Interesting newbie GOP Rep, Justin Amash's successor:

GOP lawmaker: Trump has no future in the Republican Party

BY JONATHAN EASLEY - @ TheHill.com, 01/13/21 04:40 PM EST 

First-term Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) said Wednesday President Trump has "tarnished" his legacy and has no future in Republican Party politics.

Speaking on Fox News, Mace, who worked on Trump’s 2016 campaign, said the president and some of his GOP allies in Congress were directly responsible for inciting the mob that overran the Capitol. 

Mace was asked by Fox News host Neil Cavuto if she thinks Trump has a future in the Republican Party.

“I do not,” she replied. “I don’t know how you go forward and defend the indefensible. What happened last week was a national tragedy.”

Mace hailed what she described as Trump’s accomplishments on the economy, lowering taxes and developing a vaccine, but said he had “wiped out” everything good he has done and that the party must now separate itself from him. 

“I think the principles and ideas he espoused, we’re going to have to champion in the future, but without his support, his brand or his name,” Mace said. “It’s tarnished. I don’t know how you defend what he did last week by any means.”[....]

Joe Scarborough tweeting a Peggy Noonan op-ed with a selected quote. (Keep in mind he served as the GOP rep. from FL-1 for four 4 terms, coming in with the Gingrich tide in 1994, thru 2002, was on major committees, and resigned for family reasons rather than disgust with the job):

analysis new polls of Republicans' (and general) approval of Hawley, Cruz and Pence:

[....] Hawley lost allies and a book deal, and he, like Cruz, faced high-profile calls for his resignation.

And now two new polls bolster that what may have seemed at the time like a sound political move — however craven — has earned Hawley few friends and many more enemies.

A poll from the Economist and YouGov shows that Hawley is still unfamiliar to many Americans, but among those who do have an opinion of him, it’s 2-to-1 negative. Thirty-five percent view him unfavorably, compared with 17 percent favorably.

The sentiment is similar in a poll from Axios and Ipsos. When people were asked whether they approved of the “recent behavior” of Hawley and other political figures, 68 percent disapproved, while just 24 percent approved.

Of course, to the extent that this was a political calculation, Hawley wasn’t necessarily trying to appeal to the broader electorate, as much as building a base within the GOP. Polling doesn’t indicate whether that has panned out, at least in the near term.

The Ipsos poll, in fact, shows that even Republicans are about evenly split on Hawley’s recent behavior, with 49 percent disapproving and 46 percent approving.

The YouGov poll is somewhat better for him, with 30 percent of Republicans having a favorable opinion of him and 16 percent having an unfavorable one.

But even in that survey, he doesn’t seem to have won over many people. Just 21 percent of Republicans have a “very favorable” opinion of him. He seems to have done much more to alienate the other side, with 54 percent of Democrats having a “very unfavorable” opinion of him. 

Interestingly, Cruz fared somewhat better — at least with his own party. Although the Ipsos poll shows that all voters disapprove of his recent actions 65 percent to 30 percent, Republicans approve 61-36. But Cruz remains broadly unpopular, with the YouGov poll showing that Americans disapprove of him overall, 47 percent to 32 percent.

Hawley’s numbers are also notably worse inside the GOP than a man who made another key decision last week — but in the opposite direction. Vice President Pence rejected Trump’s entreaties to adopt another extraordinary measure [....]

But the vast majority of Republicans don’t seem to be holding that against Pence — despite Trump having criticized him for it. The Ipsos poll shows that 74 percent of Republicans approve of Pence’s recent behavior, compared with 25 percent who disapprove. [....]

from From bad to worse for Josh Hawley analysis by Aaron Blake @ WashingtonPost.com, Jan. 14

Senator Lankford who enjoys a reputation as a GOP friend to Black Oklahoma leaders:

Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Republican who planned to vote against certification of Biden, changed her vote after the violence

She laid the blame directly in Trump's lap

Ms. McMorris Rodgers’s remarks were particularly pointed.

“Thugs assaulted Capitol Police officers, breached and defaced our Capitol building, put people’s lives in danger and disregarded the values we hold dear as Americans,” Ms. McMorris Rodgers said in a statement, which she released a day after declaring she would object to the vote counts. “To anyone involved, shame on you.”

“What we have seen today is unlawful and unacceptable,” she added. “I have decided I will vote to uphold the Electoral College results, and I encourage Donald Trump to condemn and put an end to this madness.”

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/01/06/us/electoral-vote

• reply

by rmrd0000 on Thu, 01/14/2021 - 12:25pm

Imagine if Trump’s influence over the GOP faded away

Column by Paul Waldman @ WashingtonPost.com, Jan. 15

For some time, I’ve assumed that, after leaving office, President Trump would continue to dominate the Republican Party — not just in spirit but as a daily presence, maintaining the loyalty of much of its base and forcing its leaders to remain deferential to him lest they incur his wrath. But that has never looked less likely than it does right now.

For all Trump’s failures and misdeeds, before Jan. 6 there was every reason to believe that his hold on the party would be undiminished; that the members of the GOP base would be unflagging in their adoration for him. But the Capitol insurrection may have changed everything.

The Pew Research Center has released a large new poll taken after last Wednesday, and while it remains to be seen if the results hold up over time and in other surveys, they are remarkable:

Donald Trump is leaving the White House with the lowest job approval of his presidency (29%) and increasingly negative ratings for his post-election conduct. The share of voters who rate Trump’s conduct since the election as only fair or poor has risen from 68% in November to 76%, with virtually all of the increase coming in his “poor” ratings (62% now, 54% then).

Trump voters, in particular, have grown more critical of their candidate’s post-election conduct. The share of his supporters who describe his conduct as poor has doubled over the past two months, from 10% to 20%.

This is not to say that a wave of sanity has swept through the Republican electorate; 64 percent of Republicans still believe that Trump actually won the 2020 election. But his approval among his party has dropped to 60 percent, and when asked whether they’d like to see Trump remain a major political figure for years to come, only 57 percent of Republicans said yes, while 40 percent said no. (Overall, only 29 percent of those polled said they’ll like to see him remain a major figure.)

It appears that while Trump could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose any support, the same could not be said of his inciting an insurrection.

The image of Trump’s most loyal supporters rampaging through the Capitol will haunt his post-presidency. The smashed windows, the overturned furniture, the Confederate flags, the police officers beaten, the deranged hatred for democracy itself — those will be the things Trump cannot escape with the rebranding he surely is already planning.

That Trump’s approval has fallen  into the 20s (at least in this poll) inevitably reminds one of the last Republican president, who also left office in disgrace as he passed off multiple crises to his successor. When he departed, George W. Bush’s approval had also dipped that low; at one point Gallup recorded it at 25 percent.

Among other things, it meant that even Republicans who in the days after 9/11 had treated Bush like a kind of living god wanted no more to do with him. They started to highlight the times they had disagreed with his policy choices, and began claiming that he wasn’t a true conservative because he didn’t cut federal spending.

As time went on [....]

a writer at Reason complains that in the AZ GOP the that the Trump-and-like-politician cultists have totally taken over, leaving libertarians nowhere to go: