General Trump Administration F**kery Thread (2017-2021)
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WSJ News Exclusive | Trump Pressed Justice Department to Go Directly to Supreme Court to Overturn Election Results
Trump Pressed Justice Department to Go Directly to Supreme Court to Overturn Election Results
The former president dropped the efforts to replace the acting attorney general after top DOJ officials agreed to resign en masse in protest if he succeeded, people familiar said
By and
Updated Jan. 23, 2021 7:33 pm ET
Mr. Trump had considered installing another senior Justice Department official in Jeffrey Rosen’s place.
Photo: Samuel Corum/Zuma Press
WASHINGTON—In his last weeks in office, former President Donald Trumpconsidered moving to replace the acting attorney general with another official ready to pursue unsubstantiated claims of election fraud, and he pushed the Justice Department to ask the Supreme Court to invalidate President Biden’s victory, people familiar with the matter said.
Those efforts failed due to pushback from his own appointees in the Justice Department, who refused to file what they viewed as a legally baseless lawsuit in the Supreme Court. Later, other senior department officials threatened to resign en masse should Mr. Trump fire then-acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, according to several people familiar with the discussions.
Senior department officials, including Mr. Rosen, former Attorney General William Barr and former acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall refused to file the Supreme Court case, concluding that there was no basis to challenge the election outcome and that the federal government had no legal interest in whether Mr. Trump or Mr. Biden won the presidency, some of these people said. White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and his deputy, Patrick Philbin, also opposed Mr. Trump’s idea, which was promoted by his outside attorneys, these people said.
“He wanted us, the United States, to sue one or more of the states directly in the Supreme Court,” a former administration official said. “The pressure got really intense” after a lawsuit Texas filed in the Supreme Court against four states Mr. Biden won was dismissed on Dec. 11, the official said. An outside lawyer working for Mr. Trump drafted a brief the then-president wanted the Justice Department to file, people familiar with the matter said, but officials refused.
After his Supreme Court plan got nowhere, Mr. Trump explored another plan—replacing Mr. Rosen as acting attorney general with Jeffrey Clark, a Trump ally in the department who had expressed a willingness to use the department’s power to help the former president continue his unsuccessful legal battles contesting the election results, these people said.
Mr. Trump backed off that plan after senior Justice Department leadership threatened to resign en masse if the president removed Mr. Rosen, people familiar with the discussions said.
Jeffrey Rosen at a news conference in October.
Photo: yuri gripas/pool/Shutterstock
Weeks before the Nov. 3 presidential election, Mr. Trump had predicted the outcome could be determined by the Supreme Court; that possibility was a reason he gave for rapid confirmation of his third appointee to the court, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, following Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death in September.
“I think this [election] will end up in the Supreme Court. And I think it’s very important that we have nine justices,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Sept. 23. “Having a 4-4 situation is not a good situation.”
As challenges to the election results went nowhere in multiple state and federal courts, Mr. Trump and his allies placed their hopes in a lawsuit that Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton planned to file directly in the Supreme Court against four states that voted for Mr. Biden. The suit alleged that Texans’ rights were violated because Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin failed to follow their own election laws in the November vote.
Before the Texas suit was filed, a group of Republican state attorneys general spoke with Mr. Barr about getting the Justice Department to back the claim, particularly if the Supreme Court asked for the department’s views on the case, people familiar with the discussions said.
Mr. Barr consulted with Mr. Wall, who is the government’s advocate before the Supreme Court. Mr. Wall told Mr. Barr that Texas’s lawsuit was likely to fail because the state lacked legal standing to challenge other states’ administration of their own laws, the people said, accurately anticipating the grounds the Supreme Court ultimately cited in dismissing the case.
Mr. Barr told the Republican officials that the department couldn't be counted on to support their legal claim if the Supreme Court sought its opinion, these people said.
Representatives of Mr. Paxton and the Republican Attorneys General Association couldn't immediately be reached.
After the Texas case was dismissed on Dec. 11, Mr. Trump began pushing for the Justice Department to file its own lawsuit against the states directly in the Supreme Court, the people said. Frustrated that his wishes weren’t being implemented, Mr. Trump at one point planned to bypass the attorney general and telephone Mr. Wall directly, these people said.
Mr. Trump didn’t follow through with a phone call, but one of his outside lawyers sent over a draft legal brief he wished the department to file with the Supreme Court, these officials said.
