation of politics taking place throughout Western democracies. It takes different forms in the multiparty systems of Europe and the two-party system of the United States. The European democracies are experiencing the unraveling of the traditionally dominant center-left and center-right major parties and coalitions that have governed since World War II. Support for these parties has splintered into new parties of the right and left, along with others with less-easily defined ideological elements. From 2015 to 2017, over 30 new political parties entered European parliaments. Across European democracies, the percentage of people who identify strongly with a political party or are members of one has declined precipitously.The effects on the ability to govern have been dramatic. In Germany, the stable anchor of Europe since the 1950s, the two major parties regularly used to receive over 90 percent of the vote combined; in this fall’s elections, that plummeted to less than 50 percent. Support has hemorrhaged to green, anti-immigrant, free-market and other parties. After its 2017 elections, with support fragmented among many parties, it took Germany six months to cobble together a governing coalition, the longest time in the country’s history. The Netherlands, after its 2017 elections, needed a record 225 days to form a government.The coalitional governments assembled amid this cacophony of parties are also more fragile. Spain, for example, was forced to hold four national elections between 2015 and 2019 to find a stable governing coalition. Spain had effectively been a two-party democracy until 2015, but mass protest movements spawned a proliferation of new parties that made forging stable governments difficult. In Sweden, the prime minister lost a vote of no confidence this summer — a first in the country’s modern political history. Digital pop-up parties, including anti-party parties, arise out of nowhere and radically disrupt politics, as the Brexit Party did in Britain and the Five Star Movement did in Italy.The same forces driving fragmentation in other democracies are also roiling the United States, though our election structures make effective third parties highly unlikely. Here the forces of fragmentation get channeled within the two major parties. The most dramatic example on the Republican side is that when the party controlled the House from 2011 to 2019, it devoured two of its own speakers, John Boehner and Paul Ryan. Mr. Boehner’s memoir portrays a party caucus so internally fragmented as to be ungovernable.Similarly, the central story of the Biden administration is whether the Democratic Party can overcome its internal conflicts to deliver effective policies. Remarkably, Speaker Nancy Pelosi scheduled floor votes on the infrastructure bill, only to pull it because she could not deliver enough Democratic votes — extraordinary evidence of how difficult it is for a speaker to unite her caucus amid the forces of fragmentation. It took a disastrous election night for progressives to bury their concerns and support the bill — and several now regret having done so.The recent collapse of Build Back Better, at least for now, led to a remarkable public bloodletting between different elements within the party.Large structural forces have driven the fragmentation of politics throughout the West. On the economic front, the forces include globalization’s contribution to the stagnation of middle- and working-class incomes, rising inequality and outrage over the 2008 financial crisis. On the cultural side: conflicts over immigration, nationalism and other issues.Since the New Deal in the United States and World War II in Europe, the parties of the left had represented less affluent, less educated voters. Now those voters are becoming the base of parties on the right, with more affluent, more educated voters shifting to parties on the left. Major parties are struggling to figure out how to patch together winning coalitions in the midst of this shattering transformation.The communications revolution is also a major force generating the disabling fragmentation of politics. Across Europe, it has given rise to loosely organized, leaderless protest movements that disrupt politics and give birth to other parties — but make effective government harder to achieve.In the United States, the new communications era has enabled the rise of free-agent politicians. A Congress with more free agents is more difficult to govern. Even in their first years in office, individual members of Congress (like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Ted Cruz) no longer need to work their way up through the party or serve on major committees to attract national visibility and influence.Through cable television and social media, they can find and construct their own national constituencies. Through internet fund-raising (particularly small donations), politicians (particularly from the extremes) can become effective fund-raising machines on their own. In this era, party leaders lack the leverage they once had to force party members to accept the party line. That is why speakers of the House resign or reschedule votes on which they cannot deliver.The political fragmentation that now characterizes nearly all Western democracies reflects deep dissatisfaction with the ability of traditional parties and governments to deliver effective policies. Yet perversely, this fragmentation makes it all the more difficult for governments to do so. Mr. Biden is right: Democracies must figure out how to overcome the forces of fragmentation to show they once again can deliver effective government.Richard H. Pildes, a professor at New York University’s School of Law, is the author of the casebook “The Law of Democracy: Legal Structure of the Political Process.