Despite Trump’s Defeat, Congressional GOP Becoming More Like Him

By Philip Klein

Thursday, August 18, 2022

 

Representative Liz Cheney’s crushing defeat in her congressional primary served as another brutal reminder of what happens to Republicans who become defined by their opposition to Donald Trump. But it also has a tangible effect. Wyoming’s lone House seat will be held by somebody much more loyal to Trump — not only compared with who Cheney is now, but compared with who Cheney was at any point in the Trump presidency.

 

A similar story has been playing out nationally in Republican primaries, which have featured a string of victories for Trump-endorsed candidates while sending a message to other GOP politicians that if they want to succeed in the party, they have to stay clear of Trump’s crosshairs.

 

Taken together, what this likely means is that when the dust settles on the 2022 election, the Republican congressional class is going to be a lot more in tune with Trump and his agenda than even the one that was in power when he was president.

 

There were a number of prominent Republicans who opposed Trump at some point in 2016, and as late as October — just weeks before the election — dozens of Republicans called on Trump to drop out of the presidential race in the wake of the Access Hollywood tape. Many more condemned what they heard on the audio while stopping short of publicly calling on him to step aside.

 

Throughout the early part of his presidency, a number of Republicans tested the waters when it came to criticizing Trump, only to soon learn that doing so was a career ender. When he entered office, there were Republican senators such as John McCain and Jeff Flake who were openly critical of Trump. If Republicans are able to win back one of those Arizona seats this year, it would be held by Blake Masters, who won his primary by embracing Trump. Retaining Senate seats in Ohio and Pennsylvania would mean replacing Senators Rob Portman and Pat Toomey with Trump loyalists J. D. Vance and Dr. Oz.

 

When Trump took office, the “MAGA movement” more or less started and stopped with him. Most Republicans in Congress came to understand that it was important for them to at least have a transactional relationship with Trump, and to try and avoid locking horns with him. But most Republicans were holdovers from previous sessions of Congress who had more conventional Republican views and did not have any inherent connection to the issues that he ran on.

 

Since then, the eclectic platform that Trump stood for has expanded into a broader critique of the pre-Trump Republican Party on issues including trade, immigration, foreign policy, and corporate America. So, the crop of candidates representing Republicans this year are not only more loyal to Trump the person, but also more aligned with his ideas (to the extent that he has any sort of ideology).

 

Ronald Reagan, for decades after leaving office, was somebody whom Republican candidates typically wanted to be identified with ideologically — especially on economics and foreign policy. During his presidential campaigns, Mitt Romney took heat in Republican primaries for an old clip of him running for senator in Massachusetts and declaring himself an “independent” during the Reagan years. But Reagan won two landslide elections by expanding the GOP coalition, so it was natural that successive generations of Republicans wanted to emulate him.

 

It is worth taking a moment to think about how extraordinary it is for a political party to become more beholden to a former president after he loses. Nobody was running as a proud supporter of Jimmy Carter in the 1982 midterms or as a George H. W. Bush Republican in 1994. A Republican seeking office in 1934 would not cower in fear of Herbert Hoover’s wrath were they to criticize his handling of the early stages of the Great Depression. And yet, despite losing to President Biden, Trump has maintained dominance over the party.

 

This is no accident. In fact, this really gets to the heart of Trump’s behavior since his 2020 defeat. Trump intuitively understands that defeated presidential candidates lose their grip on their party and, pretty soon, lose all relevance. This is why it is so important to Trump to keep denying his 2020 defeat, and why he feels he has to scare away other Republicans from challenging his stolen-election claims.

 

By successfully policing compliance, Trump has actually emerged from defeat with a Republican Party that more closely resembles him than it did when he left the White House.