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      Trump May Run in 2024. So Might They. It’s Getting Awkward.

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      Former President Donald J. Trump’s unwillingness to cede the spotlight has cast doubt on the political futures of several Republican politicians.Sign up here to get On Politics in your inbox every Tuesday and Thursday.With all the subtlety of a bullhorn, former President Donald J. Trump has been hinting that he plans to run for office again in 2024.And Republicans are so far treating him with the deference they displayed while he was in the White House as they wait to see if he makes his move.On Saturday afternoon, Mr. Trump heads to Iowa for a rally at the state fairgrounds, a perennial stop on the presidential campaign circuit. Joining him will be several of the state’s top Republicans, including Gov. Kim Reynolds, Senator Charles E. Grassley and the chairman of the Iowa Republican Party, Jeff Kaufmann — a testament to the former president’s enduring dominance.Mr. Trump’s unwillingness to cede the spotlight has cast doubt on the political futures of an entire group of Republican politicians who have suggested that they might someday want to run for president. And while they — like the rest of the country — can’t be sure what the notoriously fickle former president might do, some of them are trying to stake their claims as leaders in the party.That requires a good deal of delicacy on their part. And it got a little awkward this week for two of them.First there was former Vice President Mike Pence, whose refusal to interfere with the counting of the electoral votes on Jan. 6 deeply angered Mr. Trump and helped precipitate the deadly assault on the Capitol that day. Mr. Pence gave an interview this week to Sean Hannity of Fox News and sounded at times an awful lot like someone who wants to be president.He attacked President Biden for withdrawing American forces from Afghanistan. He also criticized the president’s approach to domestic affairs — for “lecturing the American people about vaccine mandates” and promoting what Mr. Pence called a “massive, big-government, socialist bill” before Congress that would widen the social safety net and address problems like climate change.But when Mr. Hannity broached the subject of Mr. Pence’s reportedly frayed relationship with Mr. Trump, the former vice president tried to deflect by accusing the news media of blowing the events of Jan. 6 out of proportion, referring to it obliquely at one point as “one day in January.”“They want to use that one day to try and demean the character and intentions of 74 million Americans who believe we could be strong again and prosperous again and supported our administration,” Mr. Pence said.He did not address the fact that numerous rioters at the Capitol called for his execution during the attack, demanding that he be hanged for not carrying out Mr. Trump’s wishes. And Mr. Hannity didn’t bring it up.Then there was a speech by Nikki Haley, another former Trump administration official whose relationship with Mr. Trump was damaged because she had declared herself “disgusted” with him after Jan. 6 and predicted that he’d “lost any sort of political viability.”But Ms. Haley, who served as governor of South Carolina and ambassador to the United Nations, praised Mr. Trump in an appearance at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif. She criticized Mr. Trump’s political opponents for accusing him of being compromised by the Russians, and said that Mr. Biden’s posture toward Russia was weaker by comparison.Separately, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal this week, she lauded Mr. Trump’s ability to “get strong people elected” and insisted, “I don’t want us to go back to the days before Trump.”At the moment, that doesn’t seem like an option for Ms. Haley or anyone else who wants to have a bright future in the Republican Party. Mr. Trump continues to attack Republicans who broke with him after Jan. 6 and supported his impeachment, such as Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming.His first rally since the day of the Capitol riot was in June outside Cleveland. He endorsed a local Republican who was challenging Representative Anthony Gonzalez in next year’s primary election. Mr. Gonzalez, one of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump for his role in inciting the riot, announced last month that he was leaving Congress rather than staying to face his Trump-approved challenger.Polls taken over the course of the year have shown that Mr. Trump remains the overwhelming favorite for Republican voters, suggesting that he would be difficult to beat in a primary if he did indeed run. Though his popularity suffered somewhat in the immediate aftermath of Jan. 6, most Republicans seem to have moved on. A Pew Research Center poll released Wednesday found that two-thirds of Republicans say Mr. Trump should continue to be a major national figure, an increase of 10 percentage points from January. Forty-four percent of Republicans or Republican-leaning voters want him to run again. The Pew poll also found little tolerance for dissent. Asked whether their party should accept politicians who openly criticize Mr. Trump, 63 percent said no.On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Will Miami's Mayor Francis Suarez be Nikki Haley’s Vice Presidential Pick for 2024?