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Shades of 2016: Republicans Stay Silent on Trump, Hoping He Fades Away

      by

      Just like when Donald J. Trump was a candidate in 2016, rival Republicans are trying to avoid becoming the target of his attacks or directly confronting him, while hoping someone else will.It was a familiar scene on Sunday when Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota, tried to avoid giving a direct answer about the caustic behavior of former President Donald J. Trump.Mr. Trump had called Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, “dumb” and used a coarse phrase to underscore it while speaking to hundreds of Republican National Committee donors on Saturday night. When Mr. Thune was asked by Chris Wallace, the host of “Fox News Sunday,” to comment, he chuckled and tried to sidestep the question.“I think a lot of that rhetoric is — you know, it’s part of the style and tone that comes with the former president,” Mr. Thune said, before moving on to say Mr. Trump and Mr. McConnell shared the goal of reclaiming congressional majorities in 2022.Mr. Thune was not the only Republican straining to stay on the right side of the former president. The day before Mr. Trump delivered his broadsides against Mr. McConnell, Senator Rick Scott of Florida, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, presented Mr. Trump with a newly created award for his leadership.And Nikki Haley, the former ambassador to the United Nations under Mr. Trump who enraged him when she criticized his actions in connection to the Jan. 6 riot, and indicated the party needs to move on, has also been trying a delicate dance to work back into a more neutral territory.This week, she told The Associated Press that she would not run if Mr. Trump did, a display of deference that underscored the complications the former president represents to Republicans.Like many Republicans, Mr. Thune, Mr. Scott and Ms. Haley were navigating the impulses of a former president who talks privately about running again in 2024, and who is trying to bend the rest of the party to his will, even after the deadly riot by his supporters at the Capitol on Jan. 6. He retains a firm hold on a devoted group of Republican voters, and party leaders have discussed the need to continue appealing to the new voters Mr. Trump attracted over the past five years.To some extent, their posture recalls the waning days of Mr. Trump’s first primary candidacy, in 2015 and 2016. While Mr. McConnell and a few other Republicans have been directly critical of Mr. Trump’s conduct following the Capitol riot, most are trying to avoid alienating the former president, knowing he will set his sights on them for withering attacks, and hoping that someone or something else intervenes to hobble him.Even as Mr. Trump makes clear he will not leave the public stage, many Republicans have privately said they hope he will fade away, after a tenure in which the party lost both houses of Congress and the White House.Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader, was critical of Mr. Trump after the Capitol riot in January.Amr Alfiky/The New York Times“It is Groundhog Day,” said Tim Miller, a former adviser to Jeb Bush, the only candidate to repeatedly challenge Mr. Trump during the early stages of the Republican presidential primaries in 2016.“I always thought that was like a rational choice in 2015,” Mr. Miller said, referring to the instinct to lay back and let someone else take on Mr. Trump. “But after we all saw how the strategy fails of just hoping and wishing for him to go away, nobody learned from it.”Throughout that campaign, one candidate after another in the crowded field tried to position themselves to be the last man standing on the assumption that Mr. Trump would self-destruct before making it to the finish line.It was wishful thinking. Mr. Trump attacked not only Mr. Bush but several other candidates in deeply personal terms, including Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and the businesswoman Carly Fiorina. Only Mr. Bush sustained a response, though he eventually left the race after failing to gain traction; Mr. Cruz, in particular, told donors during a private meeting in late 2015 that he was going to give Mr. Trump a “big bear hug” in order to hold onto his voters.They all tried to avoid being the target of his insults, while hoping that external events and news media coverage would ultimately lead to his downfall. Instead, Mr. Trump solidified his position as primary voting began.