According to a report from Politico, Donald Trump's attempts to stay in the Oval Office by disputing the election results in states with GOP leadership is ripping the party apart as Republicans turn on each other with some choosing the president over the future of the party.
Under a headline reading, "Trump blows a hole in the GOP on his way out," Politico's David Siders wrote that Republican officials are now worried that the president's recent actions -- that have included harshly criticizing GOP officeholders with calls for them to be voted out -- will impact the 2022 midterms and beyond.
According to Siders, "State party chairs are tearing into their governors. Elected officials are knifing one another in the back. Failed candidates are seizing on Trump’s rhetoric to claim they were also victims of voter fraud in at least a half dozen states."
That has led one former GOP official to say the president is setting off a civil war within the party.
“This is Hatfield and McCoy stuff, but it’s McCoy on McCoy, or Hatfield on Hatfield,” lamented former Minnesota Republican Party official Michael Brodkorb. “To see activists across the country really just with pitchforks and torches at the capitols … it’s just bonkers.”
The report goes on to note that enmity between the populist and establishment wings of the GOP has always existed, but during Trump's four years it has blown up with no end in sight.
"He is leaving the party at an unfamiliar crossroads: The outgoing president is a defeated candidate, but unlike recent one-term presidents, he is adored by the base and is the source of a significant expansion of the GOP’s ranks," the Politico report states. "Millions of Republican voters remain convinced, without evidence, that the election was unfairly taken from him. And Trump will leave behind a party apparatus controlled by loyalists unbeholden to less populist, less Trumpian holdovers."
According to Republican Daniel Barker, a former Arizona Court of Appeals judge, "... there clearly is a major problem," within the party and the president's reported plans to run in 2024 will continue to pit Republican against Republican.
“If people for the next two or three years view Trump as having 60 or 70 million votes, it’s going to be hard to say no to him,” he explained.
Michael Burke, chair of the Republican Party in Pinal County, Arizona, added, "It’s still Donald Trump’s party. He’s probably, I believe, going to be the most consequential former president in our lifetime,” before adding that tension within the party "will be long-lasting.”
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