His assessments are shared behind closed doors by many old-school Republicans from the local level all the way up to Congress.
The arch-conservative commentator Erick Erickson recently reported on talks with party officials who secretly predicted a collapse of the soon-to-be-ten-year-old “Maga Empire” Trumps – because only in this way can the course be set for the party’s recovery.
Chaos-free politics
In the short term, the anti-Trumpers believe that the GOP can significantly limit the room for maneuver of a Democratic president with an achievable majority in the Senate and with the stable 6:3 majority on the Supreme Court in Washington behind it. “If Trump were to be eliminated once and for all in November after his second defeat in a row, we would have cleared the way for a gradual return to a chaos-free, measured policy that looks at the center and not just the right wing,” a Republican delegate from Virginia told this newspaper at the party convention in Milwaukee. He did not want his name published for fear of reprisals.
This fear has Liz Cheney not. The daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney was a congressman for Wyoming in Washington for six years and a heavyweight in the Republican Party before she confronted Trump about the allegedly stolen 2020 election and questioned his character for the highest office in the state. The party then dropped her at Trump’s urging.
This has not stopped Cheney from taking a clear position to this day. “Donald Trump cannot be trusted with power,” she said this week in a speech at Duke University in North Carolina, explicitly calling on the audience to vote for Kamala Harris. “We have a duty to put our country and our Constitution above partisanship.”
Two details that have not played a role in the public debate so far stand out. If Harris wins the election and then pardons Trump, who is facing various criminal charges, high-ranking Republicans believe that a major motivating factor for the former president’s hardcore supporters would become irrelevant overnight.
At the same time, if Trump finally leaves the stage, the Democrats will lose their “greatest force for unity, fundraising and enthusiasm” among the people.