Voters have 'made up their minds about Trump' despite his 'hold over' the GOP: column

In a Sunday, October 8 op-ed published by The Guardian, ex-President Donald Trump's former attorney Michael Cohen argues that Republicans, by "slavishly supporting Trump and his Maga – Make America Great Again – supporters" — "have empowered a political movement that is increasingly testing the limits of the US democratic experiment."

The ex-Trump Organization vice president emphasized that even if the 2024 MAGA hopeful loses to President Joe Biden again, "the problem of the Republican party will still be with us long after he's left the political scene."

Cohen suggests, "Trump's hold over the Republican party is so complete that it borders on the pathological. Since March, he has been indicted four times and charged with 91 separate felonies. Yet his poll numbers among Republicans have dramatically improved. He enjoys a more than 45-point lead in the race for the party's presidential nomination."

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However, he insists "If there is any silver lining, it is this: for all the Republican voters who love Trump, there is a larger mobilised group of voters who loathes him."

Cohen writes:

Since leaving office, his approval numbers have also largely stayed the same. Americans have, by and large, made up their minds about Trump – and the verdict is: 'We don't like him.'

The last three US elections prove the point. In what was largely seen as a rebuke to Trump, in the 2018 midterms, Democrats picked up more than 40 seats and control of the House of Representatives. In 2020, he lost re-election by at least 7m votes to Biden(4m more than he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016). In the 2022 midterms, the Democrats dramatically overperformed, picking up a seat in the Senate and barely losing the House of Representatives. So far this year, in dozens of special elections, Democrats are overperforming by a whopping 11 points. Part of this is a byproduct of the supreme court’s decision on abortion rights, but it's also a backlash to the extremism that Trump has engendered.

Cohen suggests this is because "The GOP today is less a political party and more an inchoate mass of cultural grievances, conspiracy theories and lowest common denominator political slogans. Trump, for all his toxicity, is a symptom of the GOP's decades-long descent into madness. Legislating is not seen as a tool for bettering the plight of the American people but rather an opportunity to troll Democrats and play to the perceived slights of the party's rank-and-file supporters."

The ex-Trump lawyer emphasizes, "For those hoping that a principled and mature Republican party will somehow emerge from this mess, think again."

READ MORE: 'Wake up, fools': Michael Cohen has advice for loyal 'MAGA maniacs' after McCarthy removal

Cohen's full op-ed is available at this link (subscription required).