Gopers falling apart
This is a point worth making over and over again:
Former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton joined Biden at the star-studded event moderated by late night host Stephen Colbert in New York City, and The Atlantic’s Mark Leibowitz told the “Morning Joe” host that he was struck by that show of unity around the president.
“There is a coherence of purpose when you see three presidents up there,” Leibowitz said. “When you contrast that to, I mean, you will not see a living former Republican president or nominee anywhere near a Trump rally going forward. I mean, this is not a party that has a past, you know, before Donald Trump came on the scene.”
Scarborough agreed, saying that former Trump officials were among the ex-president’s harshest critics.
“That’s such a great point,” Scarborough said. “Let me interrupt because you’re making such a great point, I want to ruin it right now. No, you just said, we have three Democratic presidents, you would never find a Republican president onstage with Donald Trump. You also won’t find his own vice president of four years. You won’t find his first, second or third secretary of defense. You won’t find his secretary of states, you won’t find his secretary of treasury. You won’t find Elaine Chao onstage with him. You won’t find any CIA directors on stage with him. You won’t find 20, 25, 30 of his top people onstage with him because they all say he is bad for America. What a contrast, what a great point for you to bring up.”
Tom mentioned this earlier and I think it says just as much:
The analysis of GOP presidential primary results from more than 1,000 counties shows warning signs for Trump, especially as Republican voters continued to vote against him in closed primaries after he clinched the nomination. And it makes clear that, while independents and crossover voters may have boosted former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley in some primaries, a chunk of true Republican voters still wished for someone else to be the party’s nominee.
“You hear a lot of moderate Republicans now who say that they’ll never vote for Trump again,” said Parker Fairbairn, county GOP chair in Emmet County, Michigan, on the northern end of the state’s Lower Peninsula, where Trump won 55 percent of the vote in the 2020 general election. In last month’s primary, he got two-thirds of the vote there.
Maybe they’ll go home or maybe they’ll stay home. Whether they vote for Biden is an open question. But there are plenty of Republicans who really can’t stand Trump anymore, insiders and regular voters alike. It has to mean something.