For a moment, it looked like the Republican Party was getting some distance from the former president. Not anymore.
For a moment, it looked like Donald Trump might be losing his iron grip on the GOP. In the wake of the deadly Capitol riot,10 House Republicans joined Democrats in their vote to impeach him. Several other Republicans openly suggested at least censuring the president. Not anymore. Local and state Republican parties are censuring Republicans for disloyalty in states across the country. The lawmakers who broke with him are weathering a storm of criticism from Trump-adoring constituents at home, with punitive primary challenges already taking shape. In Washington, party leaders who once suggested Trump bore some responsibility for the Jan.6 violence are backtracking. On Tuesday,45 Republican senators — all but five members of the GOP conference — voted that putting a former president on trial for impeachment is unconstitutional, all but guaranteeing the Senate won’t convict him. If the Republican Party seemed to be at a crossroads about its post-Trump future, it now appears to have concluded in which direction to travel. “There is a level of support for this president more than during the election,” said Don Thrasher, chair of Kentucky’s Nelson County Republican Party, which recently voted to censure minority leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentuckian, for what Thrasher called “impugning the president’s honor” in debate over certifying the election results. Of the post-presidential fervor for Trump, he said, “I’ve never seen anything like it.” The devotion to Trump, however, comes at great expense. The party risks tying its future to a one-term president whose deeply polarizing style cost the party both the House and the Senate during his four years in office. And he blew a hole in the party’s suburban foundation that might be irreparable. Trump’s place in the party’s landscape appeared less certain after his November defeat and the Capitol insurrection that he helped to fuel with his false claims of a stolen election. Polls suggested Trump’s influence over the GOP was beginning to fade. But the GOP is still a party in which Trump’s approval rating stands at about 80 percent. For Trump loyalists, Trump’s second impeachment has been taken less as an indictment of the former president’s behavior than a cause to rally around him — a martyr for an aggrieved populist base. “There are 74 million people who voted for him,” said Charlie Gerow, a Pennsylvania-based Republican strategist. “You’re not going to get a mass exodus… At the grassroots level, he’s very, very popular, and I think the party as a whole understands that in order to be a majority party, it’s going to have to include those Trump enthusiasts.” The real question now may not be how long Trump looms over the GOP, but whether there is room beneath his shadow for anyone else. In Washington state, several Republican Party county chairs called Monday for the resignation of Republican Rep.
