Republican insiders reveal why the GOP wants to dump Trump — but can’t

On Friday, after several days of licking their wounds following their midterm mauling, a new report revealed that Republicans are beginning to look for a way to move their party beyond the leadership of President Donald Trump. But according to GOP insiders who spoke with the Washington Post, that’s easier said than done.

“We’ve never seen a political figure dominate a party to the degree that Trump has over the past 10 years — certainly not in modern times,” said former Republican congressman Bob Good, who supported Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the 2024 presidential race and was exiled from the party as a result, with Trump endorsing a primary challenger who unseated him. “Trump is the party. The party is Trump. Trump is the agenda. The agenda is Trump.”

While Republicans like Good have spent over a decade urging the party to divorce from the president, Trump’s control of and personal identification with the party only grew stronger. “Now,” writes the Post, “as Republicans reckon with a historic rout in Tuesday’s midterm elections, calls to extirpate Trump from the right’s politics are resounding more forcefully than at any point since the first of his three presidential bids. But in a party that has, over the intervening decade, remade itself to a once-unimaginable extent in the president’s image, GOP leaders and activists are finding that creating a ‘post-Trump’ party is easier said than done.”

“It’s like the event horizon of a black hole,” said one Republican operative, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about the party’s midterm disaster and troubled future. “Trump exerts this huge amount of gravity. And beyond that, you know it’s going to be different, but you don’t know what it’s going to look like.” The operative, who supports Trump’s agenda and the MAGA movement, told the Post that the party must find a way to break with the president, but that doing so will pose philosophical, political, and even logistical difficulties — even when it comes to scheduling a national convention that is still two years away. As the operative wondered, “Is Trump going to tolerate not being the final speaker at the RNC? I think that’s an open question.”

As the Post notes, the midterms demonstrated that Trump and his second-term agenda are powerful electoral liabilities, having handed Democrats a historic victory over some of the country’s reddest regions. “We can say, without hyperbole or gloating: This is the end of the Trump era,” declared Tucker Carlson on Wednesday, saying there was “no coming back for a generation” from the damage the president had done to the Republican Party.

Much of the difficulty the party will have “coming back” from Trump is structural. As the Post explains, he sits atop a campaign spending juggernaut, MAGA Inc. He retains the support of most right-wing media outlets, and major conservative institutions have explicitly aligned themselves with MAGA, as have a new generation of young Republican staffers and activists who know nothing but Trump’s style of politics. Perhaps most important, despite his low approval rating, Trump has so far kept up his ability to connect with the party’s base and to shape the outcome of primary elections, even if his handpicked candidates end up losing in general elections. While Republicans like Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) argue that the party needs to embrace more traditional candidates, according to the Post, “Others, closer to what is now the populist mainstream of the American right, are deeply skeptical that the future of the GOP rests with a fleece-wearing, Chamber of Commerce-approved Republican ready to resurrect a more genteel strain of conservatism.”

“What that wing of the party is selling, there is no constituency for,” said a former official in the first Trump administration. In the official’s estimation, it would be a mistake to read the results of the midterms as a referendum on the core of Trump’s populist agenda, such as immigration restriction or economic protectionism. According to the official, voters were expressing anger at deviating from the agenda. “I think the rebuke here is that we asked for America First, and you gave us this oligarch-first, gold-filigree-in-the-Oval-Office b------t,” the former official said.

On the day after the election, Vice President JD Vance gave an indication of how Republicans will feel their way forward when he posted a statement in which he blamed the GOP’s midterm disaster on the Iran war even as he made gestures of deference to the commander in chief who chose to launch it. As Curt Mills, an ally of Vance’s and executive director of The American Conservative magazine, told the Post, some version of this balancing act — which he described as “keep the principles, oppose the war, and tacitly support Trump” — is probably a stance that will be adopted over the next two years by conservatives seeking to shape the party’s future. In any case, Mills admitted, “I don’t think Trump’s going to be dumped.”