The Trumpification of the Senate GOP

On the Hill

The Trumpification of the Senate GOP

Former president Donald Trump has never had as strong of a hold on Senate Republicans as he does now. 

The Senate GOP had been slow to get behind the former president. But Republicans’ tumultuous week fighting over strategy, policy and leadership has hardened the president's grip on the conference. 

The splitting of the Senate Republican conference into two factions was on display in a Thursday vote to advance a $96 billion national security supplemental to provide military funding for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, and humanitarian aid for Gaza.

Funding for Ukraine has become a hot-button topic on the right, where Republican voters, influenced by Trump, are increasingly skeptical of spending billions of dollars to help Ukraine as it fights a stalemated war with Russia.

While the vote tally could change when the Senate votes on final passage, likely early next week, it’s clear the traditional, defense-hawk Republican wing is shrinking and the “America First” element of the party is growing. 

When the Senate passed $40 billion of aid for Ukraine in May 2022, only 11 Republicans opposed it. Yesterday, 31 opposed it.

• Of the 17 Republicans who voted for the aid — just over one-third of the conference — only four have endorsed Trump: Sens. Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.), John Cornyn (Tex.), John Neely Kennedy (La.) and Roger Wicker (Miss.).
• The Republicans who voted for the bill mostly consist of the defense hawks who believe in U.S. intervention, especially when Western interests are on the line, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and his deputy, Sen. John Thune (S.D.). 
• Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) and Capito, two other members of McConnell’s leadership team, also voted for it. 

But Sen. John Barrasso (Wyo.), the No. 3 Senate Republican, and Sen. Steve Daines (Mont.), the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, often side with the Trump wing of the party and went along with the former president’s allies over Ukraine. 

• Of the 31 Republicans who voted against the aid, just five of them — Sens. John Boozman (Ark.), Ron Johnson (Wis.), James Lankford (Okla.), Rand Paul (Ky.) and Pete Ricketts (Neb.) — haven’t endorsed Trump. (Lankford voted against it because it didn’t include his border security deal, which his colleagues rejected.) 

In the 2016 Republican primary, only one senator endorsed Trump: Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), whom Trump later nominated to be his first attorney general. 

Now, after two impeachments, indictments on 91 criminal charges and an insurrection, Trump has the endorsements of 31 senators. 

• “I think anybody that’s sticking with the old regime is probably going to be fewer over time. And I think when it comes to the policies, it’s very clear that many obviously are overcoming any discomfort they might have with [Trump’s] style,” Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) said of the growing number of Senate Republicans backing Trump's ideology. 

Trump’s influence was especially apparent when he helped to sink a bipartisan border security deal less than 48 hours after it was released this week. Only four Republicans voted for it, including the two who wrote it (Lankford and Sen. Susan Collins (Maine), who wrote the appropriations sections). Trump’s loyal ally Stephen Miller, the architect of his harsh border security policies while in office, is just one of the many in Trump’s corner who strongly criticized the border bill. 

While Trump hasn’t weighed in specifically on the current Ukraine and Israel aid bill, he has vocally opposed sending aid to Ukraine. 

Pressure on leadership

The former president’s grip on House Republicans has been much stronger than in the Senate. The most fervent pro-Trump House members are also the most opposed to Ukraine aid, even threatening to oust House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) if he brings it up. 

The Trump loyalty test is also central to the Senate’s MAGA wing’s discontent with McConnell, who has no relationship with the former president and is at odds with Trump on a number of issues, especially Ukraine. The pro-Trump, anti-McConnell wing of the party is openly trying to defy him, putting pressure on the fate of Ukraine aide, the future of the party and McConnell’s leadership. 

White House Notebook

Biden’s general election message comes into focus

White House reporter Cleve R. Wootson Jr., who traveled with Biden to New York and Virginia this week, files this week’s Notebook: 

Super Tuesday is nearly a month away, but the presidential race appears to be barreling toward a rematch of the 2020 campaign between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. 

And as the two presidents — former and current — rack up wins in early-voting states, Biden has begun to focus his public speeches around issues that he hopes will animate voters nine months from now.   

To be sure, other issues could come to the fore in the coming months. But Biden has consistently talked about three areas so far this year: immigration, equity and reproductive rights.  

While the topics vary, Biden has brought up a similar foil — “extremist, MAGA Republicans,” who Biden says are standing in the way of a more perfect union.  

Immigration: Republicans’ dismantling of a bipartisan bill to increase funding to the border gave Biden a way to turn the tables on what polls suggest has been a vulnerability throughout his presidency.  

It’s still unclear whether the tactic will work, but his message has been clear this week: Trump and the Republican Party care more about a political victory than a pragmatic solution.  

At a campaign fundraiser in New York on Wednesday, Biden said he “never thought I’d see something like I’m seeing now,” accusing Republicans of “walking away because they’ve got Donald Trump calling and threatening them.”  

Equity: The South Carolina primary and the Nevada caucuses were not competitive on the Democratic side, but Biden and his surrogates still made multiple visits to the states, and tried to send home the message that minority voters are key to a winning coalition.  

This outreach comes as Biden has been frustrated by declining poll numbers. Campaign insiders, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss Biden’s thinking, say he hopes minority voters send a message about the priorities of the party.  

“You all are the reason why I’m president of the United States of America,” Biden said in Nevada. “ … You’re the reason that Kamala Harris is a historic vice president. And you’re the reason that Donald Trump is a former president. And you’re the reason — you’ll make Donald Trump a loser again.”  

