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    As Trump Thunders About Last Election, Republicans Worry About the Next One

    Donald Trump is the Republicans’ greatest asset in mobilizing voters. But some fret that his obsession with false claims about the 2020 election could cost the G.O.P. in 2022.Republicans believe they have a good shot at taking Congress next year. But there’s a catch.The G.O.P.’s ambitions of ending unified Democratic control in Washington in 2022 are colliding with a considerable force that has the ability to sway tens of millions of votes: former President Donald J. Trump’s increasingly vocal demands that members of his party remain in a permanent state of obedience, endorsing his false claims of a stolen election or risking his wrath.In a series of public appearances and statements over the last week, Mr. Trump has signaled not only that he plans to work against Republicans he deems disloyal, but also that his meritless claims that widespread voter fraud cost him the White House in 2020 will be his litmus test, going so far as to threaten that his voters will sit out future elections.“If we don’t solve the Presidential Election Fraud of 2020,” Mr. Trump said in a statement last week, “Republicans will not be voting in ’22 or ’24. It’s the single most important thing for Republicans to do.”The former president’s fixation on disproved conspiracy theories is frustrating to many in his party who see it as needlessly divisive at a time when Republicans feel they are poised to take back the House of Representatives and perhaps the Senate in the 2022 midterm elections. They worry he could cost Republicans otherwise winnable seats in Congress and complicate the party’s more immediate goal of winning the governor’s race in Virginia next month.The concern over Mr. Trump’s attempts to make all federal elections a referendum on him points to the larger debate among Republicans over what his role should be, as someone who remains singularly popular with the party’s base but is also a liability with swing voters and a motivator for Democrats to turn out.Some rising stars in the Republican Party — like Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, who ousted Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming from a House leadership post in a bitter intraparty fight over the Jan. 6 riots and Mr. Trump’s attempts to downplay them — have been clear: They want Mr. Trump to play a role in the 2022 midterms. Ms. Stefanik called him “an asset to Republicans on the ballot” at a fund-raiser last week.And top party strategists said they expected the former president to remain front and center in the Republicans’ campaign to retake control of the House. “He’s the leader of the party,” said Corry Bliss, a consultant to Republicans on congressional races. “The more energized and engaged he is, the better we’ll do.”But party officials believe Mr. Trump’s threat about his supporters staying home en masse is real. And the potency of his false claims about 2020 caught even some of his staunchest allies in the party off guard.The stakes are amplified by Mr. Trump’s increasingly pointed hints that he plans to be the party’s nominee in 2024.Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has been an outspoken supporter of Mr. Trump and the claims of voting irregularities during the 2020 election.Kenny Holston for The New York TimesRepresentative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia has supported exhaustive audits of the 2020 results to look for evidence of voting irregularities that repeated reviews have failed to produce. Still, she has told colleagues that she was surprised by a recent survey of Republican voters in her district, according to one person who spoke with her about it.The internal survey found that 5 percent of Republican voters said they would sit out the 2022 election if the state of Georgia did not conduct a forensic audit of the 2020 election — a demand that some of Mr. Trump’s hard-core supporters have made. Another 4 percent said they would consider sitting out the election absent an audit.The possibility that nearly 10 percent of Republicans could sit out any election — even one in a solidly red district like the one held by Ms. Taylor Greene — was something Republican strategists said they found alarming.Since Mr. Trump left office, polls have repeatedly shown that large majorities of Republican voters want him to run in 2024. And roughly 40 percent of Republicans say they consider themselves to be primarily his supporters rather than supporters of the party — about the same share who said so last November, according to the political research firm Echelon Insights.Many Republicans don’t seem to want to hear anything critical about him. A recent poll by the Pew Research Center, for instance, highlighted the lack of an appetite for much dissent. Nearly two-thirds of Republicans, Pew found, said their party should not be accepting of elected officials who criticize Mr. Trump.Mr. Trump’s recent interference in the Virginia contest — where polls show the Republican candidate, Glenn Youngkin, narrowly trailing his Democratic rival, former Gov. Terry McAuliffe — worried advisers to Mr. Youngkin’s campaign. They watched as their carefully scripted plan to keep the race focused on their candidate and on claims that Democrats have veered too far left became engulfed by news coverage of the former president praising Mr. Youngkin at a political rally last week.Mr. Trump remains overwhelmingly popular within the Republican party.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesSome Republicans said they feared they were watching a preview of the awkward and unpleasant dilemma their candidates would face for the foreseeable future, as Mr. Trump remains the most popular figure in their party, determining what candidates say and how voters think.“Here is where Trump is so destructive,” said Barbara Comstock, a former Republican member of Congress who lost her seat in suburban Virginia in 2018. That year, voters in swing districts across the country turned against centrist incumbents like her in a repudiation of Mr. Trump.Trump’s Bid to Subvert the ElectionCard 1 of 6A monthslong campaign. More

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    McCarthy Threatens Technology Firms That Comply With Riot Inquiry

    The top House Republican said his party would retaliate against any company that cooperated with an order to preserve the phone and social media records of G.O.P. lawmakers.WASHINGTON — Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, has threatened to retaliate against any company that complies with the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot, after the panel asked dozens of firms to preserve the phone and social media records of 11 far-right members of Congress who pushed to overturn the results of the 2020 election.Mr. McCarthy’s warning was an escalation of his efforts to thwart a full accounting of the deadly attack at the Capitol carried out by a pro-Trump mob, and his latest attempt to insulate the former president and Republican lawmakers from scrutiny of any ties to the violence. It came after he led the G.O.P. opposition to the creation of an independent bipartisan commission to investigate the riot, and then pulled five Republican congressmen from the select committee that Democrats created on their own, boycotting the proceedings.In preservation orders the special committee sent to 35 technology firms this week, members of the panel included the names of hundreds of people whose records they might want to review, among them some of Donald J. Trump’s most ardent allies in Congress, according to several people familiar with the documents who were not authorized to speak about their contents.The 11 Republicans are Representatives Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar of Arizona, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Mo Brooks of Alabama, Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina, Matt Gaetz of Florida, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Louie Gohmert of Texas, Jody B. Hice of Georgia, Jim Jordan of Ohio and Scott Perry of Pennsylvania.The preservation demands were accompanied by a statement that said the committee was merely “gathering facts, not alleging wrongdoing by any individual.” But the inclusion of the Republicans’ names, reported earlier by CNN, indicated that the panel planned to scrutinize any role they may have played in fueling the violence.“These are the individuals who have been publicly supportive of Jan. 6 and the people who participated in the insurrection on Jan. 6,” Representative Bennie G. Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the panel’s chairman, said in an interview.“We need to find out exactly what their level of participation in this event was,” he said. “If you helped raise money, if you provided misinformation to people, if you served on a planning committee — whatever your role in Jan. 6, I think the public has a right to know.”The panel has not asked to preserve the records of Mr. McCarthy, who has said he had a tense phone call with Mr. Trump as the mob laid siege to the Capitol, but Mr. Thompson said the top Republican’s name could yet be added.Mr. Thompson said Mr. McCarthy’s protestations were “typical of somebody who may or may not have been involved in Jan. 6 and doesn’t want that information to become public.”On Tuesday, Mr. McCarthy said Republicans would “not forget” and “hold accountable” those tech companies that preserve records sought by the committee. His remarks followed denunciations of the committee’s work by Representative Jim Banks, Republican of Indiana, who has called the panel’s tactics “authoritarian,” and Mr. Trump, who has called it a “partisan sham.”Ms. Greene threatened on Fox News that telecommunications companies that cooperated with the investigation would be “shut down.”Mr. McCarthy asserted, without citing any law, that it would be illegal for the technology companies to cooperate with the inquiry, even though congressional investigations have obtained phone records before. He said that if his party won control of the House, it would use its power to punish any that did.“If these companies comply with the Democrat order to turn over private information, they are in violation of federal law and subject to losing their ability to operate in the United States,” Mr. McCarthy wrote on Twitter on Tuesday. “If companies still choose to violate federal law, a Republican majority will not forget and will stand with Americans to hold them fully accountable under the law.”Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the committee, said he was stunned by Mr. McCarthy’s remarks, describing them as akin to obstructing an investigation.“He is leveling threats against people cooperating with a congressional investigation,” Mr. Raskin said. “That’s an astounding turn of events. Why would the minority leader of the House of Representatives not be interested in our ability to get all of the facts in relation to the Jan. 6 attack?”Barbara L. McQuade, a former U.S. attorney and University of Michigan law professor, called Mr. McCarthy’s claims “baseless,” noting that the panel had not requested the content of any communication.“He is falsely portraying the committee as overreaching so that he can protect his own political interests, to the detriment of Congress’s ability to do its job and the public trust in our institutions of government,” she said.In the past week, the select committee has ramped up its work, taking three wide-ranging investigative steps: a records demand to seven federal agencies focusing in part on any ties Mr. Trump may have had to the attack’s planning or execution; a document demand to 15 social media companies for material about efforts to overturn the election and domestic violent extremists who may have been involved; and the record preservation orders including the Republican representatives.The 11 Republicans include lawmakers who spearheaded the effort to challenge the election outcome in Congress on Jan. 6 and those who played at least some role in the “Stop the Steal” effort to protest the results, including promoting rallies around the country and the one in Washington whose attendees attacked the Capitol.Some of the lawmakers named in the order have continued to publicly spread the election lies that inspired the riot, and to allude to the possibility of more violence to come. Mr. Cawthorn falsely claimed on Sunday that the election had been “rigged” and “stolen,” telling a crowd in Franklin, N.C., that if elections were not safeguarded in the future, it could result in “bloodshed.”The select committee has been meeting twice a week, even during Congress’s summer recess, as its members plan their next steps. Mr. Thompson said two more hearings were in the works, one to dig deeper into the pressure campaign Mr. Trump and his allies started to overturn President Biden’s victory, and another to explore who encouraged militia and extremist groups to come to Washington before the assault.Representative Bennie G. Thompson, right, and members of the select committee have ramped up their work in the past week. Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times“There’s a concern on the committee about the executive branch leaning on state elected officials to change the outcome of the election,” Mr. Thompson said. “There’s concern about the identification with domestic terrorist organizations and their participation and encouragement to participate in the Jan. 6 march and insurrection.”Last week, the panel sought communications among top Trump administration officials about attempts to place politically loyal personnel in senior positions in the run-up to the attack; the planning and funding of pro-Trump rallies on Jan. 5 and 6; and other attempts to stop or slow the process of Mr. Trump handing over the presidency to Mr. Biden.It demanded records of communications between the White House and Ali Alexander, who publicized the “Stop the Steal” rallies, as well as Tom Van Flein, Mr. Gosar’s chief of staff.Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and a committee member, said the requests were “broad” by design as the panel sought to produce a “comprehensive report.” He said they could be expanded to include more members of Congress if evidence emerges to suggest it is necessary.“We know that there are members who were involved in the ‘Stop the Steal’ rally; we know that there are members who had direct communications with the president while the attack on the Capitol was going on,” he said. “There are any number of members who have very pertinent information.”On Friday, the panel sent letters to 15 social media companies — including sites where misinformation about election fraud spread, such as the pro-Trump website theDonald.win — seeking any documents in their possession pertaining to efforts to overturn the election and any domestic violent extremists associated with the Jan. 6 rally and attack.The committee had already asked for records on extremist groups and militias that were present at the Capitol that day, including QAnon, the Proud Boys, Stop the Steal, the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters. A person familiar with the committee’s discussions said its members intended to investigate more deeply plans among militia groups to coordinate.At least 10 suspected militia extremists attended paramilitary training in Ohio, Florida and North Carolina before the breach, according to court documents. Suspected domestic violent extremists also “coordinated efforts to bring tactical equipment to the event, presumably in anticipation of violence,” according to an April homeland security analysis obtained by The New York Times through a public records request filed by the group Property of the People.“There were undoubtedly insurrectionist groups that were dead-set on committing violence,” Mr. Raskin said. “If you listen to their chatter post-Jan. 6, it’s all abut how close they came, and next time they will be carrying arms.”The records preservation request delivered on Monday asked telecommunications companies to keep on file information about cell tower locations, text messages and call logs, and information uploaded to cloud storage systems.Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California and a member of the committee, emphasized that the request was “an investigation, not an accusation.”“We’ll see what we find out,” she said. “It’s fair to say you didn’t have 10,000 people just happen to show up and attack Capitol Police officers, maim them and threaten to kill the vice president and members of Congress just because they felt like it. There was a reason, there was a structure to this, and we need to uncover everything about that.” More

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    In Iowa, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz Take Trump's Baton

    At a rally in Des Moines, Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz showed that many Republicans do not plan to move on from the Trump era.DES MOINES — Far from Washington, and even farther from their home congressional districts, Representatives Matt Gaetz of Florida and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia found their people.As the two Republican lawmakers spoke at an “America First” rally in Des Moines, held in an auditorium that often hosts people with presidential aspirations, up was down and misinformation was gospel. Ms. Greene denounced Covid-19 vaccines to applause. Both declared former President Donald J. Trump the rightful winner of the 2020 election.These were facts, argued Eric Riedinger of Des Moines, 62, a small-business owner who attended the event and owns the website BigTrumpFan.com. And he would not vote for any Republican who failed to state this clearly, he said.“My biggest issue looking ahead: Stop the RINOs,” he said, using a pejorative conservative phrase for ‘Republicans in Name Only.’ “If they’re part of that infrastructure bill and supporting it, they’re not doing what they’re supposed to be doing.”The fringe of the Republican Party is sick of being called the fringe. Led by people like Ms. Greene and Mr. Gaetz, two upstart members of Congress with little legislative power and few allies in their party’s caucus, these conservatives believe they have assets more valuable than Washington clout: a shared language with the party’s base, and a political intuition that echoes Mr. Trump’s.In the months since the former president left the White House, Republican donors and party leaders have flocked to more established figures like Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, stirring buzz for their presidential prospects. At the same time, right-wing Republicans like Ms. Greene and Mr. Gaetz are loudly making the case that the post-Trump version of the Republican Party won’t swing back toward the center but will double down on the former president’s most controversial qualities.With that in mind, the two Republicans traveled to Iowa with a message about their fellow conservatives. It was not enough, they suggested, to insult Democrats as traitors to America or to cast doubt on the effectiveness of Covid vaccines and the legitimacy of the 2020 election. They told rally attendees that winning back the House in 2022 would be useless without more “America First” Republicans and that beating President Biden would require a full embrace of Mr. Trump.They sought to up the rhetorical ante on issue after issue, creating new litmus tests for their conservative rivals in the process.“Last time Republicans had full control, the first year under President Trump, Republicans didn’t fund and build the wall,” Ms. Greene said to the crowd of about 200 people. “Republicans didn’t defund sanctuary cities, they funded them. And this is the one that blows my mind: They did not defund Planned Parenthood.”She added, “This time around, Republicans need to take back the House with people that are going to do as they say.”Mr. Gaetz said that unlike many Republicans in Congress, he and Ms. Greene did not take corporate donations, arguing that many in the party were “too often shills for big business.” (Both of them, especially Ms. Greene, have demonstrated small-dollar fund-raising prowess.)In interviews, Republicans who went to the rally or who have followed Ms. Greene and Mr. Gaetz from afar said the pair’s efforts should not be discounted. In 2016, Mr. Trump stormed through the Republican primary and swept to power after party leaders underestimated the grass-roots appetite for his openly anti-immigrant language, his insults toward G.O.P. leaders and his economic message that targeted some corporations.Ms. Greene visited the Republican Party booth at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines on Thursday.Scott Olson/Getty ImagesNow, Mr. Gaetz and Ms. Greene appear intent on doing the same thing, to set the table for another presidential run by Mr. Trump or to send a warning shot to any would-be successors.If their bet is correct and the Republican base has left the Trump era wanting more of his bombastic style, it will have profound effects on the country’s political landscape. At minimum, Trump loyalists have shown themselves to be a stubborn force, threatening to pull additional congressional and presidential candidates into the waters of misinformation and racial intolerance.Kathy Pietraszewski, a 69-year-old rally attendee from Des Moines, said she had formally left the Republican Party after the 2020 election because she believed leaders were insufficiently supportive of Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn the results. Recently, she has focused on speaking out against Covid vaccines, which is part of the reason she likes Ms. Greene.“I know what the globalist agenda is, and their one world order starts with a vaccine,” Ms. Pietraszewski said. “So my No. 1 issue is freedom.”Polling and voter registration data suggest she is not alone. The Republican base, unlike the Democratic one, has a much higher tolerance for politicians who criticize their own party, and many Republicans still want Mr. Trump to be involved in the party’s future, according to a recent Associated Press-NORC poll. Vaccine skepticism and distrust in the 2020 election results are also high among conservative Americans. In May, a Quinnipiac University poll found that two-thirds of Republicans believed Mr. Biden’s victory was not legitimate.However, both Ms. Greene and Mr. Gaetz face significant hurdles to advancing their political careers.Mr. Gaetz is the subject of a Justice Department investigation of whether he had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old and paid for her to travel with him, according to people briefed on the matter. Ms. Greene has set off a series of controversies since she took office early this year, repeatedly using antisemitic and Islamophobic language and endorsing the executions of Democrats.Ms. Greene has since been stripped of her House committee assignments, but she has found an audience with Mr. Trump and his allies in the conservative media ecosystem. Several attendees at the Iowa rally said they had heard about her appearance there from a podcast run by Steve Bannon, the former Trump adviser.“We know what American people want,” Ms. Greene said. “We know for a fact what you want. We don’t buy into the swamp.”In Washington, the two members of Congress are treated like little more than a media sideshow, a nuisance for Republican leaders. They do not have traditional legislative power, and antics like Ms. Greene’s promise to bring impeachment articles against Mr. Biden gain no traction in Congress.Their words support Mr. Trump’s core policies: cutting immigration, attacking liberal messaging on race and policing, targeting big tech companies. But Brian Robinson, a Republican strategist from Georgia, said there was a big difference between someone who excites activists and someone who has Mr. Trump’s universal name recognition and business-friendly persona.“A person like Marjorie Taylor Greene attracts crowds and attention because they are speaking to an audience that feels marginalized but also mobilized, because they’re angry,” he said.“But revving up certain segments of the party can also alienate other parts of the party,” he added, saying the same thing happens to Democrats.Michael Murphy, a Republican consultant based in California, said, “They fascinate the media,” but added that “as far as real muscle, even in the Republican primary, they’re just one of many factions.”Still, Ms. Greene and Mr. Gaetz may have the next-best thing, according to rally attendees, other close watchers of the Republican Party and even some liberals. They are messengers of the type of white grievance politics that Mr. Trump deployed nationally. They say openly what others will only hint at, no matter its factual basis or the risk of backlash. And they speak with the fearful moral urgency that many Republican voters feel.“It’s hard for me to think about 2024, because I don’t know if we’ll make it there,” Ms. Pietraszewski said, expressing dire worries about the country’s future. “With the Black Lives Matter and Marxism and critical race theory, I don’t know.”At the rally, Ms. Greene called Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, who is Somali-born, “a traitor to America.” Mr. Gaetz said that Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III, the first Black person to serve in that role, “might be the stupidest person to have ever served in a presidential cabinet in America’s history.” Ms. Greene declared that the United States faced a new “axis of evil” made up of the news media, Democrats and big tech companies. They both promised to support the Jan. 6 Capitol rioters who had been arrested.Each comment drew applause.“I’m not voting for anyone who won’t say Donald Trump had the election stolen from him,” said Ron James, a 68-year-old retiree from Des Moines. “And I don’t think anyone in that room would, either.” More

