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“Trump can destroy the party whenever he wants, yet the party can’t destroy him without also risking its own crack-up.”
“Voter participation rose in 2016, 2018 and really surged in 2020. The central figure in all of those elections was Donald Trump.”
— GOP pollster Tony Fabrizio, quoted by the Los Angeles Times.
“The race in ’24 will very much hinge on whatever President Trump decides to do. President Trump is going to make his decision whether or not he runs, or nobody else is going to make that decision for him. And I expect that everyone else will react accordingly when he does make that decision.”
— Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who “has never really danced around his ambition — including now that his party is in a holding pattern waiting to see whether former President Donald Trump runs again,” NBC News reports.
“Love him or hate him, President Donald Trump made most Americans feel strongly about politics in a way no politician has in our lifetimes. Record numbers of Americans felt strongly favorable or unfavorable toward Trump during his time in office. (The strongly favorable and unfavorable was 71% in a Fox News poll last month, for instance.) … Trump’s presidency drove historic turnout and record donations to political campaigns in a country whose voters have often shown a disinterest in politics.”
“Pragmatism, compromise and even ideological agility have always been part of politics. But what is happening now is dangerous. The rationalizers aren’t just turning against their own principles; many are turning against fundamental norms of democracy. The constant rationalization has made them unrecognizable. Unlike the Republicans who were Trumpian even before Donald Trump, the rationalizers have forgotten that what they now believe they once made up.”
“Donald Trump is impulse-driven, ignorant, narcissistic and intellectually dishonest. So you’d think that those of us in the anti-Trump camp would go out of our way to show we’re not like him — that we are judicious, informed, mature and reasonable. … But the events of the past week have shown that the anti-Trump echo chamber is becoming a mirror image of Trump himself — overwrought, uncalibrated and incapable of having an intelligent conversation about any complex policy problem.”
53%
A new Economist/YouGov poll finds 53% of Republicans said Donald Trump was a better president than Abraham Lincoln, while 47% chose the Civil War-era leader.
100
NBC News: “When Trump arrived in the White House in 2017, there were 241 Republicans at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue in the House of Representatives. Today, 100 of them have gone or have announced that they are leaving. That’s 41 percent of that original 241 in the 115th House.”
“You’d have to know why he shot him.”
— A member of a panel of Pennsylvania voters from swing districts told CNN that they would still vote for President Trump in 2020 if he shot someone.
“First, the Republican Party has largely become the Party of Trump. Too many Republicans in Congress are willing, in the interest of protecting their jobs, to overlook Trump’s misdeeds (just as too many Democrats were for Clinton during his impeachment). I have no interest in associating myself with that behavior. Maybe someday, the party will return to having honorable leaders like Bush, McCain, and Romney. Until then, count me out.”
— Greg Mankiw, former economic adviser to President George W. Bush, writes that he’s no longer a Republican.
