Trump hates losers, that’s one reason he claims he’s still president. Yet he’s got many among the 100 candidates, and counting, he’s supporting in the 2022 midterms.
With some of these losers, Trump is already having buyer’s remorse. He’s encouraging supernumerary competitors in some states to stand down. His pal Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks, the guy in yellow at the Jan. 6 rally, has yet to catch fire in his race for the seat of the retiring Alabama senator, Richard Shelby, while another candidate Trump is now vetting, Katie Britt, already has. Just before the state party’s winter meeting on Feb. 19, Britt made the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring and proceeded to give a speech in which she called Trump a commander-in-chief in the model of party god Ronald Reagan. Brooks is so screwed.
Of course, that’s the same Reagan who would be horrified at the cannibalism going on in contravention of his 11th commandment, not to speak ill of another Republican. To the contrary, Trump relishes purging Republicans who’ve deviated from his gospel, even if it means targeting incumbents traditionally protected by the party out of loyalty and because 93 percent of them cruise to re-election.
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But Trump can’t resist, and with teeth bared he’s gone after two female incumbents, Alaska’s Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, whom he detests for voting to impeach him. Despite the vendetta, Murkowski is likely to prevail but Cheney, for her additional sin of serving on the Jan. 6 committee investigating Trump’s betrayal and having the bad luck to be from a state Trump won by 43 points, likely will not. Still, she persists. Water rights lawyer Harriet Hageman is not strong enough to have immediately cleared the field and in one outlier poll, the anti-Cheney vote was sliced so thin, Cheney came in second with 23 percent to 25 percent for the leader. Cheney’s also won the money primary, raising $2 million during the last quarter with nearly $5 million in cash on hand compared with Hageman’s $443,000 which she raised last quarter and her $380,000 cash on hand. To shore up Hageman, Trump pressured the Wyoming legislature to jettison the law that could affect Cheney’s re-election chances by making it harder for voters to register as Republicans and vote for her.
In Missouri, the party is holding its breath this week to see what Trump is going to do in the crowded Senate race. Trump’s toying with endorsing former governor Eric Greitens who leads in most polls but who party strategists are convinced can’t win in the general election, for good reason. Greitens left the state house in disgrace when he not only cheated on his pregnant wife but blackmailed the hairdresser he cheated on her with. In their first encounter, Greitens stripped her naked, tied her up, forced her to have oral sex, and then threatened to post photos of it so that “everyone will know what a little whore you are” if she so much as uttered his name.
Trump, who’s flexible, shall we say, when it comes to sexual offenses, has asked aides if the vicious assault may have been consensual, as Greitens claims. There’s also the matter that Don Jr.’s girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle is a Greitens fan serving on his campaign team. The clincher could be Greitens' promise not to support Mitch McConnell (the “Old Crow” Trump hates more every day) should the GOP win back control. The New York Times reported this week that Greitens was spotted at Mar-a-Lago and met with Trump for 30 minutes.
Last Wednesday, radio host Hugh Hewitt begged Trump repeatedly to say he wouldn’t endorse Greitens. Trump wouldn’t.
Greitens is part of a pattern where Trump sees winners among the losers who hurt women. No problem that former NFL star Herschel Walker, vying to take on Sen. Ralph Warnock in Georgia, was accused in court documents of putting a gun to his wife’s head screaming, “I’m going to blow your fucking brains out.” Although he denies his ex-wife’s claim and a similar one by an ex-girlfriend contained in a police report, he’s admitted in a book that he wrote to having multiple personalities, violent tendencies, and suicidal urges. Walker’s son, Christian, a social influencer, will be no help. His videos aren’t as damning as Greitens but decidedly not a good look. A recent one has him ranting about gas prices, waving a nozzle, while wearing a $1,300 Givenchy sweatshirt.
In keeping with his capacity to overlook men behaving badly, Trump’s first choice for an open Senate seat in the swing state of Pennsylvania was Sean Parnell, who lost custody of his children after sworn testimony that he choked his wife and left her on the side of the road, and beat his son, leaving welts. Claims which he has denied. He also volunteered that working women had ruined marriage. After the ruling, Trump was still going to hold a planned fundraiser for the candidate at Mar-a-Lago until Parnell sensibly resigned. Now Trump is weighing two others who’ve since entered the fray, neither of whom lived in Pennsylvania until recently: reality show and actual doctor Mehmet Oz, and former loyal aide David McCormick, married to another Trump acolyte, Dina Powell. Since Trump’s not known for loyalty, his first instinct will be to go with Oz rather than a member of the Manhattan elite that rejected him, until aides present years of videos of the good doctor pushing quack remedies and nutritional supplements he sold on the side to convince him not to.
There are primaries within primaries all over the country to see who can go crazy enough to win Trump’s favor. At a minimum, a candidate must loudly repeat all of Trump’s lies and go all-in on his efforts to overturn the election. But to stand out, it helps to fall off the edge of the world, like Josh Mandel, in Ohio, who calls for all public schools to be replaced by religious ones or news anchor Kari Lake in Arizona who wants Secretary of State Katie Hobbs to be imprisoned for presiding over the stolen election.
Seeing his return to Majority Leader jeopardized by Trump’s meddling, McConnell is running a behind-the-scenes effort to keep “goofballs” from losing the midterms. McConnell remembers well the goofballs who ran in earlier GOP Senate primaries like Christine “I am not a witch” O’Donnell, Sharron Angle of Sharia law hysteria and Scientology leanings, and Todd Aiken who believed women couldn’t get pregnant from a “legitimate rape.” All three went on to be crushed in the general election.
McConnell’s effort comes a little late for Ohio where its critical primary race is so crowded it looks like Groucho Marx’s stateroom in A Night at the Opera. So many are running to fill the seat of retiring Sen. Rob Portman, Trump’s even noticed. He recently called on luxury car dealer Bernie Moreno to drop out, after spending $3 million of his own money from selling Bentleys, awkward considering he asked him to drop in. According to Politico, Trump worried that splitting the vote among so many candidates “could cost the MAGA movement a conservative seat.”
He must still be concerned with way too many aspirants chasing only one nomination including Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance, who jettisoned most of his previous positions to appeal to Trump, as did the once moderate former state treasurer, Josh Mandel. Portman shook up the race over the weekend endorsing former party official Jane Timken and overnight she surpassed a quarter-million dollars in donations. We’ll see, when Trump’s endorsement comes, if the recipient’s haul tops that.
If Republicans are to win the midterms as history says they should, it won’t be because of McConnell’s late effort but because Trump so fears being a loser a second time, he’s regretting the ones he’s created. But that doesn’t mean Trump’s posse wins. He can always find more losers where those came from.