After Mr. Barr resigned shortly before Christmas, Mr. Trump pushed Mr. Rosen to authorize the lawsuit. At Mr. Rosen’s request, the solicitor general’s office prepared a brief memo with talking points he could use in an effort to explain to Mr. Trump why the lawsuit wasn’t legally viable, the people said.
Mr. Clark denied involvement in a plan to oust Mr. Rosen, which was first reported by the New York Times. Mr. Rosen couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.
“My practice is to rely on sworn testimony to assess disputed factual claims,” Mr. Clark said in a statement sent to The Wall Street Journal after the publication of the story in the Times. “There were no ‘maneuver.’ There was a candid discussion of options and pros and cons with the president. It is unfortunate that those who were part of a privileged legal conversation would comment in public about such internal deliberations, while also distorting any discussions.…Observing legal privileges, which I will adhere to even if others will not, prevents me from divulging specifics regarding the conversation.”
Mr. Trump has defended his efforts to change the election results by alleging, without evidence, that there was widespread fraud as an attempt to “honor” the votes of those who supported him and ensure Americans “can have faith” in the electoral process.
Mr. Trump’s plan to orchestrate a last-minute change in the department was part of the broader effort by the former president and his allies to involve the Justice Department in their attempts to cast doubt on Mr. Biden’s November victory.
White House officials had pressured Atlanta’s top federal prosecutor to resign before Georgia’s Jan. 5 Senate runoff elections because Mr. Trump claimed he wasn’t doing enough to investigate unproven claims of election fraud there, The Wall Street Journal previously reported, a matter now under investigation by the department’s inspector general, a person with knowledge of the probe said.
Atlanta U.S. Attorney Byung J. Pak stepped down Jan. 4, the day after news organizations published a recording of a call between Mr. Trump and Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a fellow Republican, in which Mr. Trump pushed the state officials to “find” enough votes to overturn the November presidential election results.
The day after the recording was leaked, Mr. Trump acknowledged the call with Mr. Raffensperger, tweeting: “He was unwilling, or unable, to answer questions such as the ‘ballots under table’ scam, ballot destruction, out of state ‘voters’, dead voters, and more. He has no clue!” Mr. Raffensperger tweeted back: “Respectfully, President Trump: What you’re saying is not true. The truth will come out.”
After two recounts and one audit of ballot signatures, Mr. Raffensperger had concluded there was no evidence of widespread fraud that could change the results and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, also a Republican, certified Mr. Biden’s narrow win in the state on Nov. 20.
In Washington, Mr. Rosen became acting attorney general after Mr. Barr resigned Dec. 23. Mr. Trump and Mr. Barr’s relationship had become strained after Mr. Barr’s public assertion that the Justice Department hadn’t found evidence of widespread voter fraud that could reverse Mr. Biden’s victory, including claims of fraud, ballot destruction and voting-machine manipulation.
Even before Mr. Barr’s departure, Mr. Trump had called Mr. Rosen to the White House to pressure him to appoint a special counsel to investigate unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud and voting-machine manufacturer Dominion, the people said, a move Mr. Barr had concluded was unnecessary.
Mr. Trump and his attorneys had lost dozens of cases in courts at all levels, including the U.S. Supreme Court. In the five weeks after Election Day, the Trump campaign and other Republicans lost at least 40 times in six pivotal states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In several other cases, the campaign or allies withdrew claims after filing them.
Mr. Rosen refused, reiterating Mr. Barr’s conclusion that there was no widespread fraud.
—Timothy Puko and Byron Tau contributed to this article.
Write to Jess Bravin at jess.bravin@wsj.com and Sadie Gurman at sadie.gurman@wsj.com
Henry Orbit
Wave Gods
https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...dc253e-5cbc-11eb-8bcf-3877871c819d_story.html
Trump jumps into a divisive battle over the Republican Party — with a threat to start a ‘MAGA Party’
PALM BEACH, Fla. — Former president Donald Trump threw himself back into politics this weekend by publicly endorsing a devoted and divisive acolyte in Arizona who has embraced his false election conspiracy theories and entertained the creation of a new "MAGA Party."
In a recorded phone call, Trump offered his “complete and total endorsement” for another term for Arizona state party chairwoman Kelli Ward, a lightning rod who has sparred with the state’s Republican governor, been condemned by the business community and overseen a recent flight in party registrations. She narrowly won reelection, by a margin of 51.5 percent to 48.5 percent, marking Trump’s first victory in a promised battle to maintain political relevance and influence after losing the 2020 election.
