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Donald Trump’s lackluster campaign announcement was one thing. His real problem is fast becoming the collective shrug Republicans have given him in the week-plus since.
Far from freezing out potential competitors, Trump’s announcement was followed by a raft of potential 2024 contenders appearing at the Republican Jewish Coalition conference in Las Vegas over the weekend, where at least one Republican who had previously said she would defer to Trump if he ran — former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley — now said she is considering running in a “serious way.”
A super PAC supporting Trump’s chief rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, plans to begin airing TV ads in Iowa on Friday. And even the news that Elon Musk was lifting Trump’s ban on Twitter wasn’t breaking through.
The morning after his account was reinstated — a development once viewed as a significant lift to Trump’s candidacy — Fox News Sunday spent more time talking about the ticketing debacle surrounding Taylor Swift’s upcoming tour.
“The people talking about [Trump’s campaign announcement] in my circles, it’s almost like it didn’t happen,” said Bob Vander Plaats, the evangelical leader in Iowa who is influential in primary politics in the first-in-the-nation caucus state and who was a national co-chair of Sen. Ted Cruz’s campaign in 2016. “That, to me, is what is telling, where people believe we probably need to move forward, not look in the rear view mirror.”
Now, leading Republicans are no longer cowering before Trump, and for the first time since he rode down the escalator in 2015, many aren’t listening to him at all. They are dodging questions about Trump’s candidacy, or openly defying him by rallying around DeSantis. Even if the Florida governor is not yet, as Sen. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming declared, the “leader of the Republican Party.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/11/27/republicans-against-trump-2024-00070632
Far from freezing out potential competitors, Trump’s announcement was followed by a raft of potential 2024 contenders appearing at the Republican Jewish Coalition conference in Las Vegas over the weekend, where at least one Republican who had previously said she would defer to Trump if he ran — former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley — now said she is considering running in a “serious way.”
A super PAC supporting Trump’s chief rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, plans to begin airing TV ads in Iowa on Friday. And even the news that Elon Musk was lifting Trump’s ban on Twitter wasn’t breaking through.
The morning after his account was reinstated — a development once viewed as a significant lift to Trump’s candidacy — Fox News Sunday spent more time talking about the ticketing debacle surrounding Taylor Swift’s upcoming tour.
“The people talking about [Trump’s campaign announcement] in my circles, it’s almost like it didn’t happen,” said Bob Vander Plaats, the evangelical leader in Iowa who is influential in primary politics in the first-in-the-nation caucus state and who was a national co-chair of Sen. Ted Cruz’s campaign in 2016. “That, to me, is what is telling, where people believe we probably need to move forward, not look in the rear view mirror.”
Now, leading Republicans are no longer cowering before Trump, and for the first time since he rode down the escalator in 2015, many aren’t listening to him at all. They are dodging questions about Trump’s candidacy, or openly defying him by rallying around DeSantis. Even if the Florida governor is not yet, as Sen. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming declared, the “leader of the Republican Party.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/11/27/republicans-against-trump-2024-00070632
