Peter Meijer of Michigan was recently the subject of a long profile in the Atlantic in which he was portrayed as a rare Republican with conscience who was suffering under tremendous pressure because he voted for Trump’s impeachment and trying mightily to keep his integrity.
He was on MTP today and it’s pretty clear he thinks he’s found a way to thread the needle:blame Joe Biden for failing to be a GOP moderate like Mitt Romney, causing the Republican base to be very mad and back Donald Trump, who he still doesn’t like but now believes is the only game in town. Apparently, that huge bipartisan infrastructure bill doesn’t count.
“In the words of Lindsey Graham, ‘enough is enough.’ I’m out of here, right? I’m done with this, the party is going to move on, Trump’s gonna be left behind. Boy, did that not happen. Why do you think that didn’t happen?” Todd asked Meijer.
Meijer, who was one of 10 House Republicans who voted for Trump’s second impeachment following the Capitol attack, said “there was no alternative, there was no other path.”
He pointed to the party’s pair of losses in the Georgia Senate runoff races and actions taken by Biden in his first year in office.”Given how President Biden when he was elected into office, you know, said he would be moderate and look for bipartisan solutions. But then after, and frankly, I blame the former president for this, after we lost the two Senate seats in Georgia and the Senate flipped, it became an exercise in trying to be an LBJ or FDR style presidency and enact transformational change in the absence of any compelling mandate from the American people to do so,” Meijer said.
“So that gave the rallying signal, that created a very steep divide, and at the end of the day, there’s no other option right now in the Republican Party,” he added.
Pressed by Todd on why the GOP “can’t seem to kick their Trump habit,” and why it is not the responsibility of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Meijer cited the stark polarization between the two parties.
“We have a two party system. And in the best case scenario, each party challenges the other to do better, to be better, to have a scenario where iron sharpens iron,” Meijer said.
“Instead, if you have one party plumbing to the depths and the other just use that excuse to go further, to go more to an extreme, to go more away from any sort of governing consensus and towards trying to enact whatever the will of the most extreme constituency they have is, you know, that is a recipe for both parties to drive further away from anything that resembles serving the American people as a whole,” he added.
Trump endorsed Meijer’s challenger, former Housing and Urban Development official John Gibbs, in the midterm House election. Gibbs is mounting a primary race against Meijer.
The idea that if only Joe Biden had told his base to go to hell and propose entitlement cuts or maybe just propose to do nothing at all, the Trump cult would be much more amenable to leaving their orange Dear Leader and move toward and more decent, rational politics is as delusional as anything Trump ever said.
Of course, it’s probable that he really means Biden should have “triangulated” against his own base by scolding them at every turn as a way to appease right wingers who love nothing more than to see women and racial minorities put in their place. Maybe he’s too young to know that this has been tried and didn’t accomplish anything but make the right stronger and divide the Democrats — which would also strengthen Donald Trump.
No, what we are seeing is the lie the few remaining sane Republicans will tell themselves to come around to supporting Donald Trump: the Democrats made them do it.