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    Elise Stefanik and the Young Republicans Who Sold Out Their Generation

    Once upon a time, a shiny new trio of young conservatives — Ryan Costello, Carlos Curbelo and Elise Stefanik — wanted to help build a modern, millennial Republican Party. The 30-somethings, all sworn into Congress in 2015, understood that millennials often agreed on many of the nation’s core problems, and believed it was up to them to offer conservative solutions. They were out to create a new G.O.P. for the 21st century.“Whether it’s environmental policy or immigration policy, the younger generations are more open to the America of tomorrow,” Mr. Curbelo told me in 2018, when I interviewed him for a book about millennial political leaders. “We certainly have a lot of work to do on all those issues. The good news is that we have a lot of younger Republicans in Congress, and they all get it.”It was clear, even then, that millennial voters across the political spectrum cared more about issues like racial diversity, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and college affordability than their parents did. Polls showed that young Republicans were more moderate on some issues than older ones, particularly on questions of immigration and climate change.So Mr. Curbelo and Ms. Stefanik teamed up to fight for immigration reform, particularly for protections for young immigrants. They refused to join the right wing’s fight against marriage equality, likely recognizing that most young people embraced L.G.B.T.Q. rights. And Ms. Stefanik introduced a 2017 resolution, along with Mr. Costello and Mr. Curbelo, calling for American innovation to fight climate change — one of the strongest climate change statements to come out of the Republican Party in years. (Some octogenarian Republicans remained skeptical of climate science; just two years earlier, Senator Jim Inhofe brought a snowball onto the Senate floor to prove that global warming was a hoax.)But their visions of the “America of tomorrow” hadn’t foreseen Donald Trump.By 2018, Mr. Trump’s antics had helped lead Mr. Costello to opt for early retirement. That fall Mr. Curbelo, a sharp critic of the president, lost his re-election bid. Mia Love, the only Black Republican woman in Congress, was also defeated in the Democratic wave that year. Another young House Republican, Justin Amash, left the party in the face of Trumpism and dropped his bid for re-election in 2020. And Will Hurd, a young moderate and one of the few Black Republicans in the House in recent years, also decided not to run again.Ms. Stefanik is one of the few of this set who survived, but only by transforming into a MAGA warrior. By 2020, she was co-chairing Mr. Trump’s campaign and embracing his conspiracy theories about a stolen election. Her pivot paid off: This month, she was elected to the No. 3 position in the House Republican Party. She is now the highest-ranking woman and most powerful millennial in the House G.O.P.But a comparison of her past goals and present ambitions makes clear that Ms. Stefanik has morphed from optimist to operator, choosing short-term power over the long-term health of her party.When I interviewed Ms. Stefanik in 2018 and 2019, she seemed to understand that the Republican Party was in trouble with young people. “The G.O.P. needs to prioritize reaching out to younger voters,” she told me. “Millennials bring a sense of bipartisanship and really rolling up our sleeves and getting things done.” Now she has tied her political career to the man who has perhaps done more than any other Republican to drive young voters away from her party, resulting in surging youth turnout for Democrats in the 2018 and 2020 elections.Ms. Stefanik’s rise — and her colleagues’ fall — is not just a parable of Trumpism. It’s a broader omen for a party struggling to reach a 21st-century electorate. She ascended by embracing a movement that is all about relitigating the past rather than welcoming the future. Now she and other new Trump loyalists in Congress are caught between their party and their generations, stuck between their immediate ambitions and the long-term trends. The G.O.P. has embraced a political form of youth sacrifice, immolating their hopes for young supporters in order to appease an ancient, vengeful power.Of course, the road to political obsolescence is littered with the bones of political analysts like me who predicted that demographics would be destiny. But Mr. Trump didn’t just devastate the G.O.P.’s fledgling class of up-and-coming talent. He also rattled the already precarious loyalty of young Republican voters; from December 2015 to March 2017, nearly half of Republicans under 30 left the party, according to Pew. Many returned, but by 2017, nearly a quarter of young conservatives had defected.Millennials and Gen Zers were already skeptical of the G.O.P., but Mr. Trump alienated them even further. His campaign of white grievance held little appeal for the two most racially diverse generations in U.S. history. Youth voter turnout was higher in 2020 than it was in 2016, with 60 percent of young voters picking Joe Biden. His youth vote margin was sufficient to put him over the top in key states like Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia, according to an analysis by Tufts University, and young voters of color were particularly energized.Contrary to conventional wisdom that young people are always liberal and older people are always conservative, most voters form their political attitudes when they’re young and tend to stay roughly consistent as they age. And anti-Trumpism may now be one of the most durable political values of Americans under 50. By the end of Mr. Trump’s presidency, after the Jan. 6 insurrection, almost three-quarters of Americans under 50 said they strongly disapproved of him. Even young Republicans were cooling off: According to a new CBS poll, Republicans under 30 were more than twice as likely as those older than 44 to believe that Mr. Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election and roughly twice as likely to believe the party shouldn’t follow Mr. Trump’s lead on race issues.“Younger conservatives aren’t focused on the election being stolen or the cultural sound bites,” said Benji Backer, the president of the American Conservation Coalition, a conservative climate action group. He told me that Ms. Stefanik had “distanced herself from the youth conservation movement,” after years of being one of the most climate-conscious Republicans in Congress. Now, he said, “peddling misinformation about the election and Jan. 6 has made it harder for young people to look up to her as a future voice in the party.”The new G.O.P. of 2015 has been replaced by a newer G.O.P.: a cohort of young Republican leaders who seem far more concerned with owning the libs on social media than with proposing conservative solutions to issues that matter to young people.This cohort includes millennials like Representative Matt Gaetz and Representative Lauren Boebert as well as Representative Madison Cawthorn, a Gen Z-er, all Trump loyalists who voted to overturn the electoral vote result. Mr. Gaetz introduced a bill to terminate the Environmental Protection Agency, Ms. Boebert introduced a bill to designate antifa as a “domestic terrorist organization,” and Mr. Cawthorn has so embraced the Trumpian ethos of rhetoric as leadership that he once said he “built my staff around comms rather than legislation.”It’s clear that this version of the Republican Party is firmly the party of old people: Mr. Gaetz and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene kicked off their America First tour with a Trumpian rally at the Villages, Florida’s famous retirement community.Once, the young leaders of the G.O.P. were trying to present next-generation solutions to next-generation problems. Now they’ve traded their claim on the future for an obsession with the past.Charlotte Alter is a senior correspondent at Time and the author of “The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America.”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

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    Liz Cheney vs. MAGA

    The regular conference meetings of the Republican lawmakers in the House of Representatives, held most weeks behind closed doors in the Capitol Visitor Center, tend to be predictable and thus irregularly attended affairs. The party leaders — the House minority leader Kevin McCarthy, the minority whip Steve Scalise and the conference chairwoman Liz Cheney, whose job it is to run these meetings — typically begin with a few housekeeping matters and then proceed with a discussion of the party’s message or issue du jour. The conference’s more voluble members line up at the microphone to opine for one to two minutes at a time; the rare newsworthy comment is often leaked and memorialized on Twitter seconds after it is uttered. An hour or so later, the members file out into the corridors of the Capitol and back to their offices, a few of them lingering to talk to reporters.The conference meeting on the afternoon of Feb. 3 was different in nearly every way. It lasted four hours and nearly all of the G.O.P.’s 210 House members attended. Its stated purpose was to decide whether to remove Cheney from her leadership position.Three weeks earlier, Cheney announced that she would vote to impeach President Donald Trump over his encouragement of his supporters’ storming the Capitol on Jan. 6 — one of only 10 House Republicans to do so and the only member of the party’s leadership. Because her colleagues had elected Cheney to the party’s third-highest position in the House, her words were generally seen as expressing the will of the conference, and those words had been extremely clear: “There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution,” she said.The combination of her stature and her unequivocal stand amounted to a clear message from Cheney to House Republicans: If they sided with Trump in challenging the election, they were siding against the Constitution, and against at least one of their elected leaders. The tenor of the Feb. 3 meeting was therefore tense, portentous and deeply personal from beginning to end, according to several attendees who later described it to me.When it was Cheney’s turn to speak, the 54-year-old Wyoming congresswoman began by describing her lifelong reverence for the House, where her father, Dick Cheney, was minority whip more than 30 years ago before serving as George H.W. Bush’s secretary of defense and George W. Bush’s vice president. But, Cheney went on, she was “deeply, deeply concerned about where our party is headed.” Its core principles — limited government, low taxes, a strong national defense — were being overshadowed by darker forces. “We cannot become the party of QAnon,” she said. “We cannot become the party of Holocaust denial. We cannot become the party of white supremacy. We all watched in horror what happened on Jan. 6.”Cheney, alone among House Republicans, had been mentioned by Trump in his speech that day. “The Liz Cheneys of the world, we got to get rid of them,” he told his supporters at the Ellipse shortly before they overran the Capitol. The president had been infuriated by Cheney’s public insistence that Trump’s court challenges to state election results were unpersuasive and that he needed to respect “the sanctity of our electoral process.” At the time of Trump’s speech, Cheney was in the House cloakroom awaiting the ritual state-by-state tabulation of electoral votes. Her father called her to inform her of Trump’s remark. Less than an hour later, a mob was banging against the doors of the House chamber.In the conference meeting, Cheney said that she stood by her vote to impeach Trump. Several members had asked her to apologize, but, she said, “I cannot do that.”The line to the microphone was extraordinarily long. At least half of the speakers indicated that they would vote to remove Cheney. Ralph Norman of South Carolina expressed disappointment in her vote. “But the other thing that bothers me, Liz,” he went on, “is your attitude. You’ve got a defiant attitude.” John Rutherford of Florida, a former sheriff, accused the chairwoman of not being a “team player.”Others argued that her announcement a day before the impeachment vote had given the Democrats a talking point to use against the rest of the Republican conference. (“Good for her for honoring her oath of office,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi pointedly remarked when told of Cheney’s intentions.) Likening the situation to a football game, Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania lamented, “You look up into the stands and see your girlfriend on the opposition’s side — that’s one hell of a tough thing to swallow.”