Trump’s Republican Rivals Keep Teasing Primary Runs Despite Long Odds
Trump's GOP Rivals Keep Teasing Primary Runs Despite Long Odds
(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump may face another Republican primary challenger, but it’s unlikely to lead to much more than a cable news and Twitter flame war.
On Thursday, former Illinois Representative Joe Walsh all but said he’ll announce a challenge to Trump in the next few days. He joins former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld, who has been running since April.
“If Republicans don’t stand up right now and challenge this guy right now — he’s bad for the party, he’s bad for the country — we’re going to get wiped out in 2020,” Walsh told CNN.
A nationally syndicated talk radio host with a lively Twitter account, the one-term Tea Party congressman may provoke more of a response from Trump than other potential challengers.
Still on the sidelines to confront Trump within his own party are former Tennessee Senator Bob Corker; Mark Sanford, a former South Carolina congressman who was also the state’s governor; and former Ohio Governor John Kasich. Former Arizona Senator Jeff Flake has said he won’t run despite receiving a number of personal requests to mount a challenge.
Yet no matter how credible some of these challengers might seem on paper, it would take a political cataclysm to knock Trump off the GOP ticket as he remains very popular among Republican voters. A recent AP poll found that nearly eight in 10 Republicans approve of his overall job performance, while only 20% disapprove.
In interviews, tweets and op-eds, the various critics of Trump have generally floated similar complaints.
Walsh, who said just before the 2016 election that he would be “grabbing my musket” if Trump lost, now calls the president a “racial arsonist who encourages bigotry and xenophobia,” while Weld has labeled him “a raging racist.” They’ve highlighted the U.S. budget deficit, which the Congressional Budget Office recently predicted would hit $1 trillion by fiscal year 2020. And they’ve argued that his trade war with China has hurt American consumers.
John Sides, a political science professor at Vanderbilt University, said it’s no surprise that the list of potential rivals is made up of former officials, given Trump’s lock on the Republican Party as an organization and his continued high approval rating among GOP voters.
“These are not mainstream figures in the party who can command a real following,” he said.
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
Evan McMullin, a former Republican congressional aide who ran an independent campaign against Trump in 2016, said that while the president’s critics may be a small percentage, they “oppose him very strongly.” And he argued that another chunk of Trump’s current supporters are soft.
If a recession hits in the next few months, McMullin said, “the calculus for many Republicans who now support him may change.”
Amanda Carpenter, who worked for Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign in 2016, said that there’s an opportunity for a Republican to take Trump to task for his political decisions and his behavior in office, but she’s not sure she sees a “white horse” candidate just yet.
For now, she added, the potential candidates who have been discussed seem more like a “break glass in case of emergency” option in case the economy turns south or Trump begins to falter as the election approaches. She said her first question to any potential campaign is how serious it is.
“Are we having a real candidate or is this just a suicide mission?” she asked.
Joe Hunter, a spokesman for the Weld campaign, said the former governor’s team wasn’t worried about hurting Trump’s chances in the general election, given their concerns over his actions in office.
“If he’s wounded or weakened in the general election, as far as we’re concerned that’s a good thing,” he said.
Barbara Perry, director of presidential studies at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, pointed out that presidential primary challenges have historically failed in the modern era, including Senator Ted Kennedy’s campaign to replace Jimmy Carter in 1980 and conservative firebrand Pat Buchanan’s revolt against George H.W. Bush in 1992. In both cases, however, the incumbent went on to lose the general election.
Perry added that a lot about the Trump presidency has been unprecedented, referring to a sketch from comedian John Mulaney, who compared reading the news about Trump to hearing about a horse that’s gotten loose in a hospital.
“We’ve never experienced a runaway horse in a hospital,” she said. “Therefore all bets are off.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Ryan Teague Beckwith in New York at rbeckwith3@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Wendy Benjaminson at wbenjaminson@bloomberg.net, John Harney
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