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      Big names in tech including Peter Thiel and Keith Rabois have moved to Miami in the past year. Mayor Francis Suarez is welcoming them with open arms in his zeal to transform Miami into the next tech hub. The sell? Sunshine, low taxes and a mayor who is always willing to take their calls (or, as Kara Swisher puts it, “pet them.”)In this conversation, Swisher presses Suarez on whether Miami — a city with rising sea levels and without an institution like Stanford in its back yard — can really become the next Silicon Valley. She also asks what he’s angling for in the long term. Suarez, a Republican, attracted national attention during the pandemic for his tensions with Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, and President Donald Trump.He’s now rumored to be a contender to be Nikki Haley’s running mate in the 2024 presidential race — speculation that he also welcomes with open arms. “I certainly was not shy about wanting to build a bond and a relationship with her,” he says. So, does Suarez want to be on a Republican ticket? His answer: “I wouldn’t say no.”Illustration by The New York Times; photograph by Pete Marovich for The New York TimesThoughts? Email us at sway@nytimes.com. Transcripts of each episode are available midday.Special thanks to Shannon Busta, Liriel Higa, Michelle Harris and Isvett Verde.“Sway” is produced by Nayeema Raza, Blakeney Schick, Heba Elorbany, Matt Kwong and Daphne Chen, and edited by Nayeema Raza and Paula Szuchman; fact-checking by Kate Sinclair; music and sound design by Isaac Jones; mixing by Erick Gomez. More

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      Why Trump Is Still Their Guy

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      You don’t hear his name as much. But as far as the G.O.P. is concerned, the former president rules.His exile in Mar-a-Lago notwithstanding, Donald Trump’s authority over the Republican Party remains vast. You can see it in Republican reluctance to back a bipartisan inquiry into the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, in the widespread denunciation of party members who refused to overturn election results and who voted for Trump’s second impeachment, and in poll data showing continuing repudiation among loyal Republicans of the 2020 election results.Trump’s centrality guarantees that large numbers of resentful, truth-denying, conspiracy-minded, anti-democratic, overwhelmingly white voters will continue to find aid and comfort in the Republican Party.Ed Rogers, a top political aide in the Reagan White House who describes himself as “a committed Republican,” responded by email to my query about the degree of Trump’s command: “Trump is the most powerful person in the Republican Party — his endorsement can make the difference in a lot of primaries and sometimes in a general election.”Trump, Rogers continued, “would win the Republican nomination for president if the race were today. He looks unstoppable in the G.O.P. I don’t know who could challenge him.” Anyone opposing Trump for the nomination “would be mocked, mimicked and generally harassed for months. Who needs that?”Rogers captured his party’s current predicament: “For the G.O.P., Trump is like a fire, too close and you get burned, too far away and you are out in the cold.”Nikki Haley, a former South Carolina governor and Trump appointee as ambassador to the United Nations recently proved Rogers’s point.After the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, Haley was sharply critical of Trump, telling Tim Alberta of Politico:We need to acknowledge he let us down. He went down a path he shouldn’t have, and we shouldn’t have followed him, and we shouldn’t have listened to him. And we can’t let that ever happen again.Haley went on:Never did I think he would spiral out like this. … I don’t feel like I know who he is anymore. … The person that I worked with is not the person that I have watched since the election.But Haley, ambitious herself to be president, quickly backtracked. And just last week, at a news conference on April 12 in Orangeburg, S.C., she was asked if she would support Trump if he ran in 2024. “Yes,” she said, before pointedly adding, “I would not run if President Trump ran.”A key pillar of Trump’s strength is his success in turning the Republican Party into the explicit defender of white hegemony.As my news side colleague Peter Baker wrote in September 2020:After a summer when hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets protesting racial injustice against Black Americans, President Trump has made it clear over the last few days that, in his view, the country’s real race problem is bias against white Americans.Not in generations, Baker continued, “has a sitting president so overtly declared himself the candidate of white America.”The result, as William Saletan of State wrote earlier in April this year, is that “three months after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the Republican Party still won’t fully renounce it.”In recent weeks, Saletan continued:Republican lawmakers have belittled the attack, defended the mob that precipitated it (Sen. Ron Johnson called them “people that love this country”), voted against a resolution condemning it, or accused liberals of overreacting to it. In February, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, speakers blamed a “rigged election” for provoking the rioters. But the sickness goes deeper. The Republican base is thoroughly infected with sympathies for the insurrection.The depth of party loyalty to