“He intimidates people because he will attack viciously and relentlessly, much more than any other politician, yet somehow people crave his approval,” said Mike DuHaime, who advised former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey in that primary race. Mr. DuHaime recalled Mr. Trump attacking Mr. Bush’s wife in one debate, only for Mr. Bush to reciprocate when Mr. Trump offered a hand-slap later in that same debate.“Trump did self-destruct eventually, after four years in office,” Mr. DuHaime said. “But he can still make or break others, and that makes him powerful and relevant.”Even John Boehner, the former speaker of the House whose criticisms of Mr. Trump in his memoir, “On the House,” have garnered national headlines, told Time magazine this week that he voted for Mr. Trump in 2020 — well after the former president had spent months falsely suggesting the election would be corrupt.Nikki Haley, the former United Nations ambassador, has said she will not run for president in 2024 if Mr. Trump does.Meg Kinnard/Associated PressIn his speech before R.N.C. donors on Saturday night, Mr. Trump, in addition to attacking Mr. McConnell, also criticized a host of perceived enemies from both parties; among them was former Vice President Mike Pence, whose life was in danger on Jan. 6 because he was in the Capitol to certify the electoral votes. Mr. Trump reiterated that Mr. Pence, who recently signed a book deal, should have had “the courage” to send the electoral vote tallies back to the states, despite the fact that the vice president had made clear that he did not think he had the authority to do so.Jason Miller, an adviser to Mr. Trump, disagreed with the comparison to 2015, saying that Mr. Trump had more dominance over the base of the Republican Party now than he did then, according to public polling, and a greater number of senior Republican officials speaking out against him five years ago.“In 2021, there are no candidates trying to take out President Trump, just some occasional sniping from menthol-infused nitwits like John Boehner,” he said.Still, Mr. Trump does not have the complete control over the party that he did during four years in office. His critics include leading Republicans like Mr. McConnell and Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3-ranking Republican in the House. Asked on Fox News on Tuesday if she would vote for Mr. Trump if he ran in 2024 Ms. Cheney replied “I would not.’Ms. Cheney, whom Mr. Trump has threatened as a target of his anger, also said her fellow Republicans shouldn’t “embrace insurrection.”And not all Republicans think that ignoring Mr. Trump is a mistake. One senior party member, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he didn’t want to engage in a lengthy back and forth with Mr. Trump, said that with the former president out of office and off Twitter, his reach is limited.The Republican said there had been anecdotal evidence from members of Congress during the recess that Mr. Trump was less omnipresent for voters in their districts than he had previously been.While Mr. Trump was ascendant in 2015 and 2016, said an adviser to another Republican who may run in 2024, that wasn’t the case now. And if party leaders fight with him publicly or try to take him on, it could only strengthen him, the Republican argued, giving him more prominence.What’s more, the first senior Republican argued, Republican lawmakers have found common cause not just in battling President Biden’s policies but in the backlash to the Georgia voting rights law. Those fights have continued without Mr. Trump, and will accelerate, the Republican said, without being driven by the cult of personality around the former president.Other Republicans are privately hopeful that the criminal investigation into Mr. Trump’s business by the New York district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr., will result in charges that hobble him from running again or even being a major figure within the party. People who have spoken with Mr. Trump say that he is agitated about the investigation.While all of that may represent just a slow turn away from Mr. Trump, those Republicans believe the turn has begun.David Kochel, a Republican strategist and supporter of Mr. Bush during the 2016 campaign, sounded less optimistic.He noted that even the horror of Jan. 6 did not break the hold Mr. Trump has on other elected officials, and that several anchors on Fox News — the largest conservative news outlet — had consistently downplayed the attack on air, numbing viewers to what took place as time passes.In an interview on Fox News with the host Laura Ingraham late last month, when asked about the security around the Capitol, Mr. Trump said: “It was zero threat right from the start. It was zero threat.”He added: “Some of them went in and there they are hugging and kissing the police and the guards. You know, they had great relationships. A lot of the people were waved in and then they walked in and they walked out.”Mr. Kochel said Jan. 6 was “being stuffed down the memory hole” with the help of Fox News, noting that the strategy of waiting out Mr. Trump and hoping he fades away has had a less-than-perfect history of being effective.“We’ve seen this movie before — a bunch of G.O.P. leaders all looking at each other, waiting to see who’s going to try and down Trump,” he said. More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Boehner Blasts Trump, Saying He ‘Incited That Bloody Insurrection’

