The federal impeachment of former President Donald J. Trump has left the Republican Party — and his rivals for the party’s nomination — with a stark choice between clinging to a system of law and order that has been central to the identity of the party for half a century or a more radical path of resistance, to the Democratic Party in power and to the highest institutions of the nation that now Mr. Trump ridicules.
How the men and women seeking to lead the party in the 2024 election respond to the former president’s allegations in the coming months will have huge implications for the future of the GOP
Declared presidential candidates other than Mr. Trump have so far split into three camps over his federal indictment last Thursday: those who have staunchly backed him and his insistence that the indictment is a means of political impetus to deny him a second goal. Term of the house, like Vivek Ramaswamy; those who have urged Americans to take office seriously, such as Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson; and those who have straddled the two camps, condemning the impeachment but urging voters to get over Trump’s leadership, such as Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley.
The trick, for all the competitors of Mr. Trump, will be finding the balance between harnessing the anger of the party’s core voters who remain devoted to him and winning their support as an alternative candidate.
Mr Trump is due to appear in court on Tuesday in Florida. The danger for Republicans, after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, is that stoking too much anger could lead to chaos, and what pollsters call the “ghettoization” of their party: confined to minority status by voters who they don’t want to let go of the zealots. beliefs that have been rejected by the majority.
This point was exposed on Sunday for new CBS News/YouGov poll which found that 80 percent of Americans outside the core Republican voting base saw a national security risk in Mr. Trump from classified military and nuclear documents, while only 38 percent of likely Republican primary voters discerned that risk.
In the same poll, only 7 percent of Republicans said the impeachment had changed their view of the former president for the worse; 14 percent said their views had changed for the better; and a majority, 61 percent, said their views would not change. More than three-quarters of Republican primary voters said the allegations were politically motivated.
A separate ABC News/Ipsos survey showed that 61 percent of Americans viewed the charges as serious, up from 52 percent in April when pollsters asked about the mishandling of classified documents. Among Republicans, 38 percent said the charges were serious, also up from 21 percent this spring. But only about half of Americans said Mr. Trump should be impeached, unchanged from April.
“The grassroots voters see the double standard in politics. I keep hearing, ‘When are they going to indict the Bidens?'” said Katon Dawson, former chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party and senior adviser to Ms. Haley, the former South Carolina governor and Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations. . But, he added, “65 percent of our primary voters are tired of all the drama and I think they’re looking for a new generation of Republicans to lead us out of the wilderness.”
Ms. Haley has embodied that balancing act, saying in a statement, “This is not how justice should be pursued in our country,” and also, “It’s time to move beyond the endless drama.”
Trump’s closest rival for the 2024 nomination, Mr. DeSantis, the Florida governor, captured the same spirit when he mused Friday that he “would have been court-martialed in a New York minute” if he had taken classified documents during his Navy service. He was referring to Hillary Clinton, who has returned as the Republican bogeyman this week, and her misuse of classified material as secretary of state, but the double entendre was clear, as it was when she said: “There is “to have a standard. of justice in this country. Let’s get everyone involved.”
Those urging voters to read the charges against Mr. Trump — his mishandling of highly classified documents about some of the nation’s most sensitive secrets and his subsequent steps to obstruct law enforcement — are a lonelier group in the broader Republican Party. Only two former governors running for president, both former prosecutors, Mr. Christie of New Jersey and Mr. Hutchinson of Arkansas, are aligned with a scattering of other leaders including Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, who was the only Republican senator to vote to remove him. Mr. Trump out of office twice.
But their voices are likely to be amplified in the coming days by a medium eager to give them a microphone. Mr. Christie will hold a town hall meeting on CNN Monday night, while Mr. Hutchinson, the longest of longshots for the nomination, has given a series of interviews.
“The Republican Party should not dismiss this case out of hand,” said Mr. Hutchinson in an interview. “These are serious allegations on which a grand jury has found probable cause.”
On Sunday morning, former Trump Attorney General William P. Barr weighed in on Fox News on Sunday. saying he was “shocked because of the degree of sensitivity of these documents and how many there were”.
“If even half of it is true, it’s toast,” said Mr. Barr. “It’s a very detailed indictment, and it’s very, very damning. This idea of presenting Trump as a victim here, a victim of a witch hunt, is ridiculous.”
Trump’s critics also have an appeal that goes to the heart of the party’s identity: law and order. Republicans continue to attack Democrats on the post-pandemic spike in street crime, even as they attack the FBI, the Justice Department, the special prosecutor and the federal grand jury system.
“If Congress has the ability to control the Justice Department, I encouraged them to do so vigorously and fairly and ask all the questions they need to,” Christie told CNN. “But what we should also do is hold people in positions of responsibility to account and say that if you act badly, there must be sanctions for it. There has to be a cost.”
But voters eager to believe Mr. Trump’s dark stories of a nefarious “deep state,” of “communists” bent on destroying America, are getting encouragement from candidates who are ostensibly Mr. Trump’s rivals. For them, the calculation seems to be to capture the former president’s voters if his legal problems eventually end his political career.
“I personally am deeply skeptical of everything in this indictment,” Mr. Ramaswamy, a wealthy businessman and author, told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, adding: “I personally have no faith in these vague allegations.”
Other candidates were less forceful, but equally willing to challenge the integrity of the justice system, a system, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina said“where the scales are tipped” against the conservatives.
“If you want to get to President Trump, you’re going to have to go through me and 75 million Americans like me. And most of us are card-carrying NRA members,” said Kari Lake, Arizona’s failed gubernatorial candidate .
More surprisingly were the voices of the Trumpist right who have expressed their concerns: about the charges and their impact on the future of the Republican Party. When Charlie Kirk of the pro-Trump Turning Point USA called for all other Republican presidential candidates to drop out of the race in solidarity with Mr. Trump, Ann Coulter, the bomb thrower on the right, responded“This is nothing! I call on ALL REPUBLICANS TO KILL THEMSELVES in solidarity with Trump!” — acknowledging that the rally around the former president could send the party into oblivion.
Mike Cernovich, a lawyer and right-wing provocateur, criticized the indictment as “selective prosecution,” but also said, “Trump walked into this trap.”
How the party and its 2024 candidates respond will matter for the country and the party’s political fortunes. The core of the Republican electorate might be with Mr. Trump, but most Americans probably won’t. It’s a dilemma, acknowledged Clifford Young, president of U.S. public affairs at the polling and marketing firm Ipsos.
“For the average American in the middle, they’re appalled,” he said, “but for the grassroots, not only is support building up, they can’t believe what’s going on.”
“Hell,” he added, “they think he won the election.”