Trump and to the men and women who have his back has even found expression in the flow of campaign contributions.As Luke Broadwater, Catie Edmondson and Rachel Shorey of The Times reported on April 17: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.Marjorie Taylor Greene, the first term Georgia Representative, perhaps the most extreme of Trump’s allies, has raised $3.2 million, they wrote, “more than the individual campaign of Representative Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader, and nearly every other member of House leadership.”What are the sources of Trump’s continued ability to not only maintain the loyalty of millions of voters, but to keep them persuaded of the conspiratorial notion that the 2020 presidential election was rigged?There is an ongoing debate among scholars and political analysts regarding the bond between Trump and his loyalists, his preternatural ability to mobilize white resentment into grievance-based social-movement action. Where does it come from?Before we delve into competing interpretations, Johanna Ray Vollhardt, a professor of psychology at Clark University, makes a crucial point:The psychology of collective victimhood among groups that were objectively targeted and harmed by collective violence and historical oppression is quite different from the psychology of grievance or imagined victimhood among dominant group members, who are driven by a sense of status loss and entitlement as well as resentment of minority groups that are viewed as a threat.Because of this difference, Vollhardt wrote by email, she would not use the word ‘victims’ to described Trump supporters: “I would perhaps simply say ‘grievances’ or ‘imagined victimhood’ to refer to the kinds of ideas that have fueled Trump’s and other right-wing White Americans’ rhetoric and appeals.”This distinction is explicit in “Resentment and Redemption: On the Mobilization of Dominant Group Victimhood,” by Stephen Reicher and Yasemin Ulusahin, both at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, in a chapter of “The Social Psychology of Collective Victimhood.”Reicher and Ulusahin contend that “dominant group victimhood” emerges when groups experience a feelingof actual or potential loss of dominance, a sense of resentment at this loss which is bound up with issues of entitlement — the undeserving are taking what we deserve — and hence provides a moral dimension to restitutive actions, and finally the prospect of redemption — of restoring the rightful order of things — through action.These feelings of “undeserved” displacement, the authors write, “are not unmediated perceptions of reality. Rather, they are narratives offered by leaders with the aim of mobilizing people around the leader as representative and savior of the group.”To conclude, the two authors write,Our argument is not simply about victimhood as it applies to “objectively” privileged groups. It is ultimately about the toxicity of a particular construction of victimhood: One which transforms eliminationist violence into the restitution of a rightful moral order. For it is when we believe ourselves to be acting for the moral good that the most appalling acts can be committed.Other scholars point to the political manipulation of the emotions of shame and humiliation.In their March 2021 article “Populism and the Affective Politics of Humiliation Narratives,” Alexandra Homolar and Georg Löfflmann, both member of the politics and international studies department at the University of Warwick in Britain, make the case that Trump is a master of “populist humiliation discourse.”In this political and rhetorical strategy,The country of the present is described as a fundamentally weakened nation, systematically disadvantaged through “bad deals” negotiated by the establishment and exploited by allies and enemies alike. Treasured pasts of national greatness are represented through romanticized images that reduce the present to a demeaning experience.Members of the target audience, Homolar and Löfflmann continue, “are constructed as an idealized community of shared origin and destiny, the ‘pure people,’ who have been betrayed and humiliated because what is represented as their way of life and righteous place in the world has been lost.”In September 2016, Hillary Clinton’s infamous characterization of Trump voters was an open invitation to Trump’s counterattack:You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.In a Sept. 12, 2016 speech in Baltimore, Trump shot back:Hillary Clinton made these comments at one of her high-dollar fund-raisers in Wall Street. She and her wealthy donors all had a good laugh. They were laughing at the very people who pave the roads she drives on, paint the buildings she speaks in, and keep the lights on in her auditorium.In a direct play on the humiliation theme, Trump declared:She spoke with contempt for the people who thanklessly follow the rules, pay their taxes, and scratch out a living for their families. She revealed herself to be a person who looks down on the proud citizens of our country as subjects for her to rule over.In a separate article, “The power of Trump-speak: populist crisis narratives and ontological security,” Homolar and Ronny Scholz, a project manager at the University of Warwick’s center for applied linguistics, argued that Trump’s “leadership legitimation claims rest significantly upon ‘crisis talk’ that puts his audience in a loss frame with nothing to lose.” These stories serve a twofold purpose, instilling “insecurity among the American public” while simultaneously transforming “their anxiety into confidence that the narrator’s policy agendas are the route back to ‘normality.’ ”The authors studied Trump’s 2016 campaign speeches to identify the words he used most often, and then grouped them “together with the words with which they predominantly co-occur.” They demonstrate that the word clusters Trump habitually deployed “surrounding ‘American’ and ‘country’ centrally featured the interrelated themes of crime and violence, killing jobs, and poverty, as well as illegal immigration and drugs, Islamic terrorism, trade and infrastructure.”At the heart of what the authors call “Trump-speak” is apolitics of reassurance, which relies upon a threefold rhetorical strategy: it tells audiences what is wrong with the current state of affairs; it identifies the political agents that are responsible for putting individuals and the country in a state of loss and crisis; and it offers an abstract pathway through which people can restore past greatness by opting for a high-risk outsider candidate.Once an audience is under Trump’s spell, Homolar and Scholz write:Rational arguments or detailed policy proposals pale in comparison with the emotive pull and self-affirmation of an us-versus-them crisis narrative, which creates a cognitive feedback loop between individuals’ ontological insecurity, their preferences for restorative policy, and strongmen candidate options. In short, “Trumpspeak” relies on creating the very ontological insecurity that it promises to eradicate for political gain.The authors describe “ontological security” as “having a sense of presence in the world, describing such a person as a ‘real, alive, whole, and, in a temporal sense, a continuous person,’ ” citing R.D. Laing, the author of “The Divided Self.” Being ontologically secure, they continue, “allows us to ‘encounter all the hazards of life, social, ethical, spiritual, biological’ with a firm sense of both our own and others’ reality and identity. However, ontological security only prevails in the absence of anxiety and danger.”Miles T. Armaly and Adam M. Enders, political scientists at the University of Mississippi and the University of Louisville, argue that Trump appeals to voters experiencing what they call “egocentric victimhood” as opposed to those who see themselves as “systemic” victims.In their January 2021 paper, “‘Why Me?’ The Role of Perceived Victimhood in American Politics,” Armaly and Enders argue that:A systemic victim looks externally to understand her individual victimhood. Egocentric victimhood, on the other hand, is less outwardly focused. Egocentric victims feel that they never get what they deserve in life, never get an extra break, and are always settling for less. Neither the ‘oppressor,’ nor the attribution of blame, are very specific. Both expressions of victimhood require some level of entitlement, but egocentric victims feel particularly strongly that they, personally, have a harder go at life than others.There were substantial differences between the way these two groups voted, according to Armaly and Enders:Those exhibiting higher levels of egocentric victimhood are more likely to have voted for, and continue to support, Donald Trump. However, those who exhibit systemic victimhood are less supportive and were less likely to vote for Trump.The same pattern emerged in the case of racial resentment and support for or opposition to government aid to African-Americans, for building a wall on the Mexican border and for political correctness: egocentric victims, the authors report, tilted strongly in a conservative direction, systemic victims in a liberal direction.In an effort to better understand how competing left and right strategies differ, I asked Kevin Arceneaux, a political scientist at Temple, a series of questions. The first was:How would you describe the differences between the mobilizing strategies of the civil rights movement and Trump’s appeals to discontented whites? Arceneaux’s answer:The civil rights movement was about mobilizing an oppressed minority to fight for their rights, against the likelihood of state-sanctioned violence, while Trump’s appeals are about harnessing the power of the state to maintain white dominance. Trump’s appeals to discontented whites are reactionary in nature. They promise to go back to a time when whites were unquestionably at the top of the social hierarchy. These appeals are about keying into anger and fear, as opposed to hope, and they are about moving backward and not forward.What role has the sense of victimhood played in the delusional character of so many Trump supporters who continue to believe the election was stolen? Arceneaux again:Their sense of victimhood motivates the very idea that some evil force could be so powerful that it can successfully collude to steal an election. It fits the narrative that everyone is out to get them.Looking toward the elections of 2022 and 2024, Trump not only remains at the heart of the Republican Party, he embodies the party’s predicament: candidates running for House and Senate need him to turn out the party’s populist base, but his presence at the top of the ticket could put Congress and the White House out of reach.Still, Arceneaux argues that without Trump, “I do believe that the Republicans will struggle to turn out non-college educated whites at the same rate.”Ed Goeas, a Republican pollster, observes that turning out working class voters in 2024 will most likely not be enough for Trump to win: “There are a large number of Republican voters (around 40 percent), who were either reluctant Trump voters or non-supportive voters, who make a Trump win in the general election look very undoable.”Ed Rogers, the Republican lobbyist I mentioned at the beginning of this column, argues that if Trump runs in 2024 — despite the clout he wields today — he is liable to take the party down to defeat:I don’t think Trump can win a two person race in a general election. He can’t get a majority. He pulled a rabbit out of the hat in 2016 and he got beat bad by an uninspiring candidate in 2020. 