The blurred lines of Trump’s GOP
How to follow the factional fights to come.
Welcome to R&R, a Sunday private email for paid subscribers. On the menu this morning: some final thoughts on the House speaker battle + recommendations for my favorite reads from the past week.
At first glance, House members like Thomas Massie, Ralph Norman, and Keith Self might be the last lawmakers you’d expect to break with Donald Trump.
They are some of Congress’ most conservative members. Two of them hail from the House Freedom Caucus, which has often been identified as the Trumpiest group on Capitol Hill. And they, like Trump, are unafraid to make a stink and fight with Republican leaders when they’re unhappy about the direction of the party.
Then again, assuming those qualities automatically equal lockstep devotion to Trump would be a mistake. After all, Trump himself is now the undisputed leader of the GOP — problem #1 for any presumed Trump allies who have made breaking with leadership their calling card. Despite his reputation, he also isn’t particularly conservative; certainly, his plans for a second term don’t make him seem like a big fan of limited government. Partially for those reasons, his relationship with the Freedom Caucus has often been more complicated than it’s been portrayed.
This week, these three members initially split with Trump by casting votes against his preferred candidate for House speaker, Mike Johnson. By the time the vote had ended, two of them — Norman and Self — had flipped their votes after phone calls with the incoming POTUS. The big story here, of course, is that Johnson was re-elected (with Trump’s help).
But here’s our mystery today: why did these self-styled Trump allies find themselves opposed to the president-elect in the first place? The answer can tell you a lot about the ideological fights to expect within the GOP coalition during Trump’s second term.
Trump and these House members do share similar voter bases — but even that can be deceiving. Massie himself put this best in a 2017 interview with the Washington Examiner, reflecting on the GOP’s transition from the Tea Party to the Trump Party:
“All this time, I thought they were voting for libertarian Republicans,” Massie said, referring to voters who thronged to Tea Party candidates like himself in the early 2010s and then to Trump in 2016. “But after some soul searching I realized when they voted for Rand [Paul] and Ron [Paul, a father-and-son libertarian pair] and me in these primaries, they weren’t voting for libertarian ideas — they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race. And Donald Trump won best in class, as we had up until he came along.”
Unusually frank for a sitting congressman, that quote reveals a Republican Party that is an uncomfortable mix, in both its voters and its politicians, of highly ideological crusaders and people who are just happy to be part of A Fight, no matter what policies they might be fighting for.