Why is the GOP obsessed with a loser?
Donald Trump’s undeniable grip on the Republican Party is particularly confounding given his electoral track record. This is a man, after all, who lost the popular vote in consecutive presidential elections and his insistence that the 2020 vote was rigged tanked the GOP’s chance of retaining the Senate.
Writing in The Atlantic, Mark Leibovich argues that Never Trump Republicans ought to take off their kid gloves if they want to dismantle his kingmaker status:
Trump’s bizarre and enduring hold over his party has made it verboten for many Republicans to even utter publicly the unpleasant fact of his defeat—something they will readily acknowledge in private. I caught up recently with several Trump-opposing Republican strategists and former associates of the president who argued this restraint should end. The best way for a Republican to depose Trump in 2024, they said, will be to call Trump a loser, as early and as brutally as possible—and keep pointing out the absurdity of treating a one-term, twice-impeached, 75-year-old former president like a kingmaker and heir apparent. In other words, don’t worry about hurting Special Boy’s feelings.
“Why on earth would we hitch our wagons again to a crybaby sore loser who lost the popular vote twice, lost the House, lost the Senate, and lost the White House, and so on?” said Barbara Comstock, a longtime political consultant and former Republican congresswoman from Virginia. “For Republicans, whether they embrace the Big Lie or not, Trump is vulnerable to having the stench of disaster on him.”
Leibovich adds:
Trump’s wasn’t an ordinary election defeat, either. Some nervy Republican challenger needs to remind everyone how rare it is for an incumbent president to lose reelection, and also that Trump was perhaps the most graceless loser and insufferable whiner in presidential history—the first outgoing commander in chief in 152 years to skip his successor’s swearing-in. And that he dragged a lot of Republicans down with him. As Comstock hinted, Trump was the first president since Herbert Hoover to preside over his party’s loss of the House, Senate, and White House in a single term. Said nervy Republican challenger could even (just for fun) remind the former president that he once called the person he lost to “the worst presidential candidate in the history of presidential politics.”
“So what does that make you, sir? At least Jimmy Carter lost to, you know, Ronald Reagan.”
This is a devastating point of attack against Trump. He knows it, too, which is why he has taken such pains to loser-proof himself and scrub his MAGA universe of any doubt that he was in fact reelected “in a landslide.” Don’t let him get away with that, the cabinet of critics urged. Abandon all deference, and don’t forget to troll the troller.
We encourage you to read Leibovich’s whole piece, here.