What to do about Trump? Republicans who want to be president face dilemma

Prospective 2024 Republican presidential candidates are starting to choose where they stand on former President Donald Trump going forward in the aftermath of his second impeachment, a key question they will all need to answer.

Up first was Nikki Haley, who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under Trump and is also a former governor of South Carolina. She distanced herself from her old boss in an interview last week, at a time when many Republican elected officials are facing censure or possible primary challenges for breaking with the man who has come to define the party for the last four years.

“We need to acknowledge that he let us down,” Haley said. “He went down a path he shouldn’t have, and we shouldn’t have followed him, and we shouldn’t have listened to him. And we can’t let that ever happen again.”

But that is not the bet other potential GOP aspirants are making.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has channeled Trump’s populism on immigration and Big Tech while contrasting his management of the pandemic with New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s. DeSantis has trained his fire on President Biden, whose administration reportedly has mused about travel restrictions to Florida related to COVID-19.

“He is a strong potential presidential candidate in 2024, the Biden team knows that, and so they’re trying to somehow cast aspersions on the Florida experience because you know what, throughout America, there’s a lot of Florida envy,” Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican who is an ally of both Trump and DeSantis, told Fox News.

Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican who unsuccessfully sought the party’s presidential nomination in 2016, led the charge on what became the top Trump impeachment defense. He challenged the Senate’s power to try a former president. All but a handful of GOP senators agreed with him. Paul has not told associates he is planning a second presidential bid but has said someone from the libertarian wing of the party should run. Both he and DeSantis are up for reelection next year.

The Senate acquitted Trump yet again, leaving the door open to the possibility that he will be a candidate next time around himself. But this time, there was bipartisan support for the impeachment effort, even if a large majority of Republicans still rejected it. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, essentially endorsed the House impeachment managers’ arguments that Trump bore moral responsibility for the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol even as he voted for acquittal.

Trump responded Tuesday by calling McConnell “a dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack.”

Many Republicans are betting the now Twitter-less Trump will fade over time. Haley said as much. “I think he’s going to find himself further and further isolated,” she told Politico. “I think his business is suffering at this point. I think he’s lost any sort of political viability he was going to have. I think he’s lost his social media, which meant the world to him. I mean, I think he’s lost the things that really could have kept him moving.”

But this viewpoint is far from universal. “If we get a more closely aligned Trump/populist message candidate, we can probably have stronger margins,” said a Republican strategist in the Midwest. “Donald Trump is the most vibrant member of the Republican Party,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, an erstwhile Trump critic hailing from Haley’s South Carolina, told Fox News Sunday. “The Trump movement is alive and well.”

A Morning Consult poll found Republicans nationally aren’t ready to put someone else in charge of the movement, either. Trump dominated with 53% of the vote to 12% for former Vice President Mike Pence, 6% for Haley, and 4% for Mitt Romney, the frequent Trump critic who was the party’s 2012 standard-bearer and now finds himself tied with Ted Cruz. This is with Donald Trump Jr. also testing and winning 6%, the same as Haley.

Such early national polls often mean little besides showing which candidates have the highest name identification. But they did predict George W. Bush’s front-runner status in 1999 and could influence who decides to throw his or her hat in the ring. Lesser-known populists like Josh Hawley, the senator from Missouri, are stuck at 1%.

These numbers also suggest that neither impeachment nor the Capitol riot has yet done irreparable damage to Trump’s brand among GOP voters. “I did not watch one minute,” a Republican operative in Washington, D.C., said of the Senate trial.

At a minimum, Trump isn’t going to make it easy for the party to move on from him. “We know our America first agenda is a winner, not McConnell’s Beltway First agenda or Biden’s America Last,” he said in a statement Tuesday. Republicans who wish to succeed him are already trying to navigate this perilous territory.