“The RNC is sending a warning shot to major GOP donors not to play ball with the powerful Koch political network, escalating a fight between President Trump’s allies and the Kochs,” Politico reports.
“The move follows a weekend retreat in Colorado at which Koch network officials criticized the Trump administration, hinted they would work with Democrats, and announced they would not help a Republican candidate in a key 2018 Senate race.”
“President Trump’s tight grip on the Republican Party is being openly challenged by the powerful network of ideological conservatives linked to billionaire industrialist Charles Koch, splaying out long-simmering tensions over the party’s future just months before the midterm elections,” the Washington Post reports.
”The Koch network pointedly declined to endorse Trump as a presidential candidate in 2016. But this latest feud — following last weekend’s gathering at which Koch-affiliated officials sought to distance their operation from Trump — has exposed the rift between a president pushing his party toward populism, and establishment Republicans espousing the long-standing policy of free trade.”
Playbook: “The Koch network is getting a lot of ink for standing up to Trump and saying it won’t dole out big campaign checks in certain races this cycle. But, it’s not like they are going to support a bunch of Democrats and really put any effort into changing the political makeup of Congress.”
First Read: “Two things can be true: More Republican voters than ever approve of Trump’s job performance, according to the latest NBC/WSJ poll. And on a variety of issues — tariffs, immigration, Trump’s dealings with Russia — we are seeing Republican lawmakers breaking from the president on key policies and issues. And that’s no small thing.”
“Of course, in the summer and fall of 2016, Republicans were busy distancing themselves from Trump (over the ‘Access Hollywood’ video, the attacks on the Khan family, the attacks on Judge Curiel). And it all worked out for Trump and the GOP.”
“But you always want to be more unified — rather than less unified — heading into an election.”
A new CBS News poll finds that 49% of Republicans say that hearing criticisms of President Trump on the Russia investigation only makes them want to defend him more. Another 42% say they want to wait to see what the facts show.
Seventy percent of Republicans call the Russia investigation a “witch hunt,” while 77% of Democrats call it a “critical” matter of national security.
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With 101 days left before the midterm elections, the Republican National Committee wants to test the strength of its ground game with a “national week of action,” Roll Call reports.
“The committee expects 4,000 volunteers to make 2 million contacts over the week.”
“We’ve gone from being the party of Jeb Bush Republicans who can win everywhere and over perform in Democratic areas to the party of red hat Cletus the Slack-jawed Yokel and QAnon. Who thinks this is going to end well?”
— A Republican political operative, quoted by the Tampa Bay Times.
Charlie Sykes: “As Donald Trump extends his control over the Republican party, American conservatism has entered a pseudo-Orwellian stage where weakness is strength, appeasement is toughness, lies are truth, and ‘America first’ means ‘blame America first.’”
”The fiasco in Helsinki, where the president openly sided with Vladimir Putin over his own country’s intelligence agencies, was not a one-off for this president but rather an exclamation point on what has happened to the American right.”
”For me, as an outspoken conservative for the last four decades, the experience has been vertiginous. On one issue after another – from Russia and free trade to corruption and the rule of law – Republicans have adjusted their principles to conform with Trumpism, which often means with Trump’s latest glandular impulse.”
Evan Osnos: “President Trump has upended the basis of American security—opening a trade war with China, chastising U.S. allies in Europe, and, at a press conference in Helsinki, following a two-hour private meeting with President Vladimir Putin, accepting his claim that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 election.”
“The outcry, including from Republicans, was instaant… More remarkable, though, was what didn’t happen. No one resigned from the Cabinet. No Republican senators took concrete steps to restrain or contain or censure the President.”
“The pattern is already visible for the historians of tomorrow. When Trump hailed neo-Nazis in Charlottesville as ‘very fine people,’ when he endorsed an accused child molester for the Senate, when he separated children from their parents at the Mexican border, the Republican Party, by and large, accepted it. And, when Coats said, of Russian cyberattacks, that “warning lights are blinking red again,” the Party did not pressure the President to mount a defense.”
Ron Brownstein: “Trump’s Republican skeptics, both inside and outside of Congress, agree that GOP officials who privately rail about Trump won’t publicly challenge him, primarily because polls show he’s so popular with the party base. But that’s partly a self-fulfilling prophecy: One reason Trump is so popular with the base is because no one has made a systematic case against his presidency from a Republican perspective.”
“A handful of Republican elected officials, and a slightly longer roster of party strategists and intellectuals, have intermittently criticized Trump… If anything, these solo flights may have weakened the anti-Trump cause inside the GOP.”
“There’s no easy solution to that dilemma. But history suggests the first step may be to find strength in numbers. In recent decades, other factions disaffected with their party’s direction have amplified their influence by coalescing and creating their own institutions. Probably the best-known recent example is the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which party centrists formed after Ronald Reagan routed old-style liberal Walter Mondale in 1984.”
“I’m furious Republicans are cowardly about Trump. But here is what they say in private: 1.) Trump is a disgrace. 2.) I give fiery press conf tommorrow saying that. 3.) Nothing changes, Trump remains nuts and remains POTUS. 4.) A nut beats me in next primary. So how does my political suicide help?”
— GOP strategist Mike Murphy, on Twitter.
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“The Republican National Committee has raised more than $200 million this election cycle… the fastest the committee has reached the milestone in a midterm period,” CNN reports.
“The RNC haul far eclipses the more than $101 million the Democratic National Committee has raised this cycle, giving the committee upwards of five times the amount of cash-on-hand as the Democrats.”
“A county Republican Party chairman from Southeast Ohio resigned on Monday, citing President Donald Trump’s meeting earlier in the day with Russian President Vladimir Putin,” the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports.
Said Chris Gagin: “The President is entitled to GOP party leaders, at all levels, fully committed to his views and agenda. Following today’s press conference with Pres. Putin, as well as certain policy differences, most especially on trade, I could no longer fulfill that duty. Thus, I resigned.”
Playbook: “Yes, of course some will, but not most. Why? Myriad reasons, and it’s not really that neat and easy to assign one motivation to hundreds of Republicans. But Trump can truly do no wrong with a large segment of the Republican base. So, in a political system where a primary challenge is your principal political hurdle, you don’t want to be on the wrong side of the popular president. Many, though, will seethe privately, for whatever that’s worth.”
Paul Glastris: “There was a time when divided government didn’t have to mean bad government. That time has passed. If the Obama years showed anything, it is that, when in opposition, the modern Republican Party has no goal beyond blocking the Democratic agenda, whatever that may be, and will transgress hitherto undisputed democratic norms to do so. Operationally, the GOP’s governing objectives have devolved to two base goals: transferring wealth upward, and staying in power. Because the former goal is unpopular, achieving the latter increasingly requires the party to rely on anti-democratic means: voter ID laws and voter roll purges designed to suppress minority and youth turnout; hyper-partisan gerrymandering; filling the federal judiciary with ideological conservatives committed to weakening the power of unions and enhancing that of corporations; and so on. (That’s all on top of constitutional features, like the Electoral College and the Senate, that give the GOP representation that is out of proportion to its votes.)”
“The election of Donald Trump has pushed the Republican Party even further in this direction, to the point where it is now openly enabling corruption and autocracy.”
“The fact that America now has only one party committed to small-d democracy changes everything. It’s no longer acceptable for Democrats to look at politics as a way to win the next election so as to jam through a bunch of their preferred policies before the Republicans inevitably take back power. They must instead see the purpose of politics as building sustained power for Democrats, period—but, unlike the other side, they must do this in part by strengthening the democratic process, not by undermining it.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Wonk Wire, Political Job Hunt and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
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