The Republican senators, including a few female senators, stood behind Donald Trump’s lectern, clapping their hands obediently and letting him rave about the “tremendous unity” he had brought to the party. It was the designated presidential candidate’s first visit to the US Capitol since he sent his followers to storm it in Washington on January 6, 2021. At the end of last week, Trump wanted to show above all that he now calls the shots.
The months of bitter primary squabbles, in which his challenger Nikki Haley in particular had put pressure on the leader, are now over. That is all over now, Trump signals, even Haley has now said that she will vote for him in the fall, although she had previously argued for months that the country could not be expected to put up with someone like him again. At their meeting in the House of Representatives, the MPs sang him a serenade for his 78th birthday.
Close allies suddenly become enemies in the state
Even in these extraordinary Trump times, such tranquil scenes are never more than a cardboard backdrop for the notoriously chaotic collection of individualists that calls itself the Grand Old Party. On Tuesday, the Republicans will face another primary election that reminds us that countless lines of conflict run through the party.
Trump has brought large parts of the apparatus under his control. But in Virginia, he suddenly finds himself facing close allies as opponents because he is opposing an ultra-right candidate in favor of a challenger supported by the party establishment.
The head of the influential “Freedom Caucus”, the ultra-right group in the House of Representatives, once Trump’s most important standard-bearer in the Capitol, has to fear for his office. Bob Good won his seat in the House of Representatives for the deep-red part of Virginia in 2020, also after a bitter internal party dispute. At the time, Good had pushed out a member of the Freedom Caucus, a Christian conservative who had married two gay employees, to the displeasure of the party and the electorate.
Now Bob Good could suffer a similar fate. The question is also how far to the right the party delegation will position itself. And whether voters need to fear that extreme Republicans could paralyze Congress even more after the November elections than they have done since they took over the majority in the House of Representatives in the midterm elections. Blackmail by the Freedom Caucus was the reason why Congress delayed a decision on weapons for Ukraine and argued for months about the financial budget. In the process, the far-right representatives even ousted their own Speaker, Kevin McCarthy.
“We must fight fire with fire.”
Good was one of the eight rebels who turned against McCarthy. The Californian has long since left Washington, but continues to exert his influence in the background when it comes to raising donations for expensive election campaigns. He is behind a campaign that has built up another candidate against Good, John McGuire, a former member of the elite Navy Seals unit and currently a senator in the Virginia parliament. Numerous Republicans have expressed their support for him in order to weaken the ultra-right wing of the party. Representative Don Bacon from Nebraska, for example, said Politicohe does not usually take part in such actions. But: “We have to fight fire with fire.”
However, the arm of the party establishment is no longer as long as it once was. Recently, for example, Congress failed to defeat Representative Nancy Mace in the primary in South Carolina; she too was a rebel. The key difference between Mace and Good is that she backed Trump.
Good, on the other hand, dared to take on the strong man in the party and supported his rival Ron DeSantis at the beginning of the presidential election campaign. In the meantime, Good has crawled to the cross and spoken out in favor of Trump, which Trump responded to with the words “too late.” Now Trump is campaigning for the establishment candidate, regardless of the fact that other close allies from the Freedom Causesuch as Representatives Matt Gaetz and Byron Donalds, are standing up for Good.
Establishment candidate John McGuire is now the favorite. It is unclear who will win because the Republicans in Virginia will be holding their primary at the ballot box for the first time. However, it is predictable that Donald Trump will praise the tremendous unity of his party after Tuesday’s primary.