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    Republicans Fear Flawed Candidates Could Imperil Key Senate Seats

    Races in Missouri and Alabama, with others to come, reflect the potential risks for a party in which loyalty to Donald Trump is the main criterion for securing nominations.The entry of two hard-right candidates this week into Senate races in Missouri and Alabama exposed the perils for Republicans of a political landscape in which former President Donald J. Trump is the only true north for grass-roots voters.Strong state parties, big donors and G.O.P. national leaders were once able to anoint a candidate, in order to avoid destructive demolition derbies in state primaries.But in the Trump era, the pursuit of his endorsement is all-consuming, and absent Mr. Trump’s blessing, there is no mechanism for clearing a cluttered primary field. With the former president focused elsewhere — on settling scores against Republicans who advanced his impeachment or showed insufficient loyalty — a combative Senate primary season is in store for the 2022 midterms, when Republicans who hope to regain the majority face a difficult map. They are fighting to hold on to five open seats after a wave of retirements of establishment figures, and even deep-red Missouri and Alabama pose potential headaches.A scandal-haunted former Missouri governor, Eric Greitens, entered the race on Monday to replace the retiring Senator Roy Blunt. His candidacy set off a four-alarm fire with state party leaders, who fear that Mr. Greitens may squeak through a crowded primary field, only to lose a winnable seat to a Democrat.In Alabama, the entry of Representative Mo Brooks, a staunch but lackluster Trump supporter, into the race for the seat being vacated by Senator Richard C. Shelby raised a different set of fears with activists: that Mr. Brooks, who badly lost a previous statewide race, would cause waves of Republican voters, especially women, to sit out the off-year election and crack open the door in a ruby red state for a Democrat.Both candidacies are likely to pose challenges for Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, who has weighed in to cull potentially flawed candidates in the past and has said he may do so again this time. Last year, a super PAC aligned with Mr. McConnell intervened in a Senate primary in Kansas against Kris Kobach, a polarizing figure whose candidacy threatened the loss of a seat that was ultimately won by the G.O.P. establishment’s favorite, Roger Marshall.Mr. Trump has so far stayed out of the potential pileups to fill the open Senate seats — the others to date are in Ohio, Pennsylvania and North Carolina. Alabama and Missouri, both Republican strongholds, afford the G.O.P. a margin of error even with a flawed candidate, a cushion not available in the more competitive traditional battleground states.In announcing his candidacy on Fox News on Monday, Mr. Greitens, a former Navy SEAL, sought to appeal to Mr. Trump and Trump voters, boasting of having routed “antifa” from Missouri as governor and pledging to be a “fighter” who would be committed to “defending President Trump’s America First policies.”Mr. Greitens, who took office in 2017, resigned the next year amid accusations of physical and sexual abuse by a woman he had been involved with in an extramarital affair before his election. Still, he remains popular with a core of Republican voters. Many Republican officials fear that in a multicandidate primary, which appears likely, he could win with around 30 percent of the vote.“There is a high level of concern,” said Gregg Keller, a Republican strategist in Missouri, where Democrats have been shut out of major statewide victories for nearly a decade.Mr. Keller, who is unaligned in the race, said nominating Mr. Greitens would be “the only way Republicans stand a chance of losing this seat.” He added, “It would be an incredible self-own and would put the seat in play.”On Wednesday, a second candidate entered the race, Attorney General Eric Schmitt of Missouri, who had joined a Texas-led lawsuit by attorneys general to overturn the 2020 election results, which was rejected by the Supreme Court. At least three other Republicans have shown interest in the race, including Representative Ann Wagner, a moderate from the St. Louis suburbs.Mr. Greitens claimed while announcing his candidacy that he had been “completely exonerated” in the scandals that led to his resignation. But he elided important details. Accused by a hair stylist of binding her hands, spanking her, taking seminude pictures and threatening to release them if she disclosed their affair, Mr. Greitens was charged with felony invasion of privacy. The case fell apart, but the Republican-led Legislature moved to impeach Mr. Greitens anyway. An explosive investigation by the Missouri House concluded that the woman’s accusations were credible.Representative Mo Brooks was one of the first Republicans to announce that he would object to the Electoral College certifying President Biden’s victory.Elijah Nouvelage/ReutersSeparately, the attorney general at the time, Josh Hawley, now the state’s junior senator, turned up evidence that led to a felony count against Mr. Greitens related to political fund-raising, which Mr. Hawley described as “serious charges.”Mr. Greitens, 46, stepped down in May 2018 after reaching a deal with prosecutors that led to the campaign finance charge being dropped. A state ethics commission later found he had not engaged in wrongdoing in the finance case.