Donald Trump has been marking the final days of his presidency by creating new fissures within the Republican party, at a time when the GOP needs to unify if it is to win two races in Georgia, which will decide control of the Senate.
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To the dismay of some senior Republicans, Trump has continued to make baseless claims of having won the 2020 election – which he lost to Joe Biden – and to stoke conspiracy theories among his enthusiastic supporters.
But Trump’s move has won the approval of a significant chunk of his party’s elected officials, leading to the kind of open split which never meaningfully materialized during his four years in office.
“This is a time when the party should be unifying around opposition to Biden’s agenda,” said Republican strategist Alex Conant. “Instead, Trump is continuing to divide Republicans in a way that really weakens their political hand. Biden’s the real winner in all of this because his opposition is more divided than ever.”
Republicans have wanted Trump to zero in on a message that will boost Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, running for re-election to their Georgia Senate seats. Instead, Trump’s interactions with Georgia Republicans and voters have focused on his grievances and unfounded claims of fraud.
The president ramped that up on Saturday in an hour-long call with Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, the top elections official in the state and a Republican himself. The president implored Raffensperger to find more votes for him, even though the election is over and recounts and investigations found Biden won.
“So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state,” Trump said.
The call was recorded by officials in Raffensperger’s office and first reported by the Washington Post.
Raffensperger resisted, fueling the president’s frustration and widening the gap between top members of the party who are going to whatever lengths possible to try and keep the president in the White House, and those who think such efforts do more harm than good.
As the president has fumed, other Republicans have been fretting about the party’s prospects in Georgia. Turnout is already high and Republican and Democratic operatives in the state expect a razor-thin margin of victory.
Biden won the state in November, ending years of Republican dominance in major elections. That victory has fueled hopes among Democrats that they can win both Senate races and thus control the Senate. Pessimism is high among Republicans, who fear party disunity will only help Democrats.
Whatever the outcome in Georgia, Trump’s desperate efforts have divided Republicans in Congress.
About a dozen senators and a significant number of House Republicans are planning to fight certification of Biden’s victory this week in Congress. That effort is expected to fail. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate majority leader, Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the chair of the House Republican Conference, Senator John Thune of South Dakota and others have argued that that push is doomed and will cause lasting damage.
“This is directly at odds with the constitution’s clear text and our core beliefs as Republicans,” Cheney wrote in a 20-page memo laying out her opposition to the anti-certification move.
Trump has lashed out at such Republicans speaking out against the effort to save him. He has gone so far as to call for Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota to run a primary campaign against Thune, the second-highest-ranking Senate Republican, in 2022.
Notably, two of the senators leading the charge are prospective 2024 presidential candidates: Ted Cruz of Texas and Josh Hawley of Missouri.
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Cruz is known for bucking Republican leadership. The advantage for these two senators in fighting the certification is that it could engineer goodwill among the pro-Trump base of the party. That could be highly valuable as they try to move the party on from Trump without appearing to oppose him or the possibility that he might run again himself.
“These senators that have joined this Cruz effort are clearly motivated by a mix of 2024 ambitions and 2022 primary concerns, neither of which is going to slow down the Democrats’ agenda for a second,” Conant said.
Matt Gorman, another Republican strategist, stressed that Trump and the GOP would be better served by focusing only on winning the Senate races in Georgia.
“What is crucial to Georgia is Republican turnout in the ruby red parts of the state,” Gorman said. “Therefore you need President Trump to be invested in this. That’s where he’s going. He needs to convince that base that regardless of how you feel about his election, this election is important and you need to go vote. That is bar none crucial.”
Trump was due to address a rally in Dalton, Georgia on Monday night.
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