2024 is a long way away but I don’t know what might happen to make Trump have broader appeal or more advantages than he did in 2020.Stuart Stevens, a Republican media consultant who is a harsh critic of Trump, emailed me to say that “Trump is the Republican Party” and as a result:We are in uncharted waters. For the first time since 1860, a major American political party doesn’t believe America is a democracy. No Republican will win a contested primary in 2022 or 2024 who will assert that Biden is a legal president. The effect of this is profound and difficult to predict. But millions of Americans believe the American experiment is ending.What is driving the Republican Party? Stevens’s answer is that is the threat of a nonwhite majority:The coordinated effort to reduce voter access for those who are nonwhite is because Republicans know they are racing the demographic clock. The degree to which they are successful will determine if a Republican has a shot to win. It’s all about white grievance.Paul Begala, a Democratic consultant, described what may be Trump’s most lasting imprint on his party:Many prospective presidential candidates, including Josh Hawley, Kristi Noem, Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, “seem to me to be embracing the growing nativist, anti-immigrant, anti-diversity fire Trump lit.”In the 28 years since the 1992 election, Begala continued by email, there has been “more diminution in white voting power than in the previous 208 years” dating back to the nation’s first presidential election.For the Republican Party, Begala wrote, “as white power diminishes, white supremacy intensifies.”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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      Shades of 2016: Republicans Stay Silent on Trump, Hoping He Fades Away

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

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      Why Trump Holds a Grip on the G.O.P.

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyWhy Trump Holds a Grip on the G.O.P.Republicans still embrace the power of the ex-president’s agenda to galvanize voters and drive turnout.Mr. McCarthy has been a political editor and commentator for 18 years and has written extensively about conservatism, populism and the Trump presidency.March 1, 2021, 11:17 a.m. ETCredit…Mark Peterson/Redux, for The New York TimesThe Donald Trump era isn’t over for the Republican Party. He is the party’s kingmaker, and two impeachments and a re-election defeat have not quelled Republican voters’ enthusiasm for him. As no less a critic of the ex-president than Senator Mitt Romney has acknowledged, he will be the party’s presumptive front-runner if he chooses to run for president again.If there is a Republican “civil war,” Mr. Trump is winning — and so easily that it can hardly be called a real fight.At the Conservative Political Action Conference on Sunday, Mr. Trump topped the presidential straw poll with 55 percent. The only other politician to break double digits, with 21 percent, was Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who has positioned himself as Mr. Trump’s political heir.(If 55 percent seems like a less than resounding victory, recall that Mr. Trump came in only third in CPAC’s 2016 straw poll. Yet in that year’s primary contests he proved to be more popular with rank-and-file Republicans than he was with ideological conservatives like those who attend CPAC and tended to favor Ted Cruz in party caucuses.)Paradoxically, Mr. Trump may be all the stronger within the party because he served only one term. Many Republicans feel there is unfinished business to be settled after the Trump years. Many want a rematch to expunge the memory of defeat. The Republican right in particular feels that the battles Mr. Trump began over immigration, foreign policy, trade with China and the power of Big Tech in politics have yet to be played out.These are some of the themes that the party’s potential 2024 aspirants — Governor DeSantis, Senators Josh Hawley and Cruz, Nikki Haley (Mr. Trump’s former ambassador to the United Nations) and others — continue to underscore, as do a legion of conservative commentators. With only one term to enact its agenda, the Trump administration is forgiven for not having achieved everything it set out to do, and its setbacks can be chalked up to Mr. Trump’s inexperience on entering office, the hostility of his media critics and the bad luck that the Covid-19 crisis struck in a re-election year. Two of these three conditions will not apply in 2024.What will apply, for better or worse, is the power of Mr. Trump and his agenda to galvanize voters and drive turnout — for both parties. In 2020 Mr. Trump received more votes — 74 million — than any other Republican nominee in history. That was over 11 million more votes than Mr. Trump won four years earlier. After everything that had happened in those years, and even amid the historic hardships of Covid, the Trump brand had actually grown its base of support.Credit…Mark Peterson/Redux, for The New York TimesThis singular fact is seared into the minds of Republicans who look to