“His claim to have been totally exonerated is a fraud and misrepresentation of the facts,” said Peter Kinder, a former Republican lieutenant governor. “An overwhelmingly Republican Legislature was prepared to impeach him and was within days of doing that.”Mr. Greitens has both grass-roots supporters and high-profile enemies in the Missouri G.O.P., including Mr. Kinder, who lost to him in a 2016 primary for governor, and Mr. Hawley.After Mr. Blunt this month announced his plans to retire, Mr. Trump called Mr. Hawley to ask about whom he should support, according to a person familiar with the conversation. They agreed to stay in touch as the field develops, and Mr. Hawley could be expected to steer Mr. Trump away from the former governor.In an argumentative interview on Wednesday with the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, Mr. Greitens said the Missouri House’s 24-page report about him had been “discredited,” but he would not say how. He claimed, without evidence, that his accuser, two of her friends and her former husband, all of whom testified under oath, were “lying.” “Why did you quit?” Mr. Hewitt asked Mr. Greitens, referring to his resignation. “SEALs don’t quit.”In Alabama, the fear of some Republicans about a lack of enthusiasm for Mr. Brooks, the highest-profile candidate in an emerging field, traces to the lacerating sting of 2017, when the Democrat Doug Jones won a Senate seat after G.O.P. voters failed to show up to support the party’s nominee, the scandal-plagued Roy Moore.Mr. Brooks, a six-term congressman from northern Alabama, was one of the first Republicans to announce that he would object to the Electoral College certifying President Biden’s victory. He faced calls for censure from Democrats after an incendiary speech he made at the pro-Trump rally on Jan. 6 before the riot at the Capitol. In announcing his candidacy on Monday, he aired once again his and Mr. Trump’s false accounts of the election. “In 2020, we had the worst voter fraud and election theft in history,” he said. Few individual cases and no evidence of widespread fraud have been confirmed.But in Alabama, Mr. Trump’s fraud narrative is hardly a controversial view among Republican voters. Both Mr. Brooks, 66, and the only other announced candidate to date, Lynda Blanchard — a major G.O.P. donor who was ambassador to Melania Trump’s native Slovenia — have aggressively sought Mr. Trump’s endorsement. But it is entirely possible he will withhold one in the interest of not alienating potential future allies, political observers say.The bigger danger with Mr. Brooks, in the view of some party strategists, is that he simply fails to excite Republican voters in an off-year election. He finished an unimpressive third in a 2017 primary to fill an open Senate seat, winning fewer than one in five Republican votes.“The danger becomes that there will be nothing to motivate Republicans to go to the polls,” said Angi Horn, a Republican strategist in Alabama, “which would put us at the peril that we have been in in the past, when a large majority of Republican voters did not see a candidate that motivated and inspired them to go vote.” More

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    What a More Responsible Republican Party Would Look Like

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyThe Ezra Klein ShowWhat a More Responsible Republican Party Would Look LikeThe conservative wonk Ramesh Ponnuru and Ezra Klein discuss child allowances, Trump’s legacy and the future of the G.O.P.More episodes ofThe Ezra Klein ShowMarch 2, 2021  •  More

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    Trump’s Republican Hit List at CPAC Is a Warning Shot to His Party

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Trump ImpeachmentLatest UpdatesTrump AcquittedHow Senators VotedSeven Republicans Vote to ConvictAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTrump’s Republican Hit List at CPAC Is a Warning Shot to His PartyIn his first public appearance since leaving office, Donald Trump went through, by name, every Republican who supported his second impeachment and called for them to be ousted.Former President Donald J. Trump told the Conservative Political Action Conference on Sunday that he would not form a new party, then called for ousting Republicans who had backed his second impeachment.CreditCredit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesJonathan Martin and Published 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

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    How Not to Be at the Mercy of a Trumpified G.O.P.