In recent weeks, Trump has entertained the idea of creating a third party, called the Patriot Party, and instructed his aides to prepare election challenges to lawmakers who crossed him in the final weeks in office, including Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R), Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Rep. Tom Rice (R-S.C.), according to people familiar with the plans.
Multiple people in Trump’s orbit, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations, say Trump has told people that the third-party threat gives him leverage to prevent Republican senators from voting to convict him during the Senate impeachment trial. Trump advisers also say they plan to recruit opposing primary candidates and commission polling next week in districts of targeted lawmakers. Trump has more than $70 million in campaign cash banked to fund his political efforts, these people say.
The prospect of a divisive battle threatens to widen a split in the Republican Party and has alarmed leaders in Washington, who have been pleading publicly to avoid any new rounds of internecine retribution. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Republican Party Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel are among the leaders who have worked to protect politicians like Cheney, who supported Trump’s second impeachment and now faces an internal effort to remove her from her role as the third-highest-ranking member of the House Republican leadership.
McDaniel has also spoken out about the idea of a third-party split, while repeatedly pushing back against moves by Arizona state party leaders to censure fellow Republicans, such as Gov. Doug Ducey and Cindy McCain, the widow of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who have broken with Trump. (The Arizona party on Saturday night censured Ducey, McCain and former Arizona senator Jeff Flake, all longtime establishment Republicans.)
“Having differences in the party is fine. Being a party that is adamantly against cancel culture, we need to recognize that purging isn’t good. Let the voters make the decision,” McDaniel said. “The only way we win in 2022 is if we start getting rid of this purism and cancel culture in our own party.”
Graham, a close confidant of Trump, has also been trying to talk him out of attacking Cheney, Rice and Ducey, who earned Trump’s ire by recognizing Joe Biden’s win in Arizona and refusing to endorse Trump’s baseless assertions that it rested on fraud.
“We’ve got to go together, and be a party together,” Graham said. “I’m into winning. I’m into conservatives who can win.”
The central issue between the warring party elements is whether Republicans will continue to organize themselves around fealty to Trump or whether a broader coalition should be built in the coming years that can welcome both his most avid supporters and those who have condemned his behavior. The scale and shape of the big tent built by Ronald Reagan, nurtured by George W. Bush and transformed by Trump is once again up for grabs, as the party finds itself without power at the White House, the House or the Senate for the first time since 2014.
“What we have seen in President Trump is an incredible politician but one who was limited to getting 46 or 47 percent of the national vote,” said Henry Barbour, a Mississippi national committeeman who serves on the board of the Data Trust, a company that manages the party’s data infrastructure. “We can win over 50 percent if we grow the party by addition and not division.”
As it now stands, the big tent is tearing at the edges. Business groups have called for a Grand Old Party purge of more extreme leaders, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has blamed Trump and other Republicans for provoking the U.S. Capitol riot and McCarthy has said Trump “bears responsibility” for the attack by not immediately denouncing the violence once it began — although he later said he did not believe Trump provoked the riot.
Trump’s fiercest supporters in Congress, meanwhile, have continued to threaten and denounce those who criticize the former president, repeatedly raising the prospect of a more fundamental party division.
Adding to the conflict, Republican voters remain overwhelmingly supportive of Trump, suggesting strength in primary races that the establishment figures fear could prompt losses in competitive state and national races. A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 6 in 10 Republicans believed the party should follow Trump’s leadership going forward, rather than chart a new path.
“Here’s a warning the GOP needs to hear,” tweeted Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a newly elected member who has embraced Trump’s conspiratorial view and made supportive comments about the extremist group QAnon. “The vast majority of Republican voters, volunteers, and donors are no longer loyal to the GOP, Republican Party, and candidates just because they have an R by their name. Their loyalty now lies with Donald J Trump.”
The same tensions are also playing out in the states, where grass-roots party apparatuses have rebelled against calls to accept Biden as the duly elected president. The state party of Wyoming, where Cheney serves, previously demanded that the electoral college results be rejected in Congress.
Nowhere is the division more stark now than in Arizona, where the state Republican Party, run by Ward, has tried to lead the challenge of Biden’s victory. Before the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, she filed a failed lawsuit against Vice President Mike Pence in Texas in an effort to force him to rule on the legitimacy of Arizona’s electoral votes. She has also recorded conspiracy-laden videos about election impropriety that have attracted legal threats for defamation from Dominion Voting Systems, which makes software used to count ballots in parts of Arizona.
