FBI office in Phoenix is surrounded by armed Trump supporters 0:56
(CNN)
Rep. Liz Cheney's uphill battle to keep her seat in Wyoming's primary on Tuesday underscores how Donald Trump's grip on the GOP is tightening even as the former president's legal challenges are mounting.
That dynamic poses stark choices for the handful of Republican elected officials and voters who resist his dominance within the party.
If Cheney loses this Tuesday, as expected, the result will put an exclamation point on a summer that has seen Trump-backed candidates, nearly all of whom echo his falsehoods about the 2020 election, win most the party's closely contested primaries.
Virtually no GOP elected officials have dared to criticize him for the damaging revelations of the House select committee investigating Jan. 6, 2021, or the Justice Department investigation into his handling of classified information.
Trump's flexing of his muscles has dashed the expectations, or perhaps the hopes, of many conservative commentators who took his losses in several late-May primaries in Georgia as proof that his influence was waning.
Instead, by turning down multiple opportunities to walk away from the former president, both Republican officials and voters in the intervening three months have sent an unequivocal message to Trump skeptics that they remain the party's subservient minority.
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"There's not a lane in the GOP that's viable for [a] Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger or Mike Madrid," Madrid, a longtime strategist who has become one of Trump's sharpest Republican critics, told me.
"The game is never going to go back to what it was."
And that means, at least in the short term, that GOP coalition leaders and voters who see Trump as a threat to American democracy face a tough choice.
Do they continue to support a party that remains in thrall to him, or do they launch a more direct attack on his influence, even if it helps Democrats in the 2022 and 2024 elections?
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Many Trump critics are hoping that Cheney's remarks Tuesday night, if she loses, signal her intent to muster that anti-Trump effort as a contender in the 2024 presidential primary, and perhaps even in the general election as an independent if she wins. the party re-nominates Trump.
Four takeaways from the Wisconsin, Vermont, and Minnesota primaries
Georgia was an anomaly
Breathless reports have surfaced throughout the year about the alleged erosion of Trump's standing in the GOP, especially after his nemeses in Georgia, Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, handily defeated presidential hopefuls. the primaries he recruited to run against them.
Axios, in a reaction typical of the response at the time, stated that those results "cast doubt on the continued relevance of the 2020 election to GOP voters, and may portend his weakened lock on the party."
Those who claimed the GOP was moving beyond Trump pointed to objective and subjective changes: growing interest among some party activists and donors in a possible 2024 candidacy for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, less obsessive coverage of every word of Trump on Fox News, polls showing some decline in the share of Republican voters who wanted him to seek the presidency in 2024, and occasional defeats throughout the primary season for some of his preferred candidates, such as his pick marked by the scandal in the Nebraska gubernatorial race.
However, during the American summer, both Republican leaders and voters have sent a very different message.
On both fronts, recent events have underscored Trump's continued pre-eminence, to the point that pundits who study democracy see growing parallels between the contemporary Republican Party and compliant parties that have been subjugated by authoritarian-minded strongmen in other countries. countries, such as media tycoon and former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi in Italy and acting president Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey.
"The Republican Party is a party now dominated by authoritarian dynamics," Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at New York University and author of the book "Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present," told me.
"It's so domesticated and subjected by Trump to this authoritarian-style discipline that there's no room within the party for dissidents."
ANALYSIS |
In response to the FBI raid, Trump and his allies return to their familiar strategy: flood the media with nonsense
That shift has been evident both in the election results and in the behavior of GOP elected officials.
Like any political leader, Trump has not given victory to all the candidates he has endorsed.
Candidates who have steered clear of his false 2020 election fraud claims have won a few GOP races this summer, including races for attorney general in Minnesota and Wisconsin, and for secretary of state in Kansas.
But candidates who support Trump's discredited 2020 claims have enjoyed a remarkable run of success, often defeating candidates backed by more mainstream Republican leaders.
Election deniers have swept all GOP nominations in Arizona (including governor, attorney general, secretary of state and US senator), beating contenders backed by outgoing Republican Governor Doug Ducey and former Vice President Mike Pence.
Trump-backed election deniers similarly swept Michigan's top races (for governor, attorney general, and secretary of state).
Earlier this month, Trump's pick for Wisconsin governor, construction executive Tim Michels, edged out former Lieutenant Governor Rebecca Kleefisch (who had called the 2020 election "rigged" and had the support of Pence and the former Governor Scott Walker) for the GOP nomination.
Trump-backed election deniers also won gubernatorial nominations in Kansas and Maryland this summer, as well as Nevada's secretary of state nominations.
A recent CNN count found that at least 20 GOP nominees from this year's 36 gubernatorial races have directly questioned or ruled out the results of the 2020 election, with the final count expected to rise as the polls are completed. latest nominations.
Election deniers have won 10 nominations for secretary of state, according to another CNN compilation.
In a parallel push, Trump has eviscerated the ranks of House Republicans who voted for his impeachment following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.
Of the 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump, four have dropped out, three have already lost the GOP primary (including two in the August 2 races), and Cheney, who has trailed in the polls of Trump-backed election denier Harriet Hageman is likely to join the ranks of the impeached on Tuesday.
