WASHINGTON ― With voting now just 26 days away, the non-Donald Trump candidates are again opting not to exploit his greatest vulnerability: The continuing legal consequences of his Jan. 6, 2021, coup attempt.
After Tuesday’s decision by the Colorado Supreme Court that Trump had, in fact, engaged in an insurrection and was therefore ineligible under the Constitution to hold federal office, his rivals for the 2024 GOP nomination are attacking the justices who issued that ruling, rather than Trump for his actions leading up to and on that day.
“There was no trial on any of this. They basically just said: ‘Well, you can’t be on the ballot.’ How does that work?” said Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis Wednesday morning at an appearance in Urbandale, Iowa. “Could we just say that Biden can’t be on the ballot because he let in 8 million illegals into the country and violated the Constitution, which he has? Could we just say, ‘Oh, well, they have money coming to Hunter, whatever?’”
“The last thing we want is judges telling us who can and can’t be on the ballot,” former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley told reporters Tuesday night in Iowa, the site of the first election contest of the 2024 primary season on Jan. 15.
Even former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who has been the most critical of Trump’s post-election behavior, said the matter was not for the courts. “It would cause a lot of anger in this country if people had the choice taken away from them,” he told a New Hampshire audience Tuesday evening.
DeSantis’ claim that the Colorado high court ruled without a trial, however, is false. The trial court spent a week hearing evidence about Trump’s actions between Election Day 2020 and Jan. 6. Trump’s lawyers conducted cross-examinations and were allowed to present their own witnesses, as well.
Rick Wilson, a longtime Republican consultant from Florida who broke from the party after it embraced Trump in 2016, said the comments are unsurprising.
“This points out the fundamental lie of the 2024 Republican primary. Not one of them was ever running against Trump. They were only running in the hope that the actuarial tables or fate would take Trump off the battlefield,” Wilson said. “All of them except Chris Christie, who has no chance of being elected, have accepted the moral compromise and swallowed the poison of allowing Trump to operate under a separate set of legal and ethical rules than any other figure in the history of American politics. They’re weak, and this is one more demonstration of it.”
Other Republicans, though, said that the non-Trump candidates’ responses are completely logical, given the views of most Republican primary voters.
GOP pollster Neil Newhouse pointed to a new survey showing that 79% of Republicans believe Trump should be found not guilty of charges that he tried to overthrow the election and that 66% believe that Trump should be permitted to be the nominee, even if he is convicted of crimes.
“Not sure there’s a single Republican that considers Jan. 6 an insurrection,” said former Republican Congressman David Jolly. “Only Christie has shown a willingness to try to persuade GOP voters. Haley and DeSantis remain intent on affirming them. It won’t get them the nomination, but at least they won’t get booed at the convention.”
One top Iowa Republican consultant, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said, “The GOP was embarrassed by Jan. 6 but do not think it was a coup or an insurrection. The tribe doesn’t accept your premise.”
That view of Jan. 6, though, did not start that way. In the first days and weeks after the coup attempt, even many die-hard Trump supporters realized that things had gone too far. Top Trump campaign aide Jason Miller advised spreading the lie that it wasn’t Trump supporters who had perpetrated the violence but “Antifa.” Many Trump followers aggressively pushed that falsehood in the early days.
And that Trump was likely to face legal consequences, both civil and criminal, was cited by Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell after he decided against convicting Trump following his impeachment by the House for inciting the Capitol attack.
“He didn’t get away with anything yet,” said McConnell on Feb. 13, 2021. Just days earlier, on Jan. 6, he had called the assault “this failed insurrection.”
McConnell said, “We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.”
But in the coming months, McConnell essentially stopped talking about Trump at all while other Republican leaders actively began rehabilitating his image, in part to use his massive fundraising operation for their own benefit.
And as Trump resumed pushing his lies about the 2020 election having been “stolen” from him and began spreading a revisionist account of Jan. 6 in which his violent followers who had attacked and beaten police officers were recast as “patriots” and, now, “political prisoners,” many elected Republicans, particularly in the House, began joining in.
Countering this were but a handful of Republicans like former House members Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, who were effectively excommunicated by the party. Kinzinger chose not to run for re-election. Cheney was soundly defeated in her primary.
“I would love it if all Republicans were Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, but look at what happened to them,” the Iowa consultant said.
“Most Republican voters believe Trump is a victim. And DeSantis and Haley know that’s how most Republican voters feel,” said former GOP congressman Joe Walsh, who tried unsuccessfully to oust Trump in the 2020 GOP primaries. “So if you want the Republican nomination and/or you want to stay viable in the Republican Party, you must echo what Republican voters believe. Even if you know, it’s bullshit.”
Regardless of how Trump’s GOP rivals either do or do not make an issue of Trump and Jan. 6, Democratic President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign has made clear that it fully intends to put Trump’s coup attempt front and center.
“It’s self-evident. You saw it all,” Biden told reporters Wednesday morning as he stepped off Air Force One in Milwaukee. “Now, whether the 14th Amendment applies, I’ll let the court make that decision. But he certainly supported an insurrection. There’s no question about it. None. Zero.”