December 3, 2024

POLITICO: The anti-Trump movement is in tatters. Now it’s scrambling to remain relevant.

But congressional Republicans may be less willing to buck Trump once he resumes office in January and the business of vetting his Cabinet picks moves out from behind closed doors. Public acts of defiance risk not just Trump’s wrath, but primary challenges in 2026 — and few GOP senators are positioned to win reelection without his voters.

Meanwhile, the number of Trump’s opponents in the upper chamber will again dwindle in the next Congress. And the remaining two Republican senators who voted for his impeachment, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, will no longer be enough to tank a nomination on their own.

“It’s got to start in Congress,” Geoff Duncan, the former Republican lieutenant governor of Georgia who endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris over Trump, said in an interview. “You’ve got to have serious-minded senators willing to hold the conservative line and filter out as much anger and grievance-filled decision-making as possible.”

But if that bulwark crumbles, so, too, might the last vestiges of the broader Trump resistance.

Asked where Never Trumpers go from here, Jeff Timmer, former executive director of the Michigan GOP and a member of the Lincoln Project, told POLITICO: “You mean reeducation camps? I’m being an optimist.”

Always look on the bright side of life, to coin a song title: In September of 2008, Naomi Wolf, former Al Gore advisor, was muttering at the Huffington Post about Sarah ‘Evita’ Palin being poised to usher in the looming Rovian Police State. Today, she’s a Trump supporter.

Perhaps Wolf was simply afraid of finding herself at the business end of the “Trump firing squads” — like they are at CNN these days, as they attempt to explain Biden’s “unexpected” pardon of Hunter on Sunday night:

[LEIGH MCGOWAN, SOCIAL MEDIA HOST AND CONTENT CREATOR, POLITICSGIRL] No. I believe the circumstances have changed. I think that we have now have a president coming into office who’s talking about firing squads, who’s talking about running people around the country and making sure that everyone who his enemy is going to be punished.

Scott Jennings’ eye roll in response says it all about the mental landscape the left and adjacent Never Trumper right find themselves in today:

 

Posted at 12:35 pm by Ed Driscoll