the future, much as, after the 1964 election, forward-looking analysts like Kevin Phillips and the direct-mail innovator Richard Viguerie were more impressed by what Barry Goldwater had achieved in building a conservative movement of millions than by the fact of his loss. And Mr. Trump’s achievement was greater than Mr. Goldwater’s. Yet he lost, too; and many of the 81 million voters who elected President Biden seemed to be driven by antipathy to Mr. Trump and his politics, as indicated by the fact that many Biden voters did not vote for House Democrats.The lesson Republicans take from this is that Mr. Trump has discovered a potentially winning formula — if that formula’s power to attract voters to the Republican brand can be separated from the formula’s propensity to repel even larger numbers of voters who turn out to elect Democrats. More

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      At CPAC, a Reverence for Trump

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      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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      Just When You Thought Politics Couldn’t Unravel Any Further

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyThe conversationJust When You Thought Politics Couldn’t Unravel Any FurtherWhat happens when “All the King’s Men” meets “National Lampoon’s Vacation”? Nothing good.Gail Collins and Ms. Collins and Mr. Stephens are opinion columnists. They converse every week.Feb. 22, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETCredit…Sarah Silbiger/Getty ImagesGail Collins: Bret, my favorite recent political story was Ted Cruz’s Terrible Vacation. Partly because it made Ted look like such a jerk.Bret Stephens: Gail, first off all, my heartfelt sympathies and condolences to all of our friends suffering in Texas, and not just because Ted Cruz is one of their senators.Also, isn’t the whole Cancún Caper such a perfect encapsulation of Cruz’s character? He’s what happens when “All the King’s Men” meets “National Lampoon’s Vacation.” He’s Shakespeare’s Richard III as interpreted by Mr. Bean. He is to American statesmanship what “Fifty Shades of Grey” was to English prose writing, minus the, um, stimulus.Gail: Wow, that is one hell of a series of analogies.Bret: I get carried away when it comes to the junior senator from Texas.Gail: But there was also a pet angle that allowed me to revisit the saga of Mitt Romney driving with a dog on the car roof.Bret: “Pet angle” is our double entendre for the day.Gail: Mitt’s canine transport certainly fades in comparison. Meanwhile, one of Biden’s dogs just got attacked on a right-wing Newsmax show for looking … unpresidential. I think “from the junkyard” was the term used.I’m going to go out on a limb and say the president’s German shepherds will get the public’s support.Bret: If everyone just got a goldendoodle like mine, ours would be a happier, saner world.Gail: In the non-canine world, I’m already getting worried the Democrats will lose control of Congress. That’s sorta the pattern when people vote in nonpresidential years. Wondering if it would help if Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer sponsored a pet show.Bret: Don’t be so fatalistic, Gail. In the Senate, you have incumbent Republicans retiring in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Ohio and possibly Wisconsin, all of which are swing states and potential Democratic pickups. And Georgia and Arizona, both of which have Senate races in ’22, seem to have swung solidly blue.Gail: Thanks, I needed that.Bret: As for the House, Republicans did well last year by recovering a lot of the close seats they lost in swing districts in 2018. But Democrats will have a three-word magic weapon to wield there, too: Marjorie. Taylor. Greene.Gail: And how about Lauren. Opal. Boebert. The Republican from Colorado who appeared at a virtual House committee meeting sitting in front of a stash of guns she said were “ready for use?”Bret: Our colleague Jen Senior had a terrific column the other day on this whole phenomenon of right-wing women whose political strategy seems to involve out-feminizing women and out-masculinizing men. It’s a case of Tammy Wynette meets Rambo, I guess.But back to the 2022 races. If and when the stimulus package passes and the pandemic finally ends, Democrats look to be in a good position. What are your worries?Gail: Nothing along the line of the Democrats deserving punishment. So far they’ve done pretty darned well, multiple crises considered.But I keep remembering how stunned Barack Obama was when the voters tossed Democrats out of their House and Senate seats two years into his administration. People just get … tired. Or disappointed because stuff they hoped would happen probably hasn’t.Bret: As I recall, Obama devoted his first two years in office to using a 59-seat Senate majority to jam Obamacare through Congress in 2010, and voters responded later that year with a “shellacking,” as Obama called it. I think the lesson for Democrats is to stick to popular legislative items and resist sweeping progressive proposals.Gail: Then the lesson would be not to try anything that would answer a major national problem.Bret: A.k.a. a giant, wasteful government program. Sorry, my knee is starting to jerk.Gail: If it wasn’t for Obamacare, millions of Americans would be without health insurance. They wouldn’t be protected from losing coverage because of pre-existing conditions. It certainly wasn’t perfect, in part because of resistance from certain lawmakers who were in the thrall of the insurance