At a state party meeting Saturday in Phoenix, hundreds of party activists gathered in church for a largely maskless gathering where some members disregarded yellow caution tape on chairs meant to enforce social distancing. Political divisions were often described in near-apocalyptic terms, and chaotic shouting dominated large parts of the proceedings, as different members of the party and people who have advocated for a new third party fought over parliamentary procedure during nominating speeches.
“We can’t give up, we can’t give in, everything is at stake, hold the line,” was the rallying cry that ended an introductory video.
“We are on a precipice that has never been seen before since maybe the mid-1800s,” Rep. Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.) said at one point, in an apparent reference to the fight over slavery.
Ward was expected to win reelection, though her margin was surprisingly narrow, after she presented her candidacy as the only option to keep the Arizona party from going “back to the dark days before Trump.” She said Trump had asked her to run in a private meeting, and then played the recorded message from him endorsing her candidacy.
“The president is watching today’s race very closely,” she said.
Her efforts to reject the results of the presidential election, which were run in her state by Ducey and other Republicans, have created a massive backlash among moderate elements of the party and among the business community, which has historically sided with Republicans in the state.
QAnon believers grapple with reality of Biden presidency
Followers of the QAnon extremist ideology believed then-President Donald Trump would hold onto power after 2020. With him gone, they struggle with what's next. (The Washington Post)
On the day of the Capitol riot, Ward posted a poll on her Twitter account asking, “Can we salvage/save the Republican Party or do we need another option?” “Salvage it!” received 8 percent of the responses, compared with 78 percent who selected “#MAGA Party needed.”
Though Republicans performed well down ballot in 2020, they have lost two U.S. Senate seats since 2018. Last year, Biden became the first Democrat in 24 yearsto win Arizona’s electoral votes, narrowly besting Trump by 0.3 percentage points. Many moderate Republican strategists in the state blame the extremism of the party infrastructure for the losses and worry about finding a candidate to field for the Senate seat up in 2022. Ducey, who is term-limited, has said he will not run for that office.
“Right now on the Republican side, I don’t have a word to describe what is going on,” Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry President Glenn Hamer said. “Whatever the worst-case scenario is, this is worse. There will be a reaction to this. I have no doubt about it.”
Supporters of President Donald Trump protest the results of the 2020 election at the Arizona Capitol in Phoenix on Jan. 6. (Caitlin O'Hara/for The Washington Post)
The divide in the party was evident on Jan. 6, when Republican protests at the Arizona Capitol physically split in two when jumbotron screens showed the riot happening thousands of miles away in Washington. One group of protesters said they supported the raid, while a separate group opposed it.
In the first nine days after the riot, nearly 5,000 Arizona Republicans changed their party registration, compared with 719 Democrats, according to the secretary of state’s office. The pattern has continued since then at a reduced scale.
Neil G. Giuliano, the president of Greater Phoenix Leadership, a group of the state’s corporate leaders, says he personally knows more than a dozen people who have left the party after the attack on the Capitol and the decision by Republican lawmakers to endorse Trump’s false claims of fraud. The group put out a statement this month condemning as “reprehensible” the behavior of Ward, Gosar and Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) for “disinformation and outright lies to reverse a fair and free election.” The two members of Congress were among the most vocal in seeking to deny Biden his electoral victory.
“They all know the truth,” Giuliano said about the Republican officials who nonetheless claimed the election result was fraudulent. “I can’t remember a time when there was something as serious as this that compelled CEOs to speak so strongly about what was going on in a political party.”
Chuck Coughlin, a Republican consultant who worked with former governor Jan Brewer (R), is hoping to raise money for a statewide referendum that could impose nonpartisan primary elections in the state, draining power away from local Republican Party officials.
“They get self-validated through their chat groups, and they think people like Gosar can win statewide elections and there is just no truth to that,” Coughlin said. “They would rather worship themselves than work on a cause greater than themselves.”
Trump himself is likely to decide how vicious the coming fights will be. Since leaving office, he has played golf in Palm Beach while remaining focused on his political fortunes. In recent weeks, Trump has told advisers that he remains angry at both McConnell and McCarthy and has the popularity to drive down their support within the party. He is encouraging his most loyal Republican lawmakers and advisers to attack other Republicans for being disloyal — and is launching an effort to blanket the airwaves during the impeachment trial, according to a person familiar with his efforts.