Abortion rights: Reproductive freedom is a linchpin of Democrats’ hopes in 2024, as the party hopes enduring animus from the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision continues to enrage and animate their base. 

Throughout his career, Biden, a lifelong Catholic, has long talked about a tension between his faith and his politics when it comes to abortion. He has largely framed the issue as the first step in an erosion of privacy rights.  

“Even if you live in a state where the extremist Republicans are not running the show, your right to choose, your right to privacy, would still be at risk” under federal abortion laws proposed by the GOP, he said at another fundraiser in New York. “Folks, this is what it looks like when the right to privacy is under attack.” 

You can read all of Cleve’s work here. 

The campaign

Trump wins Nevada, Virgin Islands caucuses

Trump won two more caucuses Thursday night, giving him 30 more delegates as he marches toward the Republican nomination.

Trump won the Nevada caucuses — in which Nikki Haley, his only remaining rival for the nomination, was not competing — with 99 percent support as of this morning, when around 97 percent of votes had been counted. He won the Virgin Islands caucuses — in which Haley was a candidate — with 74 percent of the vote to Haley’s 26 percent, per the AP.

Next up: the South Carolina primary on Feb. 24.

What we're watching

At the White House

Biden is meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz this afternoon. They’ll discuss the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters.

“We have to do our utmost to prevent Russia from winning,” Scholz warned in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Wednesday. “If we don’t, we might soon wake up in a world even more unstable, threatening and unpredictable than it was during the Cold War.”

We’re watching what Biden says about the path to getting the aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan through the House if it clears the Senate in the coming days.

On the campaign trail

Donald Trump will hold a rally on Saturday in Conway, S.C. We’re watching how much time he and Nikki Haley devote to Haley’s home state and how much they campaign in the next contests: Michigan, which votes Feb. 27; Idaho, which caucuses March 2; North Dakota, which caucuses March 4; and the 15 states that will hold primaries or caucuses on Super Tuesday on March 5, including California and Texas.

(Washington, D.C., will hold its primary on March 3, but we’re not banking on Trump or Haley campaigning here.)

At the White House

'How in the hell he dare'

Biden and his allies responded angrily Thursday night to the findings of special counsel Robert K. Hur’s report, which questioned the president’s mental acuity, suggesting he could not recall the year his son Beau passed away or the years he served as vice president. 

All in all, Hur’s 345-page report spotlighted the Democratic incumbent’s biggest political vulnerability: his age. 

The report “painted a devastating portrait of an 81-year-old president whose age has become a central issue in his reelection campaign, saying his memory was ‘significantly limited’ and that he had ‘limited precision and recall,’” our colleagues Matt Viser and Tyler Pager write.

• “Inside the White House and throughout the Democratic Party, Democrats directed their fury at Hur, assailing him for his characterization of Biden’s mental fitness and arguing that he went far beyond his mandate of determining whether the president or his aides committed crimes,” Matt and Tyler report. “They cast the report as a partisan shot from a Republican prosecutor, albeit one assigned to the task by Biden-appointed Attorney General Merrick Garland.”

Biden himself blasted the report during a hastily called news conference Thursday night: “I’m well-meaning, and I’m an elderly man — and I know what the hell I’m doing,” he said, referring to a comment in Hur’s report that Biden can come off as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

“There’s even [a] reference that I don’t remember when my son died,” Biden told reporters. “How in the hell he dare raise that.”

Even though the report cleared Biden of any criminal wrongdoing, Hur’s comments have increased political scrutiny of the 2024 presidential candidate’s mental fitness. 

While Biden officials and allies have conceded that Hur’s portrait of Biden will have lasting consequences, they forcefully reject any talk of the president stepping aside and not running for reelection, Matt and Tyler report.

Here’s what else you need to know: 

The documents: “Investigators recovered notebooks that Biden kept from his time as vice president that contained classified information,” our colleagues Shane Harris and Josh Dawsey report. “The report found that Biden used these notebooks, which included handwritten notes from meetings with Obama and senior administration officials, as well as meetings about foreign adversaries and counterterrorism strategy, to craft his 2017 memoir with his ghostwriter … Several of the entries in Biden’s notebooks related to Afghanistan and Pakistan, areas where Biden exerted significant policy influence when he was vice president.”

Trump: Hur’s team wrote that Biden’s case was far different from Trump’s case because Biden promptly returned the documents when asked, while Trump declined multiple opportunities to do so, per our colleagues Perry Stein and Devlin Barrett. Trump faces 40 federal criminal counts for his alleged mishandling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida, including willful retention of national defense secrets and obstruction of justice.

The Media

Must reads

From The Post: 

• How the MAGA-fed Taylor Swift conspiracy theories caught fire. By Azi Paybarah.
• Much unease in blue states as Supreme Court weighs the Trump ballot case. By Karin Brulliard, Ari Schneider and Joanna Slater.
• How a ghostwriter was ensnared in the Biden classified documents probe. By Anumita Kaur.
• Biden says Israel’s military conduct in Gaza has been ‘over the top.’ By Yasmeen Abutaleb.

From across the web: 

• Trump, Putin, Carlson and the shifting sands of today’s American politics. By the New York Times’s Peter Baker.
• As her husband faces tumult, Jill Biden is a protective force. By the New York Times’s Katie Rogers.

Viral

Twin, where have you been?

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