“She’s not your girlfriend!” a female colleague yelled out. Kelly’s remark was immediately disseminated among Republican women in professional Washington, according to Barbara Comstock, who served as a Republican congresswoman from Virginia until 2019. “We emailed that around, just horrified, commenting in real time,” she told me.Throughout it all, Cheney sat implacably — “as emotional as algebra,” as one attendee later told me. She spoke only when asked a direct question. But when McCarthy concluded by suggesting that they put this matter behind them and adjourn, Cheney insisted that the conference vote on her status right then and there. The members cast their secret ballots, and Cheney prevailed, 145 to 61.The lopsided margin was almost identical to Cheney’s own whip count going into the conference. Individual colleagues had confided in her that most of the conference was only too happy to move on from Trump — but saying so in public was another matter. To do so meant risking defeat at the hands of a Trump-adoring Republican primary electorate or even, many of them feared, the well-being of their families. In sum, it risked getting the Liz Cheney treatment. That Cheney was willing to face Trump’s wrath called attention to the fact that most of them were not — a factor in the aggrievement directed at Cheney in the meeting. Lloyd Smucker of Pennsylvania said that Cheney had “a low E.Q.,” or emotional quotient. On his way out the door, one congressman remarked, “I just got to spend four hours listening to a bunch of men complain to a woman that she doesn’t take their emotions into account.”To the one-third of the conference who wanted her removed from the leadership position, Cheney offered no gesture of appeasement. Standing outside the Visitor Center conference room, Cheney described the vote to reporters as “a very resounding acknowledgment that we can move forward together.” But this was true in only the most limited sense. A clear fracture in the G.O.P. — between those who continued to view Trump as the party leader and those, now led by Cheney, who wanted to move past him and his presidency — went unaddressed. As for Cheney, who had until recently been viewed as a potential rival of McCarthy for the title of House party leader, her standing, and with it her career, was far from a settled matter.“The conference voted to keep Liz in that position because we’ve got bigger fish to fry — fighting the Democrats, winning the next election — and this is a distraction from all that,” Jeff Duncan of South Carolina, who voted against Cheney in the meeting, later told me. But, he added, “I think there’s a huge disconnect with Liz and some others in the conference and the American people. She did have a conservative record. But then she became almost a Never Trumper. And I’ve been disappointed in her lack of humility. It’s struck a lot of people as not only odd, but just as — wow.”Illustrations by Clay RoderyLiz Cheney became a federal officeholder at the same time Donald Trump did, in January 2017. In the wishful thinking of Republican leaders, her election seemed to offer a model for how the forces that Trump represented might be safely, and profitably, assimilated into the Republican establishment. The two of them were elected on similar platforms: anti-Obamacare, anti-environmental regulation, anti-gun control, anti-apologizing for protecting American interests around the world. During her 2016 campaign, Cheney described Hillary Clinton as a “felon” on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show and, in response to the “Access Hollywood” tape in which Trump bragged about groping women, she said in a statement to a Wyoming radio station, “Hillary’s actions have been far worse.”For his part, Trump appeared to understand Cheney’s stature within the Republican hierarchy. Her party connections extended across generations. She could pick up the phone and call current and former foreign leaders from around the world, particularly in the Middle East. She seemed, on occasion, a human link between the legacy of the last Republican administration and Trump’s own, despite their mutual lack of chumminess. Five days into Trump’s presidency, the congresswoman expressed her enthusiastic approval when Trump floated the possibility of bringing back waterboarding as an interrogation technique. Cheney later praised Trump for having issued a pardon to her father’s former chief of staff, Scooter Libby. Cheney criticized Trump’s policies publicly on occasion but with discretion, and Trump rarely fired back.All that changed when Cheney stood alone among House Republican leaders in refusing to humor Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Trump won 70 percent of the vote in Wyoming in 2020, his highest share in any state. In Carbon County, the local party chairman, Joey Correnti IV, immediately convened two town halls to take the local temperature. “A few folks kind of let loose for a bit” over Cheney’s impeachment vote, he told me. “Talking about tar-and-feathering, riding her out on a rail. That kind of stuff.”Correnti drafted a resolution of censure — one of several against pro-impeachment lawmakers by Republican state committees in various states — that would soon be adopted by the entire state party. In it, the Wyoming G.O.P. called for her immediate resignation and asserted that Cheney had “violated the trust of her voters.” Several politicians announced their intentions to challenge her in the 2022 Republican primary. On Jan. 29, one of Cheney’s G.O.P. House colleagues, Matt Gaetz, the Florida congressman and performative Trump ally, appeared on the State Capitol steps in Cheyenne, where he pronounced Cheney “a fake cowgirl” before posing for fan photos. (Gaetz had been invited by a 27-year-old freshman Wyoming state representative and food-truck entrepreneur, Ocean Andrew, a protégé of Rand Paul, the Republican senator from Kentucky, whose distaste for the Cheneys dates back to the Iraq war.)On one level, this was a now-familiar story of Trump’s presidency and its aftermath: A Republican lawmaker, finally pushed over the line by one or another of Trump’s actions, publicly breaks with him, only to see years’ worth of alliances, friendships and ideological credibility evaporate overnight. But Cheney was not a backbencher, and she was not only standing on principle.According to sources who are familiar with Cheney’s views, she believes the G.O.P. has been manifestly weakened by Trump. The party now controls neither the executive nor the legislative branch. Twice in a row, Trump lost the popular vote by significant margins, exacerbating a worrisome trend for Republicans that has extended across five of the last six presidential elections. Given all this, Trump’s conduct in egging on the rioters presented his party with a political opportunity. By impeaching him, they could wash their hands of Trump and then resume the challenge of winning back majorities of the voting public.Cheney declined to speak to me on the record for this article, as did many other congressional Republicans. To defend Cheney is to invite the wrath of Trump and his base, while for those members who remain Trump loyalists, interaction of any sort with “fake news media” is increasingly to be avoided. But I was able to listen in on Cheney’s remarks at a virtual fund-raiser for her on Feb. 8, hosted by more than 50 veteran lobbyists who had each contributed to her political action committee. At the event, Cheney lamented the party’s drift away from reality, the extent to which it had become wedded to conspiracy theories. The party’s core voters, she said, “were misled into believing the election was stolen and were betrayed.” Alongside a legitimate concern over a Biden administration’s priorities was “the idea that the election somehow wasn’t over, and that somehow Jan. 6 would change things. People really believed it.”When one lobbyist raised the specter of Trump re-emerging as the G.O.P.’s dominant force, Cheney responded that the party would have to resist this. Citing the Capitol riot, she said, “In my view, we can’t go down the path of embracing the person who did this or excuse what happened.” She added: “We really can’t become the party of a cult of personality. It’s a really scary phenomenon we haven’t seen in this country before. Our oath and our loyalty is to the Constitution, not to an individual — particularly after what happened on Jan. 6.” This month, she told Fox News that she would not endorse Trump if he ran again in 2024.The House G.O.P.’s other two leaders, McCarthy and Scalise, do not subscribe to this view. Before Jan. 6, each man had strongly implied that the November election was rife with serious irregularities while dancing around Trump’s brazen claim that it had been stolen outright. Both of them, like many others in their conference, criticized Trump’s behavior on Jan. 6 while stopping short of describing it as impeachable.And both McCarthy and Scalise, according to associates familiar with their thinking, are of the view that the task of winning back the House next year is likelier to occur if the party’s relationship with Trump is harmonious. The same day Gaetz strutted into Cheyenne, McCarthy went to see Trump at Mar-a-Lago. The widely circulated photo of the two men standing and smiling together at the resort suggested that a path had been chosen for the party, and it was not Cheney’s.Still, many establishment Republicans have rallied around Cheney. Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, publicly congratulated her on surviving the conference vote. “Liz’s primary is absolutely the most symbolic race in the country right now,” said Julie Conway, the executive director of the Republican women’s political action committee VIEW PAC. “She’s the proverbial canary in the coal mine. I mean, is the party ready to get back to principled leaders with substance and a moral compass? Or have we become a party that sees Congress as a source of entertainment and intellectual cotton candy?”Conway’s group hosted a virtual fund-raiser for Cheney just two hours before the Feb. 3 conference meeting. Its nearly 40 co-hosts included former Republican members of Congress — Comstock, Phil English and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen — as well as alumni from the George W. Bush administration and prominent Washington lobbyists. Some of them cried as they talked about what the party had become under Trump. “It was like the biggest therapy session I’d ever been a part of,” said one of the hosts I spoke with later. Another host, the former Bush solicitor general Ted Olson, told me, “I’m very concerned about the direction the party’s being taken by — I hate to use the word ‘leadership,’ because outside of the courage Liz has shown, I’m not sure how you’d even define that term.”On Feb. 28, Trump gave the first speech of his post-presidency, at the annual CPAC convention in Orlando. After rattling off all the names of the seven Republican senators who had recently voted to convict him, along with the nine rank-and-file G.O.P. House members who had voted to impeach, the ex-president bore down on his primary target. “And of course, the warmonger, a person that loves seeing our troops fighting, Liz Cheney,” Trump declared to lavish boos. “How about that? The good news is in her state, she’s been censured, and in her state, her poll numbers have dropped faster than any human being I’ve ever seen. So hopefully they’ll get rid of her with the next election.”Though Cheney grew up in proximity to power, it wasn’t preordained that she would seek it herself. Raised in Wyoming and the Washington suburb of McLean, Va., she was a high school cheerleader and a babysitter of neighborhood kids. After graduating from Colorado College — the alma mater of her mother, Lynne Cheney — in 1988 she worked for USAID in Poland, Hungary and China before going to work on privatization efforts in the former Soviet Union at the State Department under Richard Armitage, who had served with her father at the Pentagon during the George H.W. Bush administration.Eight years later, when George W. Bush picked the elder Cheney as his running mate, Liz was put in charge of his debate preparation. “Liz didn’t hesitate to bust her dad’s chops,” said the Republican consultant and author Stuart Stevens, who assisted in the debate prep sessions at Dick Cheney’s home outside the resort town Jackson Hole. “We did these formal run-throughs where the Cheney women would grill him on his past record. ‘You voted against Martin Luther King Day — I mean, really, Dad? Really?’ It was clear that he was in this matriarchy.”Under the new administration, Liz Cheney went back to work at the State Department for Armitage, who had been named Colin Powell’s deputy secretary of state. Cheney reported directly to the assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs, Bill Burns, who is now Biden’s C.I.A. director. Though Powell’s department and her father’s Office of the Vice President bitterly clashed over the decision to invade Iraq and other foreign-policy matters, Armitage recalled Liz Cheney as being “mission-oriented” and did not question her loyalty.‘A few folks kind of let loose for a bit, talking about tar-and-feathering, riding her out on a rail.’The criticisms over the Iraq war in general, and her father’s role in particular, seemed to colleagues to intensify Liz Cheney’s hawkishness. She co-wrote the former vice president’s distinctly unapologetic 2011 memoir, “In My Time,” and during Barack Obama’s presidency she appeared frequently on cable news and the Sunday shows to defend Bush’s belated troop surge as a success while excoriating Obama’s subsequent drawdown from Iraq. As a pundit, she developed an on-air persona that suggested a more energetic and cutting version of her father’s plain-faced certitude.By 2012, she and her husband, Phil Perry, were co-hosting House G.O.P. fund-raisers with her father in Jackson Hole — a clear-enough indicator of her own political aspirations. Her first campaign, an attempt to unseat the longtime Wyoming Republican senator Mike Enzi in 2014, was a bust, viewed even among her allies as a case of overshooting. Two years later, Cheney announced that she would run for the state’s lone House seat, soon to be vacated by the Republican Cynthia Lummis.Undaunted by accusations of carpetbagging, she leaned heavily on her family’s roots and Rolodex. She assured the state’s fossil-fuel industry that there was one war she did in fact stand against: Obama’s so-called war on coal. She vowed to repeal the Affordable Care Act and enact tort reform in its place. She labeled the Obama administration’s Common Core educational initiative a case of “big government interference” and promised to shred it. Most notably, she opposed same-sex marriage, despite the fact that her sister, Mary, was married to a woman.Cheney’s stridency on same-sex marriage, while infuriating her sister, also marked a rare difference in views from their father, whose support for the rights of gay couples stretched back over a decade. “To be for civil unions as a Republican in 2000,” as Cheney was, “was arguably disqualifying,” Stevens told me. “And Cheney made a big point of disclosing it to Bush. ‘This is what I believe, and I’m not going to change.’ And he didn’t care if that meant he wasn’t on the ticket.”Stevens added, “I think you can draw a direct line from what Dick Cheney said then to what Liz Cheney’s doing now.”Illustrations by Clay RoderyThe first sign of unresolvable differences between Cheney and Trump occurred over foreign policy. At a meeting in the Oval Office in December 2018, Cheney and other Republican members of Congress tried to dissuade President Trump from his plan to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan and Syria. A recurring theme in the “America First” platform on which Trump campaigned, and one of the few consistent themes in his foreign-policy views over the years, was that America had been mired in “endless wars” without adequate assistance from allies. These allies, he charged, also failed to pay their full NATO dues and in other ways played his presidential predecessors for suckers.Cheney believed with similar conviction that an American military presence in places like Afghanistan was necessary to combat terrorism. And from the beginning of Trump’s presidency, she had similarly objected to Trump’s apparent favoritism of Vladimir Putin over America’s NATO allies. Putting her objections in terms that she believed Trump would understand, she said to him in the White House: “I thought it was wrong for Barack Obama to withdraw troops for political reasons. And I think it would be wrong for you to do the same thing here.”Cheney was a member of the House Armed Services Committee who was seen by her colleagues as possessing an advanced political acumen, so much so that she was elected as the House G.O.P.’s conference chair at the end of 2018 despite having served only a single term. Such positions would, during previous presidencies, have given her standing to weigh in on matters like troop deployments. And to the extent that Republicans on the Hill did voice opposition to Trump, foreign policy was usually the safest ground on which to do so, because the president’s supporters tended not to get riled up over NATO contributions.Still, Cheney’s willingness to speak in such stern terms to Trump’s face contrasted sharply with the deference most of her colleagues showed to him. “In past Republican administrations, it was OK to speak up and disagree on things,” the former congresswoman Barbara Comstock told me. “That was Liz’s experience. These new ideologues, that’s not what they did. If you spoke up at the White House, they’d look at you like you were crazy. Trump would show up at conferences and point to different members and tell them how great they were on TV, and then they’d hang out at the White House.”Cheney remained enough of a Trump ally to lead the House G.O.P.’s messaging fight against Pelosi’s Democrats over the first impeachment of Trump for pressuring the new president of Ukraine to investigate Trump’s likely opponent in the presidential election, Joe Biden. She chided the Democrats for rushing the vote. “It’s a system and a process like we’ve never seen before, and it’s really disgraceful,” Cheney said during one TV appearance. Voting to impeach Trump under such circumstances “may permanently damage our republic,” she warned on the House floor.Even at the time, however, a distancing was palpable. Cheney conspicuously refrained from commenting on, much less explaining away or endorsing, Trump’s strong-arming efforts. She publicly criticized as “shameful” Republicans’ questioning the patriotism of Alexander Vindman, the Army officer and National Security Council staff member who testified in the inquiry.Still, it took the coronavirus pandemic to make permanent the gulf between Trump and Cheney. According to sources familiar with her thinking, it was not the president’s wholesale failure of empathy that she found wanting, but instead his rejection of science. The president’s cavalier prediction in February, that the virus was an ethereal blip that would pass “like a miracle,” disturbed her. Cheney’s father had suffered multiple heart attacks and was therefore at high risk if he contracted the virus. For this reason, she was a no-show at the House G.O.P.’s leadership meeting at St. Michaels, Md., in early March 2020.On May 12 of last year, Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, incurred the wrath of Trump supporters by stating that the coronavirus would not simply “disappear” in the next few months as Trump had promised. Cheney publicly defended Fauci, tweeting that he was “one of the finest public servants we have ever had.” That was among the transgressions cited in a July virtual conference by members of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus, including Jim Jordan and Andy Biggs, as evidence that Cheney was out of step with the party. Their insistence on defending Trump’s obvious dereliction struck Cheney as further evidence that the Republican Party was in danger of losing its moorings.During a news conference on Sept. 23, Trump was asked if he would commit to a peaceful transition should Biden win the election. “Well, we’re going to have to see what happens,” he replied, adding that “I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots, and the ballots are a disaster.” In response, Cheney tweeted the next day: “The peaceful transfer of power is enshrined in our Constitution and fundamental to the survival of our Republic. America’s leaders swear an oath to the Constitution. We will uphold that oath.”By “we,” the chairwoman seemed to be speaking for her entire conference — or more accurately speaking to them, stating in tersely Cheney-esque fashion that failing to follow her lead would place the republic in danger. Indeed, by this juncture only the most Pollyanna-ish of Republicans could fail to see that Trump would never concede defeat. His most zealous supporters joined him in forecasting a “rigged election”; others simply tried to dodge the implications for as long as possible.McCarthy, the minority leader, fell in the latter category. The day that Cheney tweeted her commitment to a peaceful transfer of power, McCarthy asserted during a briefing that the Democrats were likeliest to contest the outcome, adding, “There will be a smooth transition, and I believe President Trump will have a very good inaugural.”In December, well after the election results had clearly established Biden as the winner, numerous Republican elected officials refused to accept the outcome and began showing up at “Stop the Steal” rallies in swing states that went for Biden. Cheney produced a 21-page memo rebutting the “Stop the Steal” claims state by state and disseminated it on Jan. 3, hoping that it would sway fellow House Republicans to put the election and Trump behind them.It did not. On the evening of Jan. 6, hours after members of Congress had been ushered back into the House chamber under heavy security following the storming of the Capitol, Cheney voted to certify the election results. But the balance within the party had tilted far the other way. Newly elected members like Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina (who spoke at the Trump rally that morning) and Lauren Boebert of Colorado (who tweeted that morning, “Today is 1776”) had joined Freedom Caucus members like Jordan and Paul Gosar of Arizona in loudly contesting the results. Nearly two-thirds of the House Republicans voted to overturn them in at least one state.The censure passed by the central committee of the Wyoming Republican Party after Cheney’s impeachment vote, three weeks later, included a request that the congresswoman meet with the committee and explain her apostasies. Cheney did not. “She’s basically taken the attitude that the Republican Party isn’t something she needs to interact with,” Karl Allred, one of the committee members, told me. “I really hate that attitude.”The State Capitol building in