At the same time, he has told aides he plans to keep a lower profile over the next few months before ramping his public activities back up to fulfill his vague departing pledge, made at Joint Base Andrews on Inauguration Day, to “be back in some form.”
Kelli Ward, chair of the Arizona Republican Party, holds a news conference in Phoenix on Nov. 18. (Ross D. Franklin/AP)
“The president has made clear his goal is to win back the House and Senate for Republicans in 2022,” Trump senior adviser Jason Miller said. “There’s nothing that’s actively being planned regarding an effort outside of that, but it’s completely up to Republican senators if this is something that becomes more serious.”
Conservative activists have grown concerned about Trump’s talk of a third-party split, which has been spreading over Facebook and through other messaging apps.
“A third party would lock in for a generation the left’s ascendancy in American politics,” said Tim Phillips, the president of Americans for Prosperity and an early tea party organizer. “If you look at what Republicans accomplished during the brief time they were in power — generational tax reform, three Supreme Court justices, deregulation of the economy and energy policies to help America — they had some key successes.”
Those hoping for more party unity argue that time, and collective anger at Democratic policies, are likely to heal the current wounds, as it has in past moments of crises for the party, like after the Watergate scandal, the election of Bill Clinton and the total government takeover by Democrats under Barack Obama.
Grover Norquist, a longtime party activist who runs Americans for Tax Reform, said that by the next election, complaints about Democratic proposals will overshadow the current Republican divisions.
“You can count yourself to sleep at night by recounting the number of times the establishment has said that the Republican Party is dead,” he said.
Jimmy Magahern in Phoenix contributed to this report.
Trump jumps into a divisive battle over the Republican Party — with a threat to start a ‘MAGA Party’
PALM BEACH, Fla. — Former president Donald Trump threw himself back into politics this weekend by publicly endorsing a devoted and divisive acolyte in Arizona who has embraced his false election conspiracy theories and entertained the creation of a new "MAGA Party."
In a recorded phone call, Trump offered his “complete and total endorsement” for another term for Arizona state party chairwoman Kelli Ward, a lightning rod who has sparred with the state’s Republican governor, been condemned by the business community and overseen a recent flight in party registrations. She narrowly won reelection, by a margin of 51.5 percent to 48.5 percent, marking Trump’s first victory in a promised battle to maintain political relevance and influence after losing the 2020 election.
In recent weeks, Trump has entertained the idea of creating a third party, called the Patriot Party, and instructed his aides to prepare election challenges to lawmakers who crossed him in the final weeks in office, including Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R), Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Rep. Tom Rice (R-S.C.), according to people familiar with the plans.
Multiple people in Trump’s orbit, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations, say Trump has told people that the third-party threat gives him leverage to prevent Republican senators from voting to convict him during the Senate impeachment trial. Trump advisers also say they plan to recruit opposing primary candidates and commission polling next week in districts of targeted lawmakers. Trump has more than $70 million in campaign cash banked to fund his political efforts, these people say.
The prospect of a divisive battle threatens to widen a split in the Republican Party and has alarmed leaders in Washington, who have been pleading publicly to avoid any new rounds of internecine retribution. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Republican Party Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel are among the leaders who have worked to protect politicians like Cheney, who supported Trump’s second impeachment and now faces an internal effort to remove her from her role as the third-highest-ranking member of the House Republican leadership.
McDaniel has also spoken out about the idea of a third-party split, while repeatedly pushing back against moves by Arizona state party leaders to censure fellow Republicans, such as Gov. Doug Ducey and Cindy McCain, the widow of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who have broken with Trump. (The Arizona party on Saturday night censured Ducey, McCain and former Arizona senator Jeff Flake, all longtime establishment Republicans.)
“Having differences in the party is fine. Being a party that is adamantly against cancel culture, we need to recognize that purging isn’t good. Let the voters make the decision,” McDaniel said. “The only way we win in 2022 is if we start getting rid of this purism and cancel culture in our own party.”
Graham, a close confidant of Trump, has also been trying to talk him out of attacking Cheney, Rice and Ducey, who earned Trump’s ire by recognizing Joe Biden’s win in Arizona and refusing to endorse Trump’s baseless assertions that it rested on fraud.
