WASHINGTON – A large gathering of conservatives ended with former President Donald Trump in Orlando, Florida, over the weekend. Consolidating his position as the de facto leader of the GOP,
A short forum in Washington ended with an unanswered question: For Republicans frustrated by their dominance, what should be done?
in many participants principle first The summits, which took place on Saturday and Sunday, have been casualties of the MAGA movement in one way or another. Either they have faced the wrath of Trump or they have lost the race for the courage to challenge him. As the weekend unfolded, the panel experienced a political boycott of a support group.
When Marina Zimmerman stood in the audience and said she was running for Congress in Colorado against Rep. Lauren Boebert, who have positioned themselves On the right side of most other conservative politicians in Washington, former Illinois Representative Joe Walsh left his panel and went on to hug him in the crowd.
“I know this audience,” Sarah Longwell, an anti-Trump political strategist who moderated a panel, told NBC News. “It is a tribe for the tribes and a home for the politically homeless.”
“Should we stay or should we go?” One panel called it ended up without consensus around any option—staying in the GOP and trying to reform it from within seemed useless to many in attendance, while risking a third party scuttling the anti-Trump vote. To divide and help him win if he runs again for president in 2024.
“I’m wrestling with it myself,” the panel’s moderator, Michael Wood, a Texas Republican and Trump critic who lost the congressional race last year, said in an interview. “If you ask me at different points in the day what I should do, you’ll get different answers.”
Adding to the sense of futility was that many of the nearly 500 people in attendance saw no hope for the party, as long as it attached itself to Trump.
“Donald Trump is not going to be president again,” said Barbara Comstock, a panelist and former Republican member of Congress from Virginia. “If he’s the nominee, we’re gonna lose. … Alliances and relationships are what a winning majority is about. Trump doesn’t understand that.”
As they spoke and networked, members of the audience celebrated their heroes, especially House Republican Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kizinger of Illinois, both on the select committee investigating the attack by the Republican National Committee this month. He was criticized for his work. Capital.
Neither has ruled out running for president — and they won’t have an easy time running it if they do go ahead. A straw poll conducted at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando suggested Trump would win the GOP nomination contest with 59 percent. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis finished second with 28 percent, and “others” with former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in third place, with 2 percent. The survey is non-scientific, but is considered a preliminary measure of the popularity of Republican presidential candidates.
“I know my fight is to save the soul of the Republican Party,” Kizinger, who delivered the keynote address at the Washington convention, said in an interview. “But there may be a day when you realize it can’t be saved. Or there are too many people who feel representational. I don’t know if and when it will come.”
A unifying theme at the convention was how much better the nation is without Trump being in power. One of the speakers was former National Security Council official Alexander Vindman, who testified in Trump’s first impeachment trial about a phone call in which Trump attacked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden, a Democratic rival for president. pressure was exerted.
In an interview after his speech, Vindman said that if Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had happened under Trump’s watch, “it would be disastrous.”
Trump, he said, would have “condemned NATO, wandered for Russia”. [Russian President Vladimir] Putin. It would be disastrous, because we would be out of step with the rest of the world.”
(Trump, in a statement on Monday, reiterated his false claims of a “rigged” election and suggested that if he were still president, there would not have been an invasion of Russia.)
Unlike Trump and Zelensky, who were a comedian Before becoming the country’s president in 2019, Vindman presented reports of Trump takes refuge in White House bunker During the racial justice protests in 2020.
Although he is a ripe target for the Russian military, Zelensky refuses to leave Ukraine.
“What’s fascinating is that they come from similar roots,” Vindman said. “Both were entertainers. But look at the leadership Zelensky has shown, while Trump ran to the bunker after some protest outside.
Participants said they were at a loss for Republicans in addition to allegiance to Trump.
Heather Mayo, founder of Principles First, the group organizing the convention, said that as a Republican, “I know what hats I wear; I know the memes I need to tweet. But I don’t know what to believe. I don’t know who I should support. All I know is whether I’m voting for this man or this team. That’s a problem for any kind of party that Wants to win national elections.”
Some speakers tried to put forward ideas that could garner broad-based support. Georgia’s Lieutenant Gov. Geoff Duncan, who came out with a book called “GOP 2.0” last year, said in a speech that Republicans need to focus on reducing the national debt, cutting inflation and speaking to voters with more civility. Is.
“Think about how many more conservatives would have been elected if we had used a better tone,” he said.
As both conventions ended, Trump sent out a statement demonstrating that it could be even harder to snatch the party from his fist. He urged his supporters to fill Republican campus-level vacancies, potentially tightening his grip on the party machinery ahead of the battle for the 2024 presidential nomination.
In his keynote speech, Kinzinger said he was retiring from Congress but “I’m not going anywhere.”
Neither, of course, is Trump.