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyHow Not to Be at the Mercy of a Trumpified G.O.P.Barack Obama asked Democrats to kill the filibuster and pass a voting rights bill because it was the right thing to do. There’s a stronger argument.Opinion ColumnistFeb. 23, 2021Credit…Elizabeth Bick for The New York TimesLast year, in his eulogy for Representative John Lewis, President Barack Obama urged Congress to pass a new voting rights act to continue the work of the lifelong civil rights activist.“If politicians want to honor John, and I’m so grateful for the legacy of work of all the Congressional leaders who are here, but there’s a better way than a statement calling him a hero,” Obama said. “You want to honor John? Let’s honor him by revitalizing the law that he was willing to die for.”Obama then called on federal lawmakers to lift as many barriers to voting as they could. “Once we pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, we should keep marching to make it even better,” he said, listing automatic voter registration, felon re-enfranchisement, a national voting holiday, D.C. statehood and curbs on partisan gerrymandering as reforms that would do justice to Lewis’s memory. “And if all this takes eliminating the filibuster,” Obama concluded, “then that’s what we should do.”Although he probably expected them to win in November, Obama said this not knowing whether Democrats would have a majority in the Senate come the start of the next Congress. Well, Democrats have that majority. And thanks in large part to the work of John Lewis and those who followed in his footsteps, it rests on two senators from Georgia, whose political futures rest in turn on whether every voter in the state has equal access to the ballot.The same is true in Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where slim margins made the difference between Democratic victory and Republican defeat in the last election, and where Republican legislative majorities are determined to keep Democrats as far from power as possible — and not to lose the next presidential election the way they lost the last one. To that end, they have introduced bills to restrict the vote, to make the race for the Electoral College — as well as any race for statewide office — as noncompetitive as possible, by taking as many Democratic voters off the board as they can.Obama asked Democrats to kill the filibuster and pass a voting rights bill because it was the right thing to do. But there’s a stronger argument: that if Democrats don’t do this, they’ll be at the mercy of a Trumpified Republican Party that has radicalized against democracy itself.Democrats have already written the kind of voting rights bill Obama spoke about. It’s the For the People Act, designated as H.R. 1 in the House and S. 1 in the Senate. If passed and signed into law, it would establish automatic, same-day and online voter registration, protect eligible voters from overly broad purges that remove them from the rolls, restore the Voting Rights Act with a new formula for federal preclearance (which would require select cities and localities to submit new voting rules to the Justice Department for clearance), re-enfranchise the formerly incarcerated, strengthen mail-in voting systems, institute nationwide early voting and increase criminal penalties for voter intimidation.House Democrats introduced H.R. 1 in 2019 at the start of the 116th Congress. Mitch McConnell, then the majority leader of the Senate, denounced the bill as a “naked attempt to change the rules of American politics to benefit one party” and told reporters it was dead on arrival. “This is a terrible proposal,” he said that March, “it will not get any floor time in the Senate.”McConnell no longer controls the floor, but with a de facto supermajority requirement in the Senate, the For the People Act is still dead on arrival. That is, unless Democrats kill the legislative filibuster and restore majority rule to the chamber. Right now, Senators Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia are the most vocal Democratic opponents of ending the filibuster. “I want to restore the 60-vote threshold for all elements of the Senate’s work,” Sinema said earlier this month, seemingly mistaking McConnell’s Obama-era innovation for an age-old tradition. Manchin has also been emphatic about keeping the supermajority requirement, telling Politico that he will “not vote in this Congress” to change the filibuster.Manchin, who has been winning elections in West Virginia for the last 20 years, is safe in his seat for as long as he wants it. Sinema, on the other hand, is much more vulnerable. Not the least because Arizona’s Republican state Legislature, to say nothing of its Republican Party, is all-in on “stop the steal” and Donald Trump’s war on mail-in voting. Arizona Republicans have already introduced bills to limit voter registration drives, require notarized signatures for mailed ballots and forbid voters from actually mailing-in completed ballots.Arizona Republicans are not alone. To date, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at N.Y.U.’s law school, Republicans in 33 states have introduced more than 165 bills to restrict voting, part of the national conservative backlash to the results of the 2020 presidential election. A bill in Georgia would put new restrictions on absentee and in-person early voting; four different bills in Pennsylvania would eliminate no-excuse absentee voting less than two years after Republican lawmakers voted it into law.Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 Republican in the House, captured the mood of the party when, on Sunday, he refused to say that the election wasn’t stolen from Trump. “Once the electors are counted, yes, he’s the legitimate president,” Scalise said in an interview with Jonathan Karl of ABC News, speaking of Joe Biden. “But if you’re going to ignore the fact that there were states that did not follow their own state legislatively set laws. That’s the issue at heart, that millions of people still are not happy with and don’t want to see happen again.”This is euphemism. There was no issue with the election. State legislatures passed laws, courts interpreted them, and officials put them into action. This was true in states Trump won, like Texas and North Carolina, as much as it was in states he lost. It almost goes without saying that the real issue, the reason Republicans are actually unhappy, is that Biden is president and Democrats control Congress.Devoted to Trump, and committed to his fictions about the election, Republicans are doing everything they can to keep voters from holding them and their leaders accountable. They will restrict the vote. They will continue to gerrymander themselves into near-permanent majorities. A Republican in Arizona has even proposed a legislative veto over the popular vote in presidential elections, under the dubious theory that state legislatures have unconditional, unlimited and unrestricted power to allocate electoral votes.The good news is that Democrats in Congress have it in their power to stop a lot of this nonsense, to pre-emptively weaken the rising tide of voter suppression. All it takes is a simple vote to make the Senate work according to majority rule, as the founding fathers intended.The alternative is to allow the supermajority requirement to stand, to allow endless stagnation, to abdicate the authority of Congress to govern the country and tackle its problems, to deny the party of collective action the ability to act for the public good and to give the party of plutocrats and demagogues free rein to twist the institutions of the American republic against its values.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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    Trump Schedules Address Before CPAC Next Sunday

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Rush Limbaugh (1951-2021)ObituaryLimbaugh’s LegacyPresidential Medal of FreedomLimbaugh and TrumpAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTrump Schedules Address Before CPAC Next SundayThe former president will make his first lengthy remarks since leaving office before the annual conference of conservatives Feb. 28.President Donald Trump at the 2020 Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland.Credit…Anna Moneymaker/The New York TimesFeb. 20, 2021, 6:19 p.m. ETFormer President Donald J. Trump will speak at the conservative event known as CPAC on Feb. 28, his first public appearance and lengthy address since he left the White House for a final time last month.A senior aide to Mr. Trump confirmed that he would attend the Conservative Public Action Conference, which is being held in Orlando, Fla., this year, and that he planned to talk about the future of the Republican Party as well as President Biden’s immigration policies, which have been aimed at undoing Mr. Trump’s.What Mr. Trump plans to talk about and what he ultimately says once he’s onstage often diverge, as he discards scripts that aides prepare for him.But it will be the first time that he has spoken in a public setting since the deadly Jan. 6 riot by his supporters at the Capitol building.The former president, who was permanently banned from Twitter and who is facing investigations into his businesses as well as whether he has culpability for the assault on the Capitol, has generally kept a low profile, except for giving a small round of interviews to sympathetic news outlets about the death of the radio host Rush Limbaugh last week. Even though the interviews were supposed to be about Mr. Limbaugh, Mr. Trump still strayed into repeating his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him.But CPAC is traditionally a cattle call for Republican candidates for office as well as aspiring figures in the party. And Mr. Trump has signaled to several allies and advisers in recent days that he is focused on running for president again in 2024.Whether he actually does is an open question. But his presence could freeze the field for the next two years, preventing other candidates from developing operations and, more important, networks of donors to sustain their candidacies.Mr. Trump is currently locked in a battle with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, over the party’s future and what kind of candidates it attracts. Mr. McConnell has made it clear that he wants to try to minimize Mr. Trump’s influence after the deadly riot.But Mr. Trump has said he will try to encourage candidates who will carry his brand of politics forward.The CPAC conference is the event where, a year ago, when it was held in Washington, D.C., Mr. Trump gave a speech downplaying the threat of the novel coronavirus and insisting that his administration had the situation in hand. A New Jersey man who attended the conference tested positive for the virus, setting off a scramble by officials with the American Conservative Union, who run the conference.Within two weeks of Mr. Trump’s speech, the pandemic was a full-blown crisis, one that ultimately engulfed his administration. The administration’s failed response to the virus was a key issue for voters in the 2020 election.Mr. Trump’s modern political life began with a speech at CPAC in 2011.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    The Relationship Between McConnell and Trump Was Good for Both — Until It Wasn’t

