Republicans privately gripe about Trump, but don’t dare take him on

Do the Republicans really want to dump Trump?

Is that the party’s most fervent desire, although it’s spoken about only in backstage whispers?

That’s what the Atlantic thinks, and I’m not totally buying it.

More important, it’s not up to party leaders and operatives. It’s up to the voters. They will settle the question a year from now, which means we’re in for a long period of media analysis and bloviation.

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I wrote some days ago about whether Donald Trump could win not just the nomination but the presidency. My conclusion is that it’s an uphill battle but not impossible.

The magazine piece by McKay Coppins, who is well-connected on the right, says when pressed privately, "most Republican officials—even the ones with MAGA hats in their closets and Mar-a-Lago selfies in their Twitter avatar—will privately admit that Donald Trump has become a problem. He’s presided over three abysmal election cycles since he took office, he is more unstable than ever, and yet he returned to the campaign trail this past weekend…Aside from his most blinkered loyalists, virtually everyone in the party agrees: It’s time to move on from Trump."

It’s the "virtually everybody" formulation that I think goes too far. Of course many Republican officials have doubts about Trump, given the way his tenure ended with a riot and the way he presided over GOP losses in 2018, 2020 and 2022.

These officials may or may not like Trump, may or may not be exhausted by him, but don’t want to anger his substantial base. So who cares what they say privately? The bottom line is they don’t want to lift a finger against the 45th president because they know they’ll suffer a backlash.

But the Atlantic piece has some spicy stuff: "I heard repeatedly that the least disruptive path to getting rid of Trump, grim as it sounds, might be to wait for his expiration."

Former congressman Peter Meijer, who voted for Trump’s impeachment and got knocked off in a GOP primary, said "you have a lot of folks who are just wishing for his mortal demise." While he’s not in that camp, "I’ve heard from a lot of people who will go onstage and put on the red hat, and then give me a call the next day and say, ‘I can’t wait until this guy dies.’ And it’s like, Good Lord."

The piece goes through other scenarios, such as that Republican donors might turn on Trump. Some have defected, but there hasn’t been a big stampede.

And that old standby: "Some Republicans are clinging to the hope that Trump might finally be undone by his legal troubles."

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On that point, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg has begun presenting evidence about the Stormy Daniels case to a grand jury. This is weird on several levels.

Given all the things the former president has done or been accused of, will the only thing he is charged with involve paying off a porn star? That makes nailing Al Capone on tax evasion seem like a very big deal.

Bragg had basically dropped the case when he succeeded Cy Vance Jr., and a couple of top prosecutors quit. Why would he have changed his mind now? 

Trump, who has denied Daniels’ allegations of an affair, posted: "With respect to the ‘Stormy’ nonsense, it is VERY OLD & happened a long time ago, long past the very publicly known & accepted deadline of the Statute of Limitations."

The case is pretty well documented, with onetime Trump lawyer (and now fierce critic) Michael Cohen, who acted as the intermediary, having talked to the DA’s office 14 times. "The checks are the checks," Cohen said on MSNBC.

In the closing weeks of the 2016 campaign, fearing that Daniels would go public with her story, the Trump team arranged for her to be paid $130,000 in hush money in exchange for not talking to the media about her account. Cohen, who pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations and spent time in prison, was paid $420,000, in part to cover his taxes in the transaction.

The deal was cut with the help of the National Enquirer, then run by a close friend of Trump, David Pecker, who news reports say was one of the first witnesses called before the grand jury.

Still, this reminds me of how the anti-Trumpers have spent six years expecting and hoping for an indictment of the ex-president. If he is charged in this case, it will most likely cause his base to rally behind him as the victim of an unfair system. (Coincidentally, video of a Trump deposition from last year, in the New York attorney general’s civil fraud probe of his company, shows what he said before repeatedly invoking the Fifth Amendment. He accused Letitia James of "an unfounded politically motivated witch hunt" and said he’d be "an absolute fool" not to take the Fifth.)

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The Atlantic piece says many Republican leaders are engaged in "magical thinking" to believe that Trump will somehow be sidelined while they remain silent. Coppins writes that even if Trump loses the nomination, he could blow up the Republicans’ chances by running as an independent candidate.

And yet, despite grass-roots enthusiasm for Ron DeSantis, Trump remains, after all that has transpired, the front-runner for the nomination. And if he wins that, most of these private naysayers who dare not utter public criticism are going to fall into line.

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Footnote: Donald Trump sued Bob Woodward and Simon & Schuster yesterday for publishing an audio book of the 18 taped interviews that the former president granted for an earlier book. Since Trump approved the recordings and there’s no agreement restricting their use, his chances of winning the case seem exceedingly slim.