NEW COVER STORY: How Robert Mueller crushed the Republican Party’s 'Dump Trump' crowd
Donald Trump’s words echoed across Washington on a Sunday afternoon in late March as Attorney General William Barr revealed the long-awaited conclusions of the Russia-gate probe. Indeed, after nearly two years of investigation into Kremlin interference in the 2016 campaign, special counsel Robert Mueller had found no collusion.
“He’s incompetent and really bad for the party,” says Mike Murphy, the veteran GOP strategist, “and he’ll hand the country over to a party that’s going full socialist.” Dumping Trump has always been a quixotic effort. Throughout his tumultuous presidency, Trump has remained overwhelmingly popular among registered Republicans. His approval rating among party members is 84 percent, according to a recent Harvard CAPS/Harris poll. GOP critics, like former Arizona Senator Jeff Flake, soon found their own campaigns foundering when they questioned the president, his positions or his appointees.
Murphy views himself as the chief communicator of “a Paul Revere project,” trying to persuade grassroots activists—some 10,000 to 13,000 nationwide, all in his digital Rolodex from past campaigns—that Trump will drag down the party in 2020. Even post-Mueller, he believes Trump is “political anthrax” that would wipeout Republicans up and down the ticket. Whether GOP voters listen is an open question.
But even Hogan, who has opposed Trump on immigration and fiscal policy, has said publicly that the Mueller report was going to influence his thinking, and he declined comment when Newsweek sought to clarify his position after the special counsel news. He is, however, still planning on attending the Politics & Eggs breakfast organized by the New Hampshire Institute of Politics in April, a tradition for all candidates testing the presidential waters.
Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, sparked interest in January, when, as a new senator from Utah, he penned an op-ed in The Washington Post trashing Trump. “With the nation so divided, resentful and angry, presidential leadership in qualities of character is indispensable,” he wrote, and added, “I will speak out against significant statements or actions that are divisive, racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, dishonest or destructive to democratic institutions.
What would a primary challenge look like? For starters, any candidate who goes for it has to assume he or she will lose, Murphy says. “If you’re liberated, you’re truly dangerous,” he says. And the case against Trump? His presidency is one of “uncivil, loud incompetence.” He and others cite as examples the recent government shutdown, Trump’s “obsession,” as Wilson puts it, with the border wall, and his affinity for trade wars.
On key foreign policy issues, where many mainstream Republicans in Congress are uneasy with Trump’s desire to pull U.S.
“There are a lot of people out there that have done some very, very evil things, some bad things, I would say some treasonous things against our country,” the president told reporters during an Oval Office meeting a day after the Mueller reveal. “And hopefully people that have done such harm to our country—we’ve gone through a period of really bad things happening—those people will certainly be looked at.
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