Good luck with that.
Apparently, they’re getting upset with Trump’s revenge obsession. Go figure:
Donald Trump’s bid to oust a Florida Republican who backed Ron DeSantis over him is reviving a long-running GOP anxiety: that he can’t be dissuaded from the grudges and inflammatory rhetoric that plagued his party’s lawmakers during his first term.
Trump’s call for a challenger to Rep. Laurel Lee (R-Fla.), the only House Republican from DeSantis’ state to endorse the Florida governor in the primary, reveals a campaign with little interest in courting his former rivals and their supporters. But as President Joe Biden makes a play for Nikki Haley voters who might be reluctant to back Trump, Republicans are starting to nudge the former president to at least try to tone it down.
They’re concerned about a rerun of the hair-pulling past — where GOP candidates in battleground races are constantly challenged to answer for their presumptive nominee’s more erratic and boisterous statements.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), another former DeSantis backer, told POLITICO that Trump’s scorched-earth approach to Lee risks turning off some voters who might otherwise favor him.
“Gratuitous attacks like these won’t help him win the presidency, and are counterproductive to building a conservative Congress eager to advance his agenda when he’s elected,” Massie said. “Fortunately, Laurel Lee will win her reelection by a comfortable margin, but in the meantime, these kind of statements alienate some of Trump’s potential voters.”
Trump is unlikely to heed such warnings to pivot to a more consistent general election message. So far this month, he has said that Jewish Americans who vote for Democrats “hate” their religion and described some migrants as “not people.”
But the fact that Hill Republicans are even attempting to refocus him, underscored by nearly 20 interviews with lawmakers and aides, illustrates their real worries about a 2024 cycle where their electoral fates are inescapably tied to the man at the top of the ticket.
The former president “needs to be sensitive to where he’s strong and where he’s weak in the electoral map,” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.).
Atop of the list of topics some Republicans want Trump to avoid: his attempts to revise the violent history of the Capitol attack by his supporters and his description of people convicted of riot-related crimes as “patriots.”
Many GOP senators are wincing as Trump homes in on Jan. 6, 2021, rather than attempting to capitalize on Biden’s vulnerabilities. Some national polls show Biden with a potential edge on the issue of democratic values, and the president made the violent attack an early and central fixture in his State of the Union address this month.
Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), said that praising Capitol rioters “definitely is not my thing,” advising Trump to talk more about middle-class workers instead.
“I was there” on Jan. 6, said Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D). “And the courts have clearly said that these individuals engaged in criminal activity. Not all of them, but a sizable number. And I’m most certainly not going to call them patriots.”
Still, Rounds made clear that he wants Biden out of office, launching into a fusillade of mainstream GOP criticisms of the president and congressional Democrats on inflation, energy and tax policy. Then, when asked if he agr
Behold the utter depravity of all that. They know Trump is totally unfit. They just like power more than anything.. They obviously see the danger that this freak is going to lose because of his bizarre character defects but they obviously figure they’d rather take that chance than temporarily lose power and help save the country from the man they know very well is unhinged.
Update — Speaking of unhinged:
Rep. Derrick Van Orden is done with Rep. Bob Good.
Good, the leader of the House Freedom Caucus and one of eight Republicans who voted to oust Kevin McCarthy from the speakership, has been at the center of internal GOP infighting that has left their party’s agenda in tatters and their conference embroiled in a bitter civil war.
Now Van Orden has joined hands with a band of House Republicans angling to knock Good off in his June primary by propping up his primary opponent, John McGuire – a tactic long viewed as a serious breach of protocol but one that underscores the bad blood within the House GOP.
“Bob Good didn’t come here to govern. He came here to be famous,” Van Orden, a Wisconsin Republican, told CNN. “Bob Good’s wearing our jersey, and he’s not on the team.”
Van Orden added: “If you look at what we have not been able to accomplish in this Congress, it’s predominantly because of Bob Good and his ilk.”
But Good is undeterred.
As he barnstormed through his district last week with fellow House GOP hardliners, such as Reps. Matt Gaetz of Florida, Andy Biggs of Arizona and Chip Roy of Texas, Good said voters in his district don’t care what his colleague from Wisconsin thinks. And he pointedly accused many of his Republican colleagues in Washington of casting votes that hurt the country and undermine the conservative cause.
So much disarray…