Cheyenne opened in 1888, two years before Wyoming became America’s 44th state. It is ornate if strikingly pint-size, its walls covered with framed photos of bearded white throwbacks from a Wild West yesteryear. When I arrived there on a snowy morning in late March, the legislative session was reaching a fever pitch.Wyoming politics tend conservative and libertarian, shot through with an independent streak owed in large part to the state’s longstanding disgruntlement with the federal government’s influence there, which is extensive even by the standards of Western states. Nearly half of Wyoming’s land is federally owned, as are two-thirds of the mineral reserves that underwrite the state’s largest industry, energy production.Wyoming’s coal production exceeds that of any other state. But domestic demand for the fuel has been cut by more than a third over the past decade, primarily because of the cheap natural gas yielded from fracking. The shipping ports and rail lines that might send the coal to markets elsewhere are in blue states like Washington, Oregon and California, where climate-conscious lawmakers have passed laws banning coal transportation. To protect its hobbled industry, Wyoming legislators have attempted not-​entirely-conservative measures like taxing solar facilities and further regulating wind farms.All of this made the state particularly susceptible to Trump and the right-wing politics that have outlasted his presidency. The Republican Party has dominated Wyoming politics so thoroughly for so long that liberal policy victories are basically unheard of, so it was peculiar to find a legislative agenda crowded with measures tilting against a cultural and political moment that did not seem likely to arrive in Cheyenne anytime soon. One education bill, advanced by the Republican representative Jeremy Haroldson, would, as he described it, promote the view that “slavery was not maybe what it has been painted in the nation, completely.” A bill co-sponsored by a state senator and septic-pumping serviceman named Anthony Bouchard would allow the state’s conceal-carry gun permit to include out-of-state residents, though there had been no particular public outcry for such an extension.Bouchard was the first politician to announce his intention to challenge Cheney in the 2022 Republican primary. Another primary opponent, the state representative and conservative radio talk-show host Chuck Gray, happened to be speaking on the floor when I arrived in the chamber. Gray had introduced a statewide voter-ID bill, which passed the House and would later be signed into law despite the lack of evidence of its necessity (even the conservative Heritage Foundation has found only three isolated instances of individuals voting fraudulently in the state over the past two decades) or even strategic value (Republican candidates in the state rarely face serious challenges from Democrats).But the most noteworthy bill to be debated on the floor that day was a measure that would require a runoff in Wyoming primary elections if the top vote-getter failed to receive 50 percent. The bill, introduced by Senator Bo Biteman, was transparently clear in its purpose: to make it harder for Liz Cheney to prevail in 2022 over a crowded field splitting the anti-Cheney vote.Donald Trump Jr. and President Trump’s former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski had both commented positively on the bill, and Trump Jr. had been rumored among Wyoming Republicans as a possible Cheney challenger himself. Other exotic possibilities included the Blackwater founder Erik Prince, who owns a home in Wyoming, and the Rockefeller heiress and Florida socialite Catharine O’Neill, a columnist for the far-right online publication Newsmax and the daughter of a Trump donor, who filed paperwork in January suggesting her intentions to run in the state.As for Gray and Bouchard, “They’re probably dead in the water if the bill goes down,” Landon Brown, a Republican state representative from Cheyenne, told me in an office adjacent to the House floor. Hours later, the legislation did indeed fail to pass. Nevertheless, Brown said, Cheney is hardly a lock to win next year. “People like my parents, who loved all the Cheneys but are die-hard Trump supporters, will never vote for her again,” he said. “They can’t stand her.”“I love Donald Trump,” said Joey Correnti, the author of the original Cheney censure resolution, who told me that he went to considerable effort to have both his post-office box and the last four digits of his cellphone consist of the number 1776. “When he stood on that stage of 17 Republican candidates, I knew then that he’d be the only one who could drag America kicking and screaming through all the growing pains it needed to get to where we are now.”Still, Correnti acknowledged, Trump loyalty alone would not defeat Cheney. “Whoever does become the prime challenger to Cheney is going to have a hard, expensive road ahead,” he said. “So hopefully the people of Wyoming and Trump can come to an agreement.” Trump announced in a recent statement that he would soon be making an endorsement in the primary and warned against the risk of a crowded field, noting that “so many people are looking to run against Crazy Liz Cheney — but we only want one.” Already, Bouchard was angling to be Trump’s anointed candidate, posting MAGA sentiments on his Twitter page while describing Cheney in campaign emails as “DC Swamp Royalty.”The national party has affected a posture of studied neutrality on the prospect of a Republican leader being primaried by a Trump-endorsed opponent. The National Republican Congressional Committee “does not get involved in primaries,” Michael McAdams, the organization’s communications director, told me. But others in the party are rallying to Cheney’s defense. Adam Kinzinger, the Illinois Republican congressman and frequent Trump critic who also voted for impeachment, recently started a political action committee of his own, Country First, that aims to support anti-Trump Republicans like Cheney. “She just has to get through this moment,” Kinzinger said. “Look, this whole cancel culture of the right, it’s about people who feel threatened because they look bad when someone like Liz is strong and actually stands for what she believes. I think she’ll survive.”Still, simply surviving as Wyoming’s lone congresswoman was not what anyone would have anticipated even a couple of years ago for Dick Cheney’s daughter. While reporting this article, it was jarring to recall all the expectations from the G.O.P. establishment and the Beltway press that attended her in her first days in the Capitol: the party’s first female House speaker or even its first female vice president or president. Almost no one I spoke with voiced such hopes for her today.One of her friends who served with her in the Bush administration, who asked not to be named while speaking candidly of his party’s internal dynamics, told me that he urged her to run last year for the seat that Mike Enzi was retiring from in the Senate, where Trump loyalty was less maniacally enforced. “I said to her, ‘You’ve got to run for the Senate — the House is becoming a terrible place,’” the friend recalled. “And that was well before all the impeachment stuff.” After Cheney’s vote, “there’s this cohort of House Republicans that can’t not attack her.”“Maybe that will subside and the Trump effect will wear off,” the friend went on. “But the history of politics doesn’t consist of two-year periods. These movements last 10 or 15 years. And that’s your whole career.”On a sunny Thursday morning in March, Cheney convened a news conference on the section of the eastern lawn of the Capitol complex known as the Triangle. She and about 30 other House Republicans, including McCarthy and Scalise, were there to discuss what a cardboard prop called “Biden’s Border Crisis.”Given the popularity of Biden’s $1.9 trillion Covid stimulus bill and the continued progress of the vaccine rollouts, the Republicans were eager to change the subject. They were also eager to project a unity of purpose, to voice agreement on something — to be a whole and somewhat normal party again. Peter Meijer of Michigan and John Katko of New York, two of the other Republican members who had voted to impeach Trump, were in attendance.The event consisted of a succession of minute-long condemnations of the new president and his failure to stem the flow of the hundred thousand migrants who had shown up at the U.S.’s Southern border in the month of February alone. Cheney’s turn at the microphone came after McCarthy and Scalise. Even though she said little, her brisk and determinedly unflamboyant delivery harked back to her performances a decade ago, during Obama’s presidency, as an imperturbable Sunday-show critic of a Democratic administration. Even more notable was the fact that everyone at the Triangle sounded like one another, reciting the same talking points, suggesting that she and her colleague-antagonists were at last on the same page.Or so it appeared until about 24 hours later, when Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene decided that it was time to weigh in. The Georgia freshman and Trump acolyte now had considerable time on her hands after a House majority — including 11 Republicans, though not Cheney — voted to strip her of her committee assignments on account of her conspiratorial and violence-espousing social media presence before taking office. Now she was introducing her Protect America First Act, which would enforce a four-year moratorium on all immigration and complete Trump’s unfinished border wall, which would be named in his honor.The bill was destined to go nowhere, but in its transparent effort to flatter Trump and further the policies most symbolically associated with him, it was a reminder of how closely he hovered over the party, regardless of Cheney’s attempts to sideline him. Greene’s defiance of Cheney’s attempt at party unity also served as a reminder of the numerous Republican lawmakers who had not been there with Cheney at the Triangle. The absent included not just reliable detractors like Gaetz — who, it would soon be reported, had come under federal investigation for sex-trafficking allegations, which he has denied — and Greene but also colleagues like Dan Crenshaw of Texas and Nancy Mace of South Carolina, who had both publicly defended Cheney not long before. Cheney was now a polarizing brand of her own. To stand beside her was tantamount to standing with her, which in turn meant standing against the dominant force in Republican politics.A conservative lobbyist told me of calls she received from others in her profession who supported Cheney but feared the consequences of attaching their name to a fund-raising event for her. A number of her prominent past supporters in Wyoming did not seem eager to invite renewed local wrath by discussing Cheney with me.In Cheyenne, I went to see Matt Micheli, a 45-year-old lawyer who served as Wyoming’s Republican Party chairman in 2016. “I think she views what’s happening now as a fight for the heart and soul of the Republican Party,” he told me of Cheney. “It really is a battle between the traditional Reagan-style conservative and the performative politics of the Matt Gaetz wing of the party. And if she succeeds, she’s positioned to be the leader of that post-Trump party.”The hesitant tone in Micheli’s voice suggested that a “but” was coming. “We’ve redefined what it means to be conservative,” he continued ruefully. “I could go through issue by issue, and I guarantee you I’d be more conservative than you on every single one of them. But that doesn’t matter anymore, right? It’s all about being angry and obnoxious and demonstrating how loyal you are to Donald Trump.”Micheli chose not to run for re-election for the party chairmanship in 2017, in part because he did not wish to pretend to be a Trump cheerleader. “What would happen if you ran for state party chair today?” I asked.He answered immediately. “If I wouldn’t endorse the conspiracy theories that have overtaken so much of my party, which I won’t,” he said, “I’d get crushed.”Robert Draper is a writer at large for the magazine. He is the author of several books, most recently, “To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq,” which was excerpted in the magazine. Clay Rodery is a freelance illustrator and figurative artist in Brooklyn. He currently teaches illustration at Montclair State University in New Jersey. More