“We’ve got to go together, and be a party together,” Graham said. “I’m into winning. I’m into conservatives who can win.”
The central issue between the warring party elements is whether Republicans will continue to organize themselves around fealty to Trump or whether a broader coalition should be built in the coming years that can welcome both his most avid supporters and those who have condemned his behavior. The scale and shape of the big tent built by Ronald Reagan, nurtured by George W. Bush and transformed by Trump is once again up for grabs, as the party finds itself without power at the White House, the House or the Senate for the first time since 2014.
“What we have seen in President Trump is an incredible politician but one who was limited to getting 46 or 47 percent of the national vote,” said Henry Barbour, a Mississippi national committeeman who serves on the board of the Data Trust, a company that manages the party’s data infrastructure. “We can win over 50 percent if we grow the party by addition and not division.”
As it now stands, the big tent is tearing at the edges. Business groups have called for a Grand Old Party purge of more extreme leaders, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has blamed Trump and other Republicans for provoking the U.S. Capitol riot and McCarthy has said Trump “bears responsibility” for the attack by not immediately denouncing the violence once it began — although he later said he did not believe Trump provoked the riot.
Trump’s fiercest supporters in Congress, meanwhile, have continued to threaten and denounce those who criticize the former president, repeatedly raising the prospect of a more fundamental party division.
Adding to the conflict, Republican voters remain overwhelmingly supportive of Trump, suggesting strength in primary races that the establishment figures fear could prompt losses in competitive state and national races. A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 6 in 10 Republicans believed the party should follow Trump’s leadership going forward, rather than chart a new path.
“Here’s a warning the GOP needs to hear,” tweeted Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a newly elected member who has embraced Trump’s conspiratorial view and made supportive comments about the extremist group QAnon. “The vast majority of Republican voters, volunteers, and donors are no longer loyal to the GOP, Republican Party, and candidates just because they have an R by their name. Their loyalty now lies with Donald J Trump.”
The same tensions are also playing out in the states, where grass-roots party apparatuses have rebelled against calls to accept Biden as the duly elected president. The state party of Wyoming, where Cheney serves, previously demanded that the electoral college results be rejected in Congress.
Nowhere is the division more stark now than in Arizona, where the state Republican Party, run by Ward, has tried to lead the challenge of Biden’s victory. Before the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, she filed a failed lawsuit against Vice President Mike Pence in Texas in an effort to force him to rule on the legitimacy of Arizona’s electoral votes. She has also recorded conspiracy-laden videos about election impropriety that have attracted legal threats for defamation from Dominion Voting Systems, which makes software used to count ballots in parts of Arizona.
At a state party meeting Saturday in Phoenix, hundreds of party activists gathered in church for a largely maskless gathering where some members disregarded yellow caution tape on chairs meant to enforce social distancing. Political divisions were often described in near-apocalyptic terms, and chaotic shouting dominated large parts of the proceedings, as different members of the party and people who have advocated for a new third party fought over parliamentary procedure during nominating speeches.
“We can’t give up, we can’t give in, everything is at stake, hold the line,” was the rallying cry that ended an introductory video.
“We are on a precipice that has never been seen before since maybe the mid-1800s,” Rep. Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.) said at one point, in an apparent reference to the fight over slavery.
Ward was expected to win reelection, though her margin was surprisingly narrow, after she presented her candidacy as the only option to keep the Arizona party from going “back to the dark days before Trump.” She said Trump had asked her to run in a private meeting, and then played the recorded message from him endorsing her candidacy.
“The president is watching today’s race very closely,” she said.
Her efforts to reject the results of the presidential election, which were run in her state by Ducey and other Republicans, have created a massive backlash among moderate elements of the party and among the business community, which has historically sided with Republicans in the state.
QAnon believers grapple with reality of Biden presidency
Followers of the QAnon extremist ideology believed then-President Donald Trump would hold onto power after 2020. With him gone, they struggle with what's next. (The Washington Post)
On the day of the Capitol riot, Ward posted a poll on her Twitter account asking, “Can we salvage/save the Republican Party or do we need another option?” “Salvage it!” received 8 percent of the responses, compared with 78 percent who selected “#MAGA Party needed.”
