I love hearing from my most fervent critics, and I’ll hear from them for sure after this column because I think Republicans should dump former President Donald Trump if they want to win this year’s midterm elections and take control of both houses of Congress. In other words, Dump Trump!
I write this because I believe the GOP should be a forward-looking party focused on the future, and not a backward-looking party focused on relitigating the 2020 presidential election, which President Biden won by more than 5 million votes. As the conservative Wall Street Journal warned last Tuesday, “Donald Trump’s delusions about the 2020 election are the gift that keeps on giving – to Democrats. … Mr. Trump’s false claims about 2020 already helped Republicans lose Georgia’s two U.S. Senate seats, and that was one expensive blunder.”
Was there voter fraud? Sure, there always is, but not enough to change the results of the 2020 election, not in Nevada nor anywhere else. President Biden, a weak, ineffectual candidate who campaigned from his Delaware basement “because of COVID-19” (his reason), won because he wasn’t Trump, and many voters are now experiencing buyer’s remorse as Biden’s approval ratings plunge to Trumpian levels, below 40 percent.
Trump’s cult-like enablers and followers have bought into his “Big Lie” – that he won the 2020 presidential election “by a landslide,” even though we know that’s not true. Here in Nevada, several fringe candidates continue to claim that Trump won in 2020 and that Biden is an illegitimate president. Chief among our Big Lie proponents are GOP gubernatorial candidates Fightin’ Joey Gilbert and Pistol Packin’ Michelle Fiore with assists from veteran politicians who should know better, like former Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt and ex-U.S. Sen. Dean Heller, of Carson City, who seems to feel that he needs to grovel at the feet of the former president.
Just in case you think I’m too far out there with my “Dump Trump” idea, here’s what the very conservative Washington Examiner had to say about the former president last week: “The Republican Party and the country would be better off if Trump ruled himself out of the (2024) race.”
The Examiner went on to suggest that “the GOP should be looking forward rather than back at the 2020 election to relitigate the result. … The country will be better served not having to choose between two lame ducks.”
But Trump won’t focus on the future; instead, he’ll continue to fight an old war that he lost. Pompous egomaniac that he is, everything is always about him and his endless quest for revenge, and not about what’s best for the country going forward.
If Republicans fail to regain control of Congress because of Trump’s Big Lie, the Wall Street Journal opined that “he won’t regret it for a moment, because he never does.” Well said!
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), who’s caught betwixt and between pro- and anti-Trumpers in his party, rejected the Republican National Committee’s description of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot as “ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.” To his credit, McConnell called the Jan. 6 debacle “a violent insurrection that was intended to prevent the peaceful transition of power.”
I agree with McConnell, who said he “supports all members of our party regardless of their positions on some issues.” Let’s call that positive diplo-speak designed to heal festering divisions within the Republican Party.
McConnell also defended congressmen Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, who are serving on the bipartisan Jan. 6 Commission. Just call me a Liz Cheney Democrat. Dump Trump!
Guy W. Farmer is the Appeal’s senior political columnist.