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOn WashingtonThe Relationship Between McConnell and Trump Was Good for Both — Until It Wasn’tThe unlikely alliance delivered results they both wanted but fell apart after the election once their political interests diverged.President Donald J. Trump meeting in July with Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader at the time, in the Oval Office.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York TimesFeb. 19, 2021, 6:00 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — At a White House event in November 2019, President Donald J. Trump offered unrestrained praise for one person on hand he regarded as singularly responsible for his administration’s remarkable record of placing conservatives on the courts.“The nation owes an immense debt of gratitude to a man whose leadership has been instrumental to our success,” Mr. Trump said.That man was Senator Mitch McConnell, now enmeshed in an ugly feud with the former president that has significant ramifications for the future of the Republican Party. The rift is extraordinary partly because perhaps no one did more to advance Mr. Trump and his Washington ambitions than Mr. McConnell, who had ambitions of his own and saw Mr. Trump as a vessel to pour them in.“Trump would not have been able to achieve his objectives without a strong Senate leader,” said Karl Rove, the Republican strategist and former political adviser to President George W. Bush.The relationship had its rocky moments but was usually cordial enough — until it went extremely bad in recent days as Mr. McConnell excoriated Mr. Trump on the Senate floor after acquitting him in an impeachment trial and Mr. Trump responded with a cutting personal broadside. It was a messy breakup years in the making.Like most Americans, Mr. McConnell expected Mr. Trump to lose to Hillary Clinton in November 2016, and he also braced for the potential loss of the Senate majority as party pollsters and strategists predicted a big night for Democrats. Much to the surprise of Mr. McConnell, Republicans held on and Mr. Trump triumphed, an outcome for which Mr. McConnell could deservedly take some credit.A strong argument can be made that Mr. McConnell, by preventing President Barack Obama from filling the Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February 2016, cleared Mr. Trump’s path to the White House.The sudden political focus on the court provided a way for Mr. Trump to assure conservatives wary of his character flaws that he could be their champion. He and his legal advisers assembled a now famous list of potential conservative nominees that he promised he would choose from to calm evangelicals and others on the right who worried he might appoint a more liberal justice to succeed Justice Scalia.Mr. Trump himself recognized the political power of that list and the Scalia vacancy as he lavished praise on Mr. McConnell that day at the White House.“It really did have an impact on the election,” Mr. Trump said at the celebration in the East Room. “People knew me very well, but they didn’t know, ‘Is he liberal? Conservative?’”Mr. McConnell, the canny Senate leader, and Mr. Trump, the Washington novice suddenly ensconced in the White House, became a team. It was not a great personal match. Mr. McConnell spilled nothing of his intentions; Mr. Trump spilled all.Mr. Trump could not relate to the buttoned-lip approach of Mr. McConnell as he made clear this week in his scathing statement describing Mr. McConnell as “dour, sullen and unsmiling.” Mr. McConnell held private disdain for Mr. Trump and saw a flawed personality with a sketchy history who was not at all versed in the customs and rites of Washington.But as the Trump era opened, Mr. McConnell was just happy that Mr. Trump didn’t turn out to be a Democrat, though some congressional Republicans were not so sure. And it didn’t hurt that Mr. Trump brought on Mr. McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, as transportation secretary.“Back during the campaign, there were a lot of questions: Is Trump really a conservative? A lot of questions about it,” Mr. McConnell told The New York Times in February 2017 as the chaotic White House set up shop. “But if you look at the steps that have been taken so far, looks good to me.”As he looked, Mr. McConnell, long obsessed with the federal courts, saw opportunity. Even before Mr. Trump was sworn in, Mr. McConnell approached Donald F. McGahn II, the incoming White House counsel, about establishing an assembly line of judicial nominees to fill vacancies caused by Republicans’ refusal to consider Obama administration nominees.The interests of the Trump administration and Mitch McConnell had aligned. He prioritized appeals court judges, eliminated the 60-vote threshold for Supreme Court nominees and stood by Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh despite accusations of sexual misconduct. He pushed Justice Amy Coney Barrett just days before the 2020 presidential election despite using the approach of the 2016 election to block Judge Merrick B. Garland’s nomination eight months before the voting. The judicial success provided both the president and the Republican leader with a legacy.But it wasn’t just judges. Mr. McConnell delivered Mr. Trump’s tax cuts, remained stoic during regular presidential outbursts and made short work of the 2020 impeachment, with his most prominent failure in conservative eyes being the inability to overturn the Affordable Care Act.