Though Republicans performed well down ballot in 2020, they have lost two U.S. Senate seats since 2018. Last year, Biden became the first Democrat in 24 yearsto win Arizona’s electoral votes, narrowly besting Trump by 0.3 percentage points. Many moderate Republican strategists in the state blame the extremism of the party infrastructure for the losses and worry about finding a candidate to field for the Senate seat up in 2022. Ducey, who is term-limited, has said he will not run for that office.
“Right now on the Republican side, I don’t have a word to describe what is going on,” Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry President Glenn Hamer said. “Whatever the worst-case scenario is, this is worse. There will be a reaction to this. I have no doubt about it.”
Supporters of President Donald Trump protest the results of the 2020 election at the Arizona Capitol in Phoenix on Jan. 6. (Caitlin O'Hara/for The Washington Post)
The divide in the party was evident on Jan. 6, when Republican protests at the Arizona Capitol physically split in two when jumbotron screens showed the riot happening thousands of miles away in Washington. One group of protesters said they supported the raid, while a separate group opposed it.
In the first nine days after the riot, nearly 5,000 Arizona Republicans changed their party registration, compared with 719 Democrats, according to the secretary of state’s office. The pattern has continued since then at a reduced scale.
Neil G. Giuliano, the president of Greater Phoenix Leadership, a group of the state’s corporate leaders, says he personally knows more than a dozen people who have left the party after the attack on the Capitol and the decision by Republican lawmakers to endorse Trump’s false claims of fraud. The group put out a statement this month condemning as “reprehensible” the behavior of Ward, Gosar and Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) for “disinformation and outright lies to reverse a fair and free election.” The two members of Congress were among the most vocal in seeking to deny Biden his electoral victory.
“They all know the truth,” Giuliano said about the Republican officials who nonetheless claimed the election result was fraudulent. “I can’t remember a time when there was something as serious as this that compelled CEOs to speak so strongly about what was going on in a political party.”
Chuck Coughlin, a Republican consultant who worked with former governor Jan Brewer (R), is hoping to raise money for a statewide referendum that could impose nonpartisan primary elections in the state, draining power away from local Republican Party officials.
“They get self-validated through their chat groups, and they think people like Gosar can win statewide elections and there is just no truth to that,” Coughlin said. “They would rather worship themselves than work on a cause greater than themselves.”
Trump himself is likely to decide how vicious the coming fights will be. Since leaving office, he has played golf in Palm Beach while remaining focused on his political fortunes. In recent weeks, Trump has told advisers that he remains angry at both McConnell and McCarthy and has the popularity to drive down their support within the party. He is encouraging his most loyal Republican lawmakers and advisers to attack other Republicans for being disloyal — and is launching an effort to blanket the airwaves during the impeachment trial, according to a person familiar with his efforts.
At the same time, he has told aides he plans to keep a lower profile over the next few months before ramping his public activities back up to fulfill his vague departing pledge, made at Joint Base Andrews on Inauguration Day, to “be back in some form.”
Kelli Ward, chair of the Arizona Republican Party, holds a news conference in Phoenix on Nov. 18. (Ross D. Franklin/AP)
“The president has made clear his goal is to win back the House and Senate for Republicans in 2022,” Trump senior adviser Jason Miller said. “There’s nothing that’s actively being planned regarding an effort outside of that, but it’s completely up to Republican senators if this is something that becomes more serious.”
Conservative activists have grown concerned about Trump’s talk of a third-party split, which has been spreading over Facebook and through other messaging apps.
“A third party would lock in for a generation the left’s ascendancy in American politics,” said Tim Phillips, the president of Americans for Prosperity and an early tea party organizer. “If you look at what Republicans accomplished during the brief time they were in power — generational tax reform, three Supreme Court justices, deregulation of the economy and energy policies to help America — they had some key successes.”
Those hoping for more party unity argue that time, and collective anger at Democratic policies, are likely to heal the current wounds, as it has in past moments of crises for the party, like after the Watergate scandal, the election of Bill Clinton and the total government takeover by Democrats under Barack Obama.
Grover Norquist, a longtime party activist who runs Americans for Tax Reform, said that by the next election, complaints about Democratic proposals will overshadow the current Republican divisions.
“You can count yourself to sleep at night by recounting the number of times the establishment has said that the Republican Party is dead,” he said.
Jimmy Magahern in Phoenix contributed to this report.
MerCrimmuh
Pro
Mods can you close this thread and archive? That bytch nikka is over with now.
Was gonna say the same thing.
SN: HL threads have become a bit repetitive of late. Same topics over 3-4 threads.