Only two of the 10 have won the primaries to advance to the November midterm elections (Dan Newhouse, in Washington, and David Valadao, in California, were in the top two in their states' primary systems,
At the same time, GOP elected officials have, almost without exception, banded together to defend Trump amid ethical and legal issues.
Hardly any elected GOP leaders expressed concern over the many damaging revelations about their behavior unearthed by the Jan. 6 House committee and their broader efforts to overturn the 2020 result. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio — who like his fellow party members, Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz, has gone from Trump antagonist in the 2016 presidential primaries to staunch supporter—set the tone from the start when he branded the commission "circus" and "garbage" before he had even held a single hearing.
In a recent interview on Chicago television, Kinzinger, Cheney's other Republican on the Jan. 6 committee, acknowledged that the silence of Republican leaders showed that Trump, at least for now, had "won" the battle for control of the party.
"Maybe there wasn't going to be a tidal wave of people coming up, but I certainly didn't think I was going to be the only one," said the Illinois Republican, who is not running for re-election this fall.
What did the FBI take from Trump's Florida residence?
1:07
The rush by GOP leaders to defend Trump after the FBI executed the search warrant at his Florida mansion — even before information became available about what the FBI was looking for — has offered another measure of his dominance. .
Once again, Rubio set the pace for abjection: "Using government power to persecute political opponents is something we have seen many times in third world Marxist dictatorships. But never before in the United States," Rubio tweeted on registration day.
Only after an apparent Trump supporter attacked an FBI office in Ohio last week — and violent threats against federal law enforcement on the right proliferated — did some Republicans (including Rubio) color their criticism with allegations of violence or praise of federal law enforcement.
International parallels suggest the GOP's allegiance to Trump won't fade anytime soon
Cheney's probable defeat on Tuesday will put an end to these shows of force by Trump.
For experts who study authoritarian movements, it follows a pattern evident in other countries.
Ben-Ghiat points out that in Italy, Berlusconi's party, Forza Italia, held its own for years despite an endless succession of financial, political and sexual scandals reminiscent of Trump's tribulations.
As he wrote in his book "Strongmen," Berlusconi's "cult of personality left Forza Italia no room to develop a political identity independent of him and no respite from his endless court troubles, scandals, and loyalty tests."
She sees the same dynamic hardening among Republicans.
"Since January 6 [2021], the party has become much more radicalized," she told me.
"When parties make these deals with these charismatic demagogues they stick with them to the end."
Susan Stokes, director of the Chicago Center on Democracy at the University of Chicago, sees another international parallel with the GOP's continued deference to Trump.
"The case that jumps to mind," he told me, "is that of Erdogan and his party, the AKP in Turkey, where you have a very charismatic and persuasive leader who always has a narrative to explain things that, in our eyes, She's super crazy, but she gets people to believe her."
Like Ben-Ghiat, Stokes says international precedent leaves her skeptical that the GOP will reject Trump's leadership — or even turn away from Trump personally — anytime soon.
Madrid also agrees that Republican critics of Trump must recognize that his forces remain unequivocally the party's ruling faction.
"What we are witnessing right now is simply the calcification of the establishment, since he has taken control of the party," says Madrid.
"You can't challenge this party" and win primaries within the party, except on rare occasions, he adds.
But that doesn't mean Republicans resisting Trump's direction don't have influence over the direction of the GOP, Madrid argues.
Depending on how you ask in polls, between a fifth and a quarter of self-identified Republican voters (and sometimes more) reject Trump's lies about the election, believe he was wrong on January 6, or in how he contested the election. result of 2020 or that his statements encouraged violence before the insurrection.
Madrid says that if even about half of those voters retained their support for Republican offices allowing Trump, or Trump himself if his party re-nominates him in 2024, the party could not survive those defections in a general election. .
"There's really no leverage within the party for that 20% of Republicans," he says.
"There is leverage in the general election because they will essentially have veto power" on whether a Republican can win the White House in 2024.
Like many anti-Trump Republicans, Madrid wants and hopes that Cheney will run in the 2024 GOP presidential primary to try to unite the party's minority of Republican voters resistant to the former president into a more unified faction.
If he is renominated by the GOP, Madrid and like-minded Trump skeptics argue that Cheney should try to sidetrack right-wing voters who would hardly vote for a Democrat by running as a conservative independent in the general election.
If Cheney provides “a banner to rally around,” Madrid predicts, the critical swath of traditionally Republican-leaning voters — many of them college-educated suburbans who defected from Trump in 2020 in key battleground states like Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona — would grow. in 2024.
Other Trump critics are less sure that an independent Cheney general election bid, if it were to come to pass, would do more than help the former president by dividing voters hostile to him.
The larger issue may be that the GOP's decision to redouble its commitment to Trump, even as multiple investigations into its actions uncover new evidence, underscores the extent to which party leaders and rank and file have fully enlisted in its efforts to destabilize American democracy.
"Where are you going with that?" Stokes asks.
"I don't see where it's going except in the direction of a complete constitutional crisis, gridlock and violence. That's a really scary thought."
Donald Trump Republican Party
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