industry. But one way to judge its overall success is to look at the Republicans who are now terrified to oppose it.Bret: As I remember it, Obamacare succeeded in pricing people out of the private insurance plans they had and were happy with and which Obama promised they could keep.Gail: Well, that promise thing was … imperfect. But I certainly don’t want Biden to avoid serious reforms because he’s worried about 2022. Already disappointed that we’re not seeing much action on gun control.Bret: All I want for Purim this year is immigration reform. It’s the most important long-term issue facing the country if we are going to continue to have demographic growth and an equal-opportunity society and we have a rare legislative opportunity to solve it with a bipartisan grand bargain. If Biden also wants to build lots of bridges, tunnels and high-speed rails, I’m down with that, too.Gail: Go infrastructure! But whatever happens, I’ll be nervous about an off-presidential-year election.And how about you? If I offered you Republican control in the House and Senate would you take it? With glee or a feeling of foreboding?Bret: The Senate, sure. I’m a big believer in the virtues of divided government. The House, definitely not.Republican representatives have a spectacular talent for political self-harm. It’s a major reason Bill Clinton was able to win re-election in 1996, by running against Newt Gingrich’s government shutdown. And it’s also a reason Obama got a second term in 2012, after Republicans forced another fiscal crisis in order to achieve unpopular budget cuts — cuts they abandoned during Trump’s presidency.Gail: Yeah, and there’s nobody less concerned about budget deficits than a Republican member of Congress with a tax-cut bill.Bret: The Republican hypocrisy here is notable, but it’s also a function of the party’s Trumpian captivity. My advice to Republicans is, first, break with Trump and, second, break with Trump. But that’s not likely to happen, is it?Gail: Trump loses the election, his unpopularity costs Republican Senate seats, and then he eggs on rioters who storm the capitol. But that good old Republican base still loves him.Bret: Trump worship is the political equivalent of a substance addiction. It makes you delusional, it makes you sick, it makes you mean, it causes agonizing withdrawal symptoms and, to borrow a line from Neil Young, all Republicans can say is, “I love you, baby, can I have some more?”Gail: And he’ll stay active. His private financial disasters are going to be a distraction, but also an incentive. If he dropped out of the political game, he wouldn’t be able to fill the tables at Mar-a-Lago with paying guests who also happen to be prominent politicians and lobbyists.And of course, if the Republicans are going to get rid of him, they’ll need an alternative. Who’s your pick of the week for the next nominee not named Trump?Bret: Nobody I like has a snowball’s chance in hell. Ideally it would be someone like Rob Portman, who’s retiring, or Charlie Baker, who’s from Massachusetts, or Mitch Daniels, who left politics a long time ago to go do something truly valuable with his life. There’s also Ben Sasse, whom I like a lot. But I just don’t see him getting the nomination.That leaves me with a choice between Nikki Haley, Josh Hawley, maybe Ron DeSantis. In that lineup, Haley is the easy favorite. What do you think of her?Gail: Well, depends on the moment since she seems to change her political positions every 15 minutes. Gail said snidely.DeSantis is awful on matters like vaccine distribution, and you have to admit it isn’t every governor who plans to have state flags fly at half-staff for Rush Limbaugh. Hawley was a disaster during the whole capitol riot crisis, and I notice he’s the only Republican who’s voted against every single Biden cabinet nominee so far.I loved it when Sasse called Hawley’s behavior “really dumbass,” so he’d have to be my favorite. Although I understand he’s not exactly a front-runner.Speaking of national political names, what do you think about Andrew Cuomo’s latest troubles?Bret: You mean that his administration deliberately underreported the number of Covid deaths in nursing homes and then tried to cover it up for fear of a federal investigation? Or that he later threatened to “destroy” a state lawmaker who had dared to criticize him?All I can say is: This is a scandal that could not have happened to a nicer guy.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.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      If There Was a Republican Civil War, It Appears to Be Over

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyIf There Was a Republican Civil War, It Appears to Be OverThe party belongs to Trump for as long as he wants it.Opinion ColumnistFeb. 17, 2021A Trump supporter wearing a paper mask of the former president’s face at a rally in Pennsylvania in 2018.Credit…Damon Winter/The New York TimesThat there is a backlash against the seven Republican senators who voted to convict Donald Trump of inciting a mob against Congress is not that shocking. What is shocking is how fast it happened.Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, for example, was immediately censured by the Louisiana Republican Party. “We condemn, in the strongest possible terms, the vote today by Senator Cassidy to convict former President Trump,” the party announced on Twitter. Another vote to convict, Richard Burr of North Carolina, was similarly rebuked by his state party, which censured him on Monday. Senators Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania are also in hot water with their respective state parties, which see a vote against Trump as tantamount to treason. “We did not send him there to vote his conscience. We did not send him there to do the right thing or whatever he said he’s doing,” one Pennsylvania Republican Party official explained. “We sent him there to represent us.”That this backlash was completely expected, even banal, should tell you everything you need to know about the so-called civil war in the Republican Party. It doesn’t exist. Outside of a rump faction of (occasional) dissidents, there is no truly meaningful anti-Trump opposition within the party. The civil war, such as it was, ended four-and-a-half years ago when Trump accepted the Republican nomination for president.If there’s a conflict, it’s less a war and more a small skirmish with an outmatched and outnumbered opponent. Seventy-five percent of Republicans want Trump to continue to “play a prominent role in the Republican Party,” according to a new poll from Quinnipiac University, and 87 percent say he should be allowed to “hold elected office in the future.” A recent survey from Morning Consult likewise shows Trump far ahead of his rivals in a hypothetical 2024 matchup, with 54 percent support versus 12 percent for the runner-up, Mike Pence.The Republican Party belongs to Trump for as long as he wants it. Its most prominent politicians will follow his lead and attempt to build on his example. His children and in-laws will have a place as heirs to his legacy. If Trump decides to seek the White House for a second term, the nomination is almost certainly his to lose.What does it mean, in practice, for Trump to retain this strong a hold over the Republican Party? Since “Trumpism” isn’t a policy platform as much as it is a singular devotion to the man himself, a Trumpified Republican Party is one in which candidates do everything they can to shape themselves in his image. Just look at the candidates who would like to be president, if Trump doesn’t run. Most of them were, at some point before he became president, critics, with harsh words for Trump’s policies, personality and proclivities. These days, however, they’re his biggest fans.Ted Cruz has adopted a version of Trump’s Twitter presence, using the platform to stoke anti-liberal resentment and attack perceived cultural enemies. The Texas senator, who by virtue of his legislative seat and second-place finish in the last Republican primary, is one of the most high-profile politicians in the country. But he has more to say about personnel changes at Disney than the problems facing his constituents.Nikki Haley hasn’t tried to emulate Trump, but she knows not to keep too much distance between them. In December, when Trump was still working to overturn the election through the courts, the former U.N. ambassador and South Carolina governor defended him to Politico’s Tim Alberta. “He believes he’s following that oath,” Haley said of the then-president. “This would be different if he was being deceptive.” Just a few weeks later, after the attack on the Capitol, when it looked for a moment like Republicans might break with Trump, she told a crowd at the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting that “His actions since Election Day will be judged harshly by history.” But when it was clear that Trump was still in command of the party, she switched gears. “Give the man a break!” she said in an interview on Fox News in late January arguing against impeachment.Even state and legislative candidates are borrowing from Trump and aligning themselves with his political movement. Here where I live, in Virginia, Amanda Chase and Kirk Cox, Republican candidates for governor, are running on guns and “cancel culture,” with Chase still treating Trump as if he were the rightful president. Josh Mandel, running for Senate in Ohio, reintroduced himself to voters as a pro-MAGA Republican. “I’m going to Washington to advance a Trump America First Agenda and to stand up for economic freedom and individual liberty,” he told Fox News.The impeachment trial was the Republican Party’s last chance to rid itself of Trump. Had 10 more Republicans joined their colleagues in the Senate, the former president would have been on the way to being barred from future office. Presidential hopefuls like Cruz (or Josh Hawley or Marco Rubio) would have cleared out at least one obstacle to their ambition. But, in a repeat of the 2016 primary, no one wants to take the risk of losing his supporters and thus any chance at the nomination or the White House.Just as it was five years ago, the hope is to come ahead somehow without confronting Trump, to win his voters without challenging his status among Republicans. Maybe, if Trump leaves politics to monetize his post-presidency, this will work. So far, that is not looking likely; Trump still speaks as if he is the party and the party is him. In a statement attacking Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, Trump bragged that he was responsible for what Republican success there was last year. “In 2020, I received the most votes of any sitting president in history, almost 75,000,000. Every incumbent House Republican won for the first time in decades, and we flipped 15 seats, almost costing Nancy Pelosi her job.”With Trump’s grip on the party and its image what it is, the outcome we’re most likely to see is the one we already experienced: a Republican Party with Trump at its head, committed to nothing but his insatiable ego.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.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More