      by

      In his new book, John Boehner, the Republican former House speaker, sharply rebukes the former president for his role in the “mob violence” at the Capitol on Jan. 6.John Boehner, the Republican former House speaker, issues a stinging denunciation in his new book of Donald J. Trump, saying that the former president “incited that bloody insurrection” by his supporters at the Capitol on Jan. 6 and that the Republican Party has been taken over by “whack jobs.”The criticism from Mr. Boehner in his book, “On the House: A Washington Memoir,” represents an extraordinary public rebuke by a former speaker of the House toward a former president from his own party and shows how much the Republican Party has shifted since Mr. Boehner left Congress in 2015. And his remarks came as Mr. Trump has sought to retain his grip on Republican lawmakers’ loyalty from his new political base in South Florida.The Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, sharply criticized Mr. Trump at the end of the Senate trial for the former president’s second impeachment, pointing to his role in the Capitol riot. Others, like Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3 in the House Republican leadership, have also excoriated him.But Mr. Boehner’s remarks went a step further, serving as a rejection of what the party he once helped lead has morphed into over the last several years. While he has criticized Mr. Trump in the past, it’s his comments about the events of Jan. 6 that have the most resonance.In the book, an excerpt from which was obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Boehner writes that Mr. Trump’s “refusal to accept the result of the election not only cost Republicans the Senate but led to mob violence,” adding, “It was painful to watch.”At another point, he writes, “I’ll admit I wasn’t prepared for what came after the election — Trump refusing to accept the results and stoking the flames of conspiracy that turned into violence in the seat of our democracy, the building over which I once presided.”Former President Donald J. Trump speaking at a rally in front of the White House on Jan. 6 shortly before his supporters stormed the Capitol.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesHe adds: “Watching it was scary, and sad. It should have been a wake-up call for a return to Republican sanity.” Nodding to the divisions between the parties in Congress now, he writes, “Whatever they end up doing, or not doing, none of it will compare to one of the lowest points of American democracy that we lived through in January 2021.”Mr. Trump, he goes on, “incited that bloody insurrection for nothing more than selfish reasons, perpetuated by the bullshit he’d been shoveling since he lost a fair election the previous November.” Mr. Boehner writes, “He claimed voter fraud without any evidence, and repeated those claims, taking advantage of the trust placed in him by his supporters and ultimately betraying that trust.”In an emailed statement, Jason Miller, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, called Mr. Boehner a “Swamp Creature” and accused him of favoring “Communist China” (The former speaker’s lobbying firm represents the Chinese Embassy in the United States). In a separate email to The Times, Mr. Trump asked of Mr. Boehner, whose love of merlot wine is legendary in Washington: “Was he drinking when he made this statement? Just another RINO who couldn’t do the job!”The former president has continued to make wild and false claims about widespread voter fraud in the election, despite multiple court rulings against him and the certification of President Biden’s victory.Of members of the House and the Senate who supported Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results, Mr. Boehner writes: “Some of the people involved did not surprise me in the least. The legislative terrorism that I’d witnessed as speaker had now encouraged actual terrorism.”Mr. Boehner, whose tenure in the House Republican leadership coincided with the congressional obstruction of the Obama years and who was subsumed by the rise of the Tea Party and House members who were rewarded by conservative media appearances, writes that the G.O.P. must “take back control from the faction that had grown to include everyone from garden-variety whack jobs to insurrectionists.”For now, Mr. Trump has retained support among Republican voters. A slim majority would like to see him as the party’s nominee again if he runs in 2024, something he has told advisers he’s serious about considering. And some House G.O.P. officials are deeply concerned about keeping him on their side in their efforts to retake control in the midterm elections next year. More