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    Donations Surge for Republicans Who Challenged Election Results

    The lawmakers, who encouraged their followers to protest in Washington on Jan. 6, have capitalized on the riot to draw huge campaign donations.WASHINGTON — Republicans who were the most vocal in urging their followers to come to Washington on Jan. 6 to try to reverse President Donald J. Trump’s loss, pushing to overturn the election and stoking the grievances that prompted the deadly Capitol riot, have profited handsomely in its aftermath, according to new campaign data.Senators Josh Hawley of Missouri and Ted Cruz of Texas, who led the challenges to President Biden’s victory in their chamber, each brought in more than $3 million in campaign donations in the three months that followed the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia who called the rampage a “1776 moment” and was later stripped of committee assignments for espousing bigoted conspiracy theories and endorsing political violence, raised $3.2 million — more than the individual campaign of Representative Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader, and nearly every other member of House leadership.A New York Times analysis of the latest Federal Election Commission disclosures illustrates how the leaders of the effort to overturn Mr. Biden’s electoral victory have capitalized on the outrage of their supporters to collect huge sums of campaign cash. Far from being punished for encouraging the protest that turned lethal, they have thrived in a system that often rewards the loudest and most extreme voices, using the fury around the riot to build their political brands. The analysis examined the individual campaign accounts of lawmakers, not joint fund-raising committees or leadership political action committees.“The outrage machine is powerful at inducing political contributions,” said Carlos Curbelo, a former Republican congressman from Florida.Shortly after the storming of the Capitol, some prominent corporations and political action committees vowed to cut off support for the Republicans who had fanned the flames of anger and conspiracy that resulted in violence. But any financial blowback from corporate America appears to have been dwarfed by a flood of cash from other quarters.Representative Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina, a freshman who urged his supporters to “lightly threaten” Republican lawmakers to goad them into challenging the election results, pulled in more than $1 million. Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado — who like Ms. Greene compared Jan. 6 to the American Revolution — took in nearly $750,000.The sums reflect an emerging incentive structure in Washington, where the biggest provocateurs can parlay their notoriety into small-donor successes that can help them amass an even higher profile. It also illustrates the appetites of a Republican base of voters who have bought into Mr. Trump’s false claims of widespread election fraud and are eager to reward those who worked to undermine the outcome of a free and fair election.Most of the dozens of corporations that pledged to cut off any Republican who supported overturning the election kept that promise, withholding political action committee donations during the most recent quarter. But for the loudest voices on Capitol Hill, that did not matter, as an energized base of pro-Trump donors rallied to their side and more than made up the shortfall.“We’re really seeing the emergence of small donors in the Republican Party,” said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist. “In the past, Democrats have been the ones who have benefited most from small-dollar donations. We’re seeing the Republicans rapidly catching up.”Lawmakers have long benefited richly from divisive news coverage, especially around prominent events that play to the emotions of an enraged or fearful voter base. But the new filings illustrate a growing chasm between those who raise money through a bombastic profile — often bolstered by significant fund-raising expenditures — and those who have focused their attentions on serious policy work.As provocative freshmen like Ms. Greene, Ms. Boebert and Mr. Cawthorn took in high-dollar figures, other more conventional members of their class in competitive districts — even those praised for their fund-raising prowess — were substantially behind.For instance, Ashley Hinson of Iowa and Young Kim of California, both of whom opposed the electoral challenges and have worked on bipartisan bills, each took in less than $600,000.Ms. Greene, Ms. Boebert and Mr. Cawthorn raised more money than the top Republicans on the most powerful committees in Congress, such as appropriations, budget, education and labor, foreign affairs and homeland security.In many cases, Republican lawmakers who fanned the flames of the Jan. 6 violence have since benefited by casting themselves as victims of a political backlash engineered by the Washington establishment, and appealed to their supporters.“Pennsylvania wasn’t following their own state’s election law, but the establishment didn’t want to hear it. But that’s not who I work for,” Mr. Hawley wrote in January in a fund-raising message. “I objected because I wanted to make sure your voice was heard. Now, Biden and his woke mob are coming after me. I need your help.”Ms. Greene fund-raised off a successful effort to exile her from committees, led by furious Democrats incensed at her past talk in support of executing Speaker Nancy Pelosi and encouraging her followers to “Stop the Steal” on Jan. 6. Setting goals of raising $150,000 each day in the days before and after the unusual vote, she surpassed them every time.“The D.C. swamp and the fake news media are attacking me because I am not one of them,” one such solicitation read. “I am one of you. And they hate me for it.”But the polarizing nature of Mr. Trump also helped some Republicans who took him to task for his behavior surrounding the events of Jan. 6.Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3 House Republican who voted to impeach Mr. Trump, took in $1.5 million, and Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, who has started an organization to lead the Republican Party away from fealty to Mr. Trump, raised more than $1.1 million.“It’s obvious that there’s a strong market for Trumpism in the Republican base,” Mr. Curbelo said. “There is also a strong market for truth-telling and supporting the Constitution.”Mr. Conant questioned how much of the fund-raising surge for some candidates was directly tied to the Capitol assault, which he said the conservative news media had generally “moved on” from covering.Instead, he said that Republican voters were “very nervous” about the direction of the country under Democratic control and were eager to support Republicans they viewed as fighting a liberal agenda.“It pays to be high-profile,” Mr. Conant said. “It’s more evidence that there’s not a lot of grass-roots support for milquetoast middle of the road. It doesn’t mean you have to be pro-Trump. It just means you need to take strong positions, and then connect with those supporters.”But if the Republican civil war has paid campaign dividends for fighters on both sides, individual Democrats involved in prosecuting Mr. Trump for the riot in his impeachment trial have not reaped a similar windfall.With her $3.2 million raised this quarter, Ms. Greene brought in more money than the combined total raised by all nine impeachment managers — even though they won widespread applause in liberal circles for their case against the former president. Three of the managers have raised less than $100,000 each over the past three months, according to the data.Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene brought in more than the combined total raised by nine impeachment managers, three of whom raised less than $100,000 over the past three months.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesAs money pours into campaigns, the Jan. 6 assault has also resulted in much spending around security precautions.The Federal Election Commission expanded guidance allowing lawmakers to use campaign contributions to install residential security systems at their homes, and top Capitol Hill security told lawmakers to consider upgrading their home security systems to include panic buttons and key fobs.Campaign filings show nearly a dozen lawmakers have made payments of $20,000 or more to security companies in the past three months, including Senator Patrick J. Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, who voted to convict Mr. Trump; Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, who gave a harrowing account of the riot; and Representative Eric Swalwell, Democrat of California and one of the impeachment managers against Mr. Trump.Mr. Cruz and Mr. Hawley were also among the biggest spenders on security.Lauren Hirsch More

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    At CPAC, a Reverence for Trump

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyAt CPAC, a Golden Image, a Magic Wand and Reverence for TrumpThe faithful who flocked to the annual conference of conservatives made it clear that their allegiance was to the former president far more than to the Republican Party.A woman standing next to a metal replica of former President Donald Trump, made by Tommy Zegan, on the second day of the Conservative Political Action Conference.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesFeb. 28, 2021Updated 10:13 a.m. ETORLANDO, Fla. — Tommy Zegan was appalled by the few sculptures of Donald J. Trump in existence — the life-size nude statue that popped up in major cities in America, the golden toilet in London. So in 2018, he got to work.Mr. Zegan, a Trump supporter who had recently moved to Mexico from the United States, created a six-foot-tall fiberglass mold of the former president and painted it gold. Mr. Zegan’s Trump carried a magic wand in his left hand, a reference to Barack Obama’s quip in 2016 about Mr. Trump’s needing one to bring back manufacturing jobs. The sculpted Trump wore his customary suit jacket and red tie, American flag shorts — and flip-flops — “because technically he should be retired,” Mr. Zegan explained, “but he chose to be a servant.”The final product, titled “Trump and His Magic Wand,” was among the more popular attractions at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Fla. On Saturday, attendees flocked to the event’s merchandise hall for photos with the golden sculpture, the scene an almost literal rendering of the Republican Party, which continues to reserve its reverence not for ideas or elected officials but for one man.“It’s definitely not an idol,” Mr. Zegan insisted. (“I was a youth pastor for 18 years,” he noted.) “An idol is something somebody worships and bows down to. This is a sculpture. It’s two different things.”The defiantly pro-Trump mood at CPAC represented a culmination of a cycle that began in 2016, when Republican leaders publicly supported Mr. Trump’s nomination for president while privately presuming a landslide defeat and subsequent irrelevance. It was a pattern that held firm over the four years that followed, with many lawmakers continuing to indulge the president, all while confident that a breaking point — whether a loss in 2020 or, most recently, the riot at the Capitol by Trump supporters on Jan. 6 — was imminent.Meanwhile, their constituents’ devotion to Mr. Trump only hardened. For many voters, Mr. Trump became the party. And at CPAC, many of the thousands of attendees sporting Make America Great Again hats made it clear that their loyalties no longer lay with the institution itself.Despite four years of professions of fealty to Mr. Trump from the party’s elected officials and their orienting of the G.O.P. around his image, dozens of conservatives this weekend bristled at the Republican label, castigated the party’s current congressional leadership and vowed to leave the party altogether should Mr. Trump decide not to run for a second term in 2024.Sany Dash selling merchandise at her CPAC booth. “We’re so disgusted by Republicans that, honestly, if Trump’s not running, we don’t care who wins,” she said.