An Early Trump Backers Message to the Republican Party: Dump Him

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The biggest threat to Donald Trump’s grip on the Republican Party has always come from among his own supporters, rather than those who have disliked him all along. So it’s significant that one of his earliest supporters appears to be swinging against him.

In February 2016, when Representative Tom Marino became one of the first Republican members of Congress to endorse Trump, he called the decision one of my life-changing moments and hailed the presidential candidate as a fresh voice that doesn’t listen on Wall Street.

At the time, Trump was still locked in a bitter nomination battle with Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, and he was struggling to attract support from elected officials. Marino, a former prosecutor representing a rural district in northern Pennsylvania, didn’t just endorse him. He is a loud and proud Trump booster who helped steer his campaign in the state and joined his presidential transition team after he won.

Trump expressed love for Marino and Lou Barletta, a fellow member of Congress and co-chairman of Trumps campaign in Pennsylvania, calling them thunder and lightning.

As president, Trump tapped Marino to become director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, though Marino backed out after questions about his record on opioids. He resigned from Congress in 2019 soon after his fifth term, citing recurring kidney problems.

In this years Republican primary for governor in Pennsylvania, Marino strongly criticized Trump for refusing to endorse Barletta, who lost that race to Doug Mastriano. Now, he’s urging his fellow Republicans to keep going.

I think the Republican Party has to do whatever it takes to get away from Trump, Marino said in an interview. He certainly, I think, caused the party defeats in this election that we had in November. Im deeply disappointed with him.

In an unpublished letter he shared with The New York Times, Marino blasted Trump for acting like a child bully by attacking Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, started by the former president as Ron DeSanctimonious as Republicans began to gather on a possible alternative for 2024.

To secure his support, Marino wrote, Trump had to step up and act presidential and stop calling potential candidates derogatory names.

Trump, he added, has thrown some people close to him under the bus; no idea what honesty means; and severely lacking in character and integrity.

Understand the Events of Jan. 6

I will not support Trump, in fact, I will campaign against him, Marinos letter concluded. Our country deserves a mature, respectful and honest person to lead our country.

Trumps campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump continues to sink

Evidence that Trump is waning within the Republican Party is mounting by the day, and Marinos’ letter is just the latest indicator.

GOP primary voters are on the move, said Mike DuHaime, a Republican strategist, nodding to Trump’s deteriorating poll numbers in hypothetical 2024 matchups. They were tired of defending his every word and action, he added, and wanted similar policies and battles without all the drama.

Consider the parties that reacted less enthusiastically to Monday’s big news: the Jan. 6 committees are calling on the Justice Department to prosecute Trump. The panel also released a damning, 154-page executive summary of its final report, which appeared in full on Wednesday.

That evidence led to an overriding and straightforward conclusion: The main cause of January 6 was one person, former President Donald Trump, followed by many others, the summary reads. None of the events on Jan. 6 will happen without him.

Trump responded with typical bluster. These people don’t understand that when they go after me, he posted on Truth Social, freedom-loving people rally around me.

He continued: It makes me stronger. What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.

No sign of that yet. As Maggie Haberman writes in assessing the damage caused by former presidents’ recent actions and the committees’ investigations, Trump has significantly diminished, a diminished presence on the political landscape.

Two possible presidential contenders are former Vice President Mike Pence and Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas took the position that Trump acted recklessly in Jan. 6, although they argued that he should not be charged criminally.

In the Senate, Trump also didn’t get much political cover on Monday. Only one Republican senator, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, endorsed his presidential bid.

The whole country knows who was responsible that day, Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, told reporters at the Capitol. Beyond that, I don’t have any immediate observations.

Senator John Thune, a Republican from South Dakota, said the panel had interviewed several credible witnesses. Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, while criticizing what she called the political process, said Trump was responsible for the riot.

And even in the House which is very much Trump country the reaction still lacks a thorough, orchestrated push.

Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the top Republican in the House, perhaps thinking he needs moderate Republicans to support his bid for speaker as much as he needs pro-Trump die-hards, said nothing .

McCarthys lieutenants politely attacked the January 6 panel, but there was no phalanx of pro-Trump surrogates holding court for reporters at the Capitol, no point-by-point refutation of the committee’s key findings.

Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, who oversees the Republican message, issued a tweet calling the investigation on Jan. 6 a partisan charade. Representative Jim Jordan, the incoming chairman of the House Oversight Committee, complained that McCarthy was not allowed to put his allies on the panel, which he boycotted after Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected his first two choices. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia went after communist Democrats and attacked Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, one of the two Republicans on the committee, as crybaby Adam.

More often than not, Republicans prefer to change the subject to any other year-end spending proposal opposed by many on the right, the recent influx of migrants at the border, Twitter’s handling of articles about Trump’s laptop. Hunter Bidens in 2020 or the effects of inflation.

Did the January 6 hearings hurt Trump?

Democrats tend to view Republicans’ attitude toward Trump as cynical rather than principled in nature, recalling how a good portion of the party rallied to his side in early 2021. then eagerly sought his endorsement in 2022.

If the GOP had won the House by a large margin and taken the Senate behind Trumps nominees, the reaction to recent problems would have been very, very different, Dan Pfeiffer, a former communications director for President Barack Obama, wrote Tuesday in his Substack newsletter.

What it missed, however, was that the January 6 committee, especially its elegantly staged prime-time summer hearings, which drew millions of viewers seemed to be at least a small factor in the loss of Republicans this year.

One of several polls to try to isolate the question came out this week. In surveys commissioned by Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan watchdog group, 46 percent of voters in five battleground states said the Jan. 6 hearings were a factor in their decision. And a larger group of 57 percent said they had at least some exposure to hearings.

The poll focuses on so-called ticket-splitters Republicans and independents who vote for a Democrat in one race and a Republican in another. In Arizona, 20.9 percent of those ticket-splitters said Jan. 6 was a top factor in their vote. In Pennsylvania, that number is just 8.5 percent. Those numbers are pretty modest, but every vote counts.

When I recently asked Sarah Longwell, a Republican consultant who’s worked to defeat swing voters in places like Arizona and Pennsylvania, to assess the role democracy has played in the midterms, she was cautious.

I think we just won an important battle and sent a message to Republicans that election denial and extremism are a loser to swing/independent voters in states that hold the keys to political power, he told a email. But it is too early, he said, to say that American democracy is out of the woods.

For now, the strongest argument within the Republican Party base is not Trump’s behavior in office, but the increasingly dominant view that his 2020 election craze will cost the GOP valuable seats this year.

That may be the most powerful anti-Trump argument of all, says John Sides, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University: that a rejection of the election is a political loser.

All that matters is the interpretation, Sides said. If that view takes root, it doesn’t matter what the real reason is.

What to read

Top Washington lawmakers have unveiled a sweeping spending package that will keep the government open until next fall after reaching a compromise on billions of dollars in federal spending, Emily Cochrane reports. Congress faces a midnight Friday deadline to fund the government or face a shutdown.

The House Ways and Means Committee is now considering the release of the Trumps’ tax returns. Such a move risks retaliation from Republicans, writes Alan Rappeport.

Congress has proposed $1 billion to help poor countries cope with climate change, a number that falls short of President Biden’s pledge, Lisa Friedman reports.

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