Once an albatross around Trump’s neck, January 6 is now off limits in the GOP primary

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If any topic is verboten in the early stages of the Republican presidential primary, it’s the insurrection that once served as the defining point of Donald Trump’s 2024 race. While Republicans have once talked openly about being disqualifying for the former president, now it’s more of a litmus test among GOP groups of a candidate’s MAGA bona fides. None of them wanted any part of it.

For a major candidate, said Scott Walker, the former Republican governor of Wisconsin, going after Trump for Jan. 6 is “a big risk.”

Avoiding January 6 isn’t just in DeSantis’ book. Mike Pence, the former vice president and likely presidential candidate, is preparing to fight a grand jury subpoena for testimony about Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, only to see political landmines in the testimony. Nikki Haley, asked on a recent podcast whether she would describe the unrest in the Capitol as an “insurrection, a riot, or a coup,” instead went with a saner — and safer — description: “a sad day in America.”

Basically, said Dave Carney, a Republican national strategist based in New Hampshire, “I don’t think January 6 is coming, period.”

The insurrection was not always destined to be taboo in mainstream GOP politics. In the immediate aftermath, the turmoil appears to provide an opening not only for Trump’s strongest critics in the party, but also for more mainstream, if non-Trumpian Republicans who seek to distinguish themselves from him before 2024. .

It was Haley, the former UN ambassador, who once said she was angry and “disgusted” with Trump and told members of the Republican National Committee that his “actions since Election Day will be judged by history.” Pence made his first post-presidential break with Trump by declaring that he and Trump may never “see eye to eye” on the insurgency. DeSantis once openly criticized the “chaos and chaos” at the Capitol.

“The calculation is that this is clearly indefensible, he’s not going to have a place in the party going forward,” said a Republican strategist and former congressional aide. “Obviously that didn’t happen … January 6th is useful for Trump in a Republican primary right now. Nobody’s going to hurt him on January 6th.”

The advantages for Trump, if they exist, were clearly visible at the gathering of conservatives at the Conservative Political Action Conference. At the annual confab — held this year outside Washington — some attendees wore their Jan. 6 connection as a badge of honor and found sympathetic ears.

Micki Witthoeft, the mother of Ashli ​​Babbitt — the protester who was shot and killed by Capital police during the riot as she tried to break down a door inside the building — appeared on set with Donald Trump Jr. outside the convention’s main stage. There were two booths in CPAC’s exhibition hall focused on the defendants of January 6. And it was standing room only for a breakout session at the conference titled: “True Stories of January 6: The Prosecuted Speak.” Speakers included Jan. 6 defendants Brandon Straka, Simone Gold, West Virginia lawmaker Derrick Evans, John Strand and Geri Perna, the aunt of Matthew Perna, who died by suicide after pleading guilty to four cases related to the Capitol riot.

In the halls, it’s not unusual to bump into people protesting on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6. Deborah Gordon, a retiree from Maryland, said it’s “disgusting” that politicians haven’t talked about January 6 more. “I was there,” Gordon said. Bruce Cherry, the chairman of the Seminole County Republican executive committee in Florida, said it was important to re-elect Trump “to pardon those people.” Melissa Cornwell, who attended CPAC from Beaumont, Texas, called January 6 a “non-event,” adding that the “real uprising” was the riots that followed the death of George Floyd in 2020.

If anything, the tone and tenor of the conference suggested that Republican presidential candidates may feel pressure from corners of the base to talk about Jan. 6 in positive terms — and rally around defense of persons arrested following the riot.

“I can tell you that just contacting a lot of activists here, there is concern that the violations of protocol and civil rights around the issue of January 6 have not gotten enough attention from Congress, and that is really something for us in the House majority more so than 2024 candidates,” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) said on the sidelines of CPAC.

Now, Trump’s world is attacking potential 2024 opponents for not adequately supporting the coming January 6 protesters. Alex Bruesewitz, a Republican strategist and influencer close to the Trumps, says others who might asked for the nomination showed that they “don’t care” about the defendants on January 6 “because they will lose money on Wall Street, they hate Trump and his base.” Bruesewitz himself was subpoenaed by the committee on January 6 but reportedly pleaded with the Fifth when asked to testify about the events of that day. He once said he would help pay for the legal defense of accused Capitol rioters, while Trump proposed pardoning some defendants on Jan. 6 and even collaborated on a song with some of them.

CPAC has grown increasingly aligned with Trump, making it difficult to assess how representative its gathering is of broader Republican politics. In fact, in August, the conference featured a fake jail cell where he sat, fake cried, and prayed with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) is a convicted Capitol rioter. Still, the crowd that gathered there was filled with exactly the kind of hardline activists critical of presidential candidates in a GOP primary.

In the broader GOP ecosystem, even more moderate Republicans see little upside in citing the chaos.

“I’m not trying to downplay January 6 and how horrible it is, but honestly, a lot of us want to move this year, right?” said Mark Graul, a Republican strategist who worked on George W. Bush’s 2004 campaign. “We want to get past him, and get past the horror, which ended on January 6th. That’s the height of Trump’s awfulness.”

But Graul added that anyone running to be the GOP standard-bearer understands the calculations involved.

“We’re still at the stage where if you’re going to run for the Republican nomination, you’re going to have to get votes from people who voted for Donald Trump,” he said.

In fact, polls show there isn’t much ground in the GOP primary for anyone criticizing Trump on Jan. 6. More than two years after the upheaval, the fraction of Republicans who disagree with Trump’s supporters take over the building of the Capitol has fallen to 49 percent, from 74 percent in 2021, according to a recent Economist/YouGov poll. And even if Republicans didn’t like what they saw that day, most of them didn’t blame Trump.

Two years ago, Walker said, January 6 was worthy of condemnation. He said then. But it makes no sense for presidential candidates to talk about it now, he added, when most people have moved on.

What’s more, he said, “No one cares.”

Natalie Allison contributed to this report.

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