“Mitch McConnell was indispensable to Donald Trump’s success,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and an occasional go-between who is traveling to meet Mr. Trump this weekend in Florida to try to smooth things over, said on Fox News. “Mitch McConnell working with Donald Trump did a hell of a job.”Then came the election. Mr. Trump refused to accept the results, making wild and unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud. Mr. McConnell indulged him and refused to recognize President Biden as the winner until he could avoid it no longer after the states certified their electoral votes on Dec. 14. He congratulated Mr. Biden the next day.The interests of Mr. McConnell and Mr. Trump now sharply diverged, with Mr. McConnell fixated on regaining power in 2022 while Mr. Trump was stuck on 2020, making outlandish allegations that threatened to drive off more suburban voters and imperiled two Georgia seats that went to Democrats on Jan. 5. Then the riot the next day found marauders in the Senate chamber, Mr. McConnell’s sanctum sanctorum.“This mob was fed lies,” Mr. McConnell declared on Jan. 19, accusing Mr. Trump of provoking the rioters and prompting rumblings that he of all people might vote to convict Mr. Trump in the coming impeachment trial. But he did not. Instead, he voted to acquit Mr. Trump then tried to bury him minutes later while distinguishing between Mr. Trump’s responsibility for the riot and the Trump voters Mr. McConnell and Republican Senate candidates would need next year.“Seventy-four million Americans did not engineer the campaign of disinformation and rage that provoked it,” Mr. McConnell said. “One person did. Just one.”Mr. Rove said Mr. McConnell handled it well.“McConnell reads his conference and he knows that, like him, they thought simultaneously that this was a highly partisan process and not good for country, but also that Trump had played a significant role in fomenting Jan. 6,” he said.Then it was Mr. McConnell doing the provoking. His post-trial speech and a subsequent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal drew the ire of Mr. Tump, who fired back with a call for Republicans to dump their leader — an unlikely prospect — and a threat to mount primary challenges against candidates allied with Mr. McConnell, a more worrisome prospect for members of the party.Now the question is whether Mr. Trump will follow through, causing intramural fights that ultimately lead to Democratic victories. Mr. McConnell’s allies note that he has been in this position before facing challenges from the right and came out on top.“My money,” said Bob Stevenson, a former top Senate Republican leadership aide active in Senate races, “is on Mitch.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Trump Calls on G.O.P. to Replace McConnell

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Trump ImpeachmentLatest UpdatesTrump AcquittedHow Senators VotedSeven Republicans Vote to ConvictAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTrump, in Scorching Attack on McConnell, Urges G.O.P. to Replace HimThe former president, breaking an unusually long silence, called the Senate minority leader a “dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack” and called on Republicans in the chamber to find a new leader.Former President Donald J. Trump meeting with Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, in the Oval Office last year. They were wary political allies throughout Mr. Trump’s term in office.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York TimesMaggie Haberman and Feb. 16, 2021Updated 9:13 p.m. ETFormer President Donald J. Trump on Tuesday made a slashing and lengthy attack on Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader, calling him a “dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack” and arguing that the party would suffer losses in the future if he remained in charge.“If Republican senators are going to stay with him, they will not win again,” Mr. Trump said.The 600-word statement, coming three days after the Senate acquitted him in his second impeachment trial, was trained solely on Mr. McConnell and sought to paint Mr. Trump as the best leader of the G.O.P. going forward.The statement did not include any sign of contrition from Mr. Trump for his remarks to a crowd of supporters who then attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6. Nor did it include any acknowledgment of his role during the violent hours in which his own vice president and members of Congress were under threat from the mob of Trump supporters.Rather, Mr. Trump chose to focus on Mr. McConnell as he broke an unusually lengthy silence by his standards, after being permanently barred from his formerly favorite medium — Twitter — last month because of tweets that he posted during the Capitol riot.Mr. McConnell’s office declined to comment on Mr. Trump’s attacks on Tuesday, but the senator has left little mystery about his contempt for the former president. Shortly after he joined the majority of Republican senators on Saturday in voting to acquit Mr. Trump on the House impeachment charge of “incitement of insurrection,” Mr. McConnell excoriated Mr. Trump, laying the blame for the deadly riot at his feet and suggesting that further investigations of the former president could play out in the judicial system.