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesThe party’s viability in the future, these people suggested — some as they proudly displayed their well-worn Trump 2020 T-shirts — was entirely contingent upon its members’ willingness to remain fixed in the past.“We’re so disgusted by Republicans that, honestly, if Trump’s not running, we don’t care who wins,” Sany Dash said as she worked at her Trump merchandise booth.Ms. Dash’s store, Bye Bye Democrats, was bustling on Saturday as CPAC attendees browsed bejeweled MAGA clutches, plush elephants and a tapestry featuring an image of Mr. Trump drinking coffee accompanied by text reading, “The best part of waking up is Donald Trump is president.” (“We’ve sold probably 1,400 Nancy Pelosi toilet paper rolls here,” she said. “Our toilet paper is always a hit.”)Yet Ms. Dash, an Indian-American from New York who called herself a “Day 1” Trump supporter, appeared angrier at the moment at Republicans, and specifically at Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who has urged her party to break with the former president. Ms. Dash said she was preparing to open a store in Wyoming in the next two months and call it Bye Bye Liz.“Liz Cheney is a descendant of a warmonger,” she said. “Sorry, we got into war with Iraq, and so many people died — millions of people’s lives changed.”She continued: “I don’t care what she has to say now. It’s like the Bush girls in Austin. I don’t care how woke you are in Austin, just because now you get along with Michelle Obama, but your father killed a lot of people. So excuse me, I don’t want anything to do with you people.”Like all of the dozens of CPAC attendees interviewed, Ms. Dash said she hoped Mr. Trump would run for president in 2024. There are some other Republicans she likes, including Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota — “I like Kristi Noem, because she fights back,” she said, calling her a “female Trump” — but she said she would stick with the G.O.P. only if Mr. Trump, or someone who pledges to lead as he did, was the nominee.“I mean, I’ve heard the rest of them — if they actually come through, that’s wonderful,” she said. “If they don’t, I’m going to be out of this party, just like everyone else. It’s that simple.”Della Striker, 70, is a lifelong Republican and, for the past three years, has been a fitness instructor at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s resort in Palm Beach, Fla. But she said her allegiance to Mr. Trump had come to transcend political parties. “I only voted Republican, but I never loved anyone — I voted Republican because they were at least pro-life and loved Israel.”But in 2015, she said, she heard a voice.“I’ve heard the Lord five times in my life,” she said. “I woke up in 2015 — I was waking up, and it said, ‘I want you to pray for Donald Trump.’”Six years later, Ms. Striker said she was “very upset.”“Seven Republicans turned on him,” she said, referring to the senators who voted to convict in Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial this month. While she had enjoyed listening to some speakers at CPAC, such as Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, she wondered why there were not more speakers she considered sufficiently pro-Trump — in particular, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.Ms. Greene, who was elected in 2020 despite a history of racist, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic remarks and her embrace of the QAnon conspiracy theory, was not on the CPAC agenda. But she attended the conference anyway, posing for photos on Saturday with throngs of fans in the hallways of the Hyatt Regency.Other CPAC attendees also questioned Ms. Greene’s absence from the agenda.Timothy Shea and Johnny Flynn, a Republican who is running for Senate in Connecticut, fist bumping in front of a cardboard cutout of Mr. Trump on the second day of the Conservative Political Action Conference.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesPamela Roehl, a Realtor from Illinois who was wearing a red “Keep America Great” cowboy hat, frowned slightly when asked if she considered herself a Republican. “I’m a conservative,” she said. For her, that meant “following the Constitution” and “America first.” She felt many speakers at this year’s conference — her fourth — fit that mold, but she was also looking forward to learning more about “the new congresswoman from Georgia.”Ms. Roehl, 55, unlocked her iPhone, whose screen background was a photo of Donald Trump Jr., and pulled up a group text to double-check that Ms. Greene was indeed in Orlando. “Yeah, I’m going to go hear her speak,” Ms. Roehl said. “I know she’s controversial with, like, the QAnon stuff and everything, but I like CPAC because you can hear people out.”Ms. Roehl acknowledged that Ms. Greene’s history of inflammatory remarks was “kind of a blemish on her,” but she saw a positive in them, too, contrasting Ms. Greene to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat. “A lot of the unfiltered women I’ve seen in politics are more like A.O.C. and other people, so it’s kind of neat to see a more conservative person kind of unfiltered,” she said.Yet when it came to other Republicans who were missing from CPAC’s agenda, including former Vice President Mike Pence and Nikki Haley, Mr. Trump’s former ambassador to the United Nations, many attendees seemed ambivalent, as if those figures’ absence hadn’t even occurred to them.“No opinion,” Mr. Zegan, the sculptor of the golden Trump, said with a shrug when asked about Mr. Pence. Mr. Zegan, like several of those interviewed, expressed the false belief that the loosely affiliated group of far-left anti-fascism activists known as antifa was responsible for the riot at the Capitol (“It’s eventually going to come out,” Mr. Zegan promised). But while some said that Mr. Pence had “let down” Mr. Trump by presiding over the congressional certification of Electoral College votes, even they seemed not so much angry toward him as indifferent.As for Ms. Haley, Mr. Zegan was a bit more animated, pulling out his phone and showing a photo of a painting he had made of her. “I would love to present it to her, but I’m kind of disappointed in her,” he said. “When she bad-mouthed Trump — she should’ve just kept her opinion to herself.”In other words, two figures who were once considered rising stars in the G.O.P., who for years have had an eye to 2024, appeared to have less currency at CPAC than a freshman congresswoman known for her conspiracy theories and her devotion to Mr. Trump.Asked how he defined the Republican Party right now, Mr. Zegan grinned weakly. “In shambles,” he said.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Mitch McConnell Would Like Trump to Fade Away

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyMitch McConnell Would Like Trump to Fade AwayGood luck with that.Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C. on politics, demographics and inequality.Feb. 24, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETCredit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesMitch McConnell is savvy enough to know that when he took the Senate floor to blame Donald Trump for the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, he was pouring gasoline on an intraparty feud.As accurate as McConnell’s statement may have been — “There’s no question — none — that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day” — McConnell was attacking a man who had won an unprecedented level of devotion from a majority of the Republican electorate, devotion bordering on religious zeal.The escalating feud threatens to engulf the party in an internal struggle that will be fought out in the 2022 House and Senate primaries, pitting Trump-backed candidates against those who have offended the former president.When Trump viciously counterattacked on Feb. 16, Democrats were especially cheered by this passage in his remarks:Where necessary and appropriate, I will back primary rivals who espouse Making America Great Again and our policy of America First. We want brilliant, strong, thoughtful, and compassionate leadership.In effect, Trump is gearing up to run a slate of favored candidates in the 2022 primaries against incumbent Republicans, especially, but by no means limited to those who supported his impeachment.Politico reported on Feb. 20 that:Trump will soon begin vetting candidates at Mar-a-Lago who are eager to fulfill his promise to exact vengeance upon incumbent Republicans who’ve scorned him, and to ensure every open GOP seat in the 2022 midterms has a MAGA-approved contender vying for it.Twenty Republican-held Senate seats are at stake in 2022, and at least two of the incumbents up for re-election — John Thune of South Dakota and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — are certain to be on Trump’s hit list.Murkowski voted to convict the president. Thune voted against conviction, but before that he publicly dismissed efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s victory. Trump then tweeted on Dec. 13:RINO John Thune, ‘Mitch’s boy’, should just let it play out. South Dakota doesn’t like weakness. He will be primaried in 2022, political career over!!!McConnell will not be on Trump’s hit list for the simple reason that he just won re-election and does not have to face voters until 2026. But his name will be there in invisible ink.Another group Trump is very likely to target for political extinction is made up of the 10 Republican members of the House who voted to impeach the president.These incumbent Republicans only scratch the surface of the potential for intraparty conflict in the event Trump adopts a scorched earth strategy in an all-out attack on Republican candidates who voiced criticism of the former president.Trump’s venom is likely to encompass a host of state-level Republicans who disputed his claims of a stolen election, including Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia and Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio, both up for re-election in ’22.Assuming that Trump versus McConnell becomes a major theme in the 2022 Republican primaries, the numbers, especially among white evangelical Christians, favor Trump.Robert Jones, founder and chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute, noted that his group’s polling has found that many Republicans have elevated Trump to near-deity status. In an email, Jones wrote:Just ahead of the election, a majority (55 percent) of white evangelicals and a plurality (47 percent) of Republicans said they saw Trump as “being called by God to lead at this critical time in our country.”Jones continued:If McConnell is counting on the impeachment for inciting insurrection to weaken Trump’s future within the party, he seems to have miscalculated: Three-quarters of Republicans and two-thirds of white evangelicals agreed with the statement, “Trump is a true patriot.”I asked Gary Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California-San Diego, about the consequences of a Trump versus McConnell battle over the future of the Republican Party. He emailed in reply: “The deck is stacked against McConnell, at least for the next election cycle.”Jacobson sent a copy of a paper he is working on, “Donald Trump’s Big Lie and the Future of the Republican Party,” that provides strong evidence in support of his assessment.Among Republicans, over much of the Trump presidency, the favorability ratings of Trump, the party and McConnell generally rose and fell in tandem, Jacobson noted. That changed in December 2020:After the Electoral College voted in mid-December, the proportion holding favorable opinions of all three fell, but more for the Republican Party and much more for McConnell than for Trump. Trump’s average was 5.6 points lower for January-February 2021 than it had been for all of 2020, the party’s average was 11.3 points lower.According to Jacobson, the drop was disastrous for McConnell:In December, after McConnell congratulated Biden, his favorability ratings among Republicans dropped about 13 points from its postelection average (66 percent) and then fell another 17 points after he blamed Trump for the Capitol invasion, with the biggest drop occurring among the share of Republicans who held very favorable opinions of Trump (57 percent in this survey).The pattern is clear in the accompanying graphic:Trump on TopThe share of Republicans holding favorable views of Trump, McConnell and the party overall. More