Trump's Bush-era GOP foes keep losing at their own party-defining game
by W. James Antle III, Politics Editor |
August 20, 2022 07:04 AM
Rep. Liz Cheney’s (R-WY) defeat Tuesday night put former President Donald Trump a step closer to doing what his staunchest intraparty critics would like to do to him: marginalizing a once-powerful force inside the GOP.
"Never Trump" conservatives do not merely want to replace the former president as a leader of the Republican Party. They want him to be retroactively condemned and repudiated by the party that once embraced him. The political arm of this subset of the GOP is disproportionately made up of operatives associated with former President George W. Bush and the late Arizona GOP Sen. John McCain.
This was always a tall order. The Republican Party moved on from President Richard Nixon, but its future did not belong to leaders who were especially vocal in their criticisms of his Watergate conduct.
It does, however, come much closer to describing what Trump and his allies have managed to do to the Bushes and Cheneys, along with critical reappraisals of McCain and Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT). Bush, Dick Cheney, McCain, or Romney were on every Republican presidential ticket from 2000 to 2012 — until Trump won the 2016 nomination. A Bush was on the GOP ticket every presidential cycle but one for 24 years.
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