“There is no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day,” Mr. McConnell said in remarks on the Senate floor.His comments were widely interpreted as an attempt to minimize Mr. Trump’s brand of politics within the Republican Party and to appeal to donors who have said they are rejecting the party after some senators voted against certifying President Biden’s victory.Mr. McConnell wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed article and gave an interview to the paper’s news section suggesting he might get involved in primaries for 2022 as part of an effort to win back the majority.In private, Mr. McConnell has said he believed the impeachment proceedings would make it easier for Republicans to eventually purge Mr. Trump from the party. And he expressed surprise, and mild bemusement, at the hatchet-burying mission made to Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club in Palm Beach, Fla., by Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader.In public, Mr. McConnell has sharply criticized Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the extremist freshman and Trump devotee from Georgia, while defending Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming after her vote to impeach the former president.What Mr. McConnell has not done, though, is openly declare political war on Mr. Trump in the fashion that the former president did to him on Tuesday. While telling associates he knew he would have to oppose the former president in some primaries next year, he had hoped to unify his caucus by turning attention to Mr. Biden.But if Mr. McConnell wasn’t eager to begin an open and protracted feud with Mr. Trump, at least not yet, the freshly acquitted, ever-pugnacious and newly deplatformed former president was happy to do so. One person close to Mr. Trump said his initial version of the statement was more incendiary than what was released publicly.In the statement, Mr. Trump resorted to insults about Mr. McConnell’s acumen and political abilities, and faulted him for Republicans’ loss of their Senate majority.“The Republican Party can never again be respected or strong with political ‘leaders’ like Sen. Mitch McConnell at its helm,” Mr. Trump said. “McConnell’s dedication to business as usual, status quo policies, together with his lack of political insight, wisdom, skill, and personality, has rapidly driven him from majority leader to minority leader, and it will only get worse.”Mr. Trump offered up some new taunts: “The Democrats and Chuck Schumer play McConnell like a fiddle — they’ve never had it so good — and they want to keep it that way!” he said. “We know our America First agenda is a winner, not McConnell’s Beltway First agenda or Biden’s America Last.”While Mr. McConnell has faulted the former president for the party’s losses last month in both Senate races in Georgia, Mr. Trump maintained that it was because Republican voters were angry that the party’s officials had not done more to address his baseless claims of widespread voter fraud.Mr. Trump claimed credit for Mr. McConnell’s victory in his own Senate race last year and took a swipe at Mr. McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, who worked for the Trump administration as the transportation secretary.“McConnell has no credibility on China because of his family’s substantial Chinese business holdings,” Mr. Trump said. “He does nothing on this tremendous economic and military threat.” “He will never do what needs to be done, or what is right for our country,” Mr. Trump said, adding that “where necessary and appropriate, I will back primary rivals who espouse Making America Great Again and our policy of America First.”After Mr. Trump made his statement on Tuesday, some of Mr. McConnell’s longtime supporters suggested that they knew bait when they saw it.“Trump going total mean girl ought to feed the cable beast for weeks,” Janet Mullins Grissom, the senator’s first chief of staff, wrote on Twitter.Others in Mr. McConnell’s intensely loyal circle of advisers, however, did not want such a bald attack to go unanswered.“It seems an odd choice for someone who claims they want to lead the G.O.P. to attack a man who has been unanimously elected to lead Senate Republicans a history-making eight times,” said Billy Piper, another former top McConnell aide. “But we have come to expect these temper tantrums when he feels threatened — just ask any of his former chiefs of staff or even his vice president.”Mr. Trump’s reference to Ms. Chao’s family was also a line of attack that Mr. McConnell and his inner circle have long denounced as racist when it comes from Democrats.The former president’s statement was the longest one he has issued since leaving office on Jan. 20. He has been mindful that he is the target of multiple investigations, people close to him said, and has been advised against appearing to taunt prosecutors or people who might sue him in civil courts. Still, Mr. Trump’s ability to stay silent through situations that anger him tends to last only so long.Mr. Trump’s advisers are discussing backing nearly a dozen candidates in primaries against the Republicans who voted in favor of impeachment, a move that would only deepen Mr. Trump’s friction with Mr. McCarthy. Not all of Mr. Trump’s aides think this is a wise course of action.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More