It was an annual confab of the Washington media and their guests from rarefied realms of business and politics, the kind of party where an anti-Trump Republican could feel at home. But New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, the Republican who made headlines at this dinner two years earlier by calling Donald Trump “f---ing crazy,” was no longer feeling so punchy.
“I’m going to vote for the guy,” he said, standing outside the after-party for the white-tie Gridiron dinner in March, sometime after the clock struck midnight.
It’s happening.
Sununu spent months talking about how Trump should not be his party’s nominee for president. Last summer he wrote that he himself would not be running for president because “beating Trump is more important.” In January, when he was stumping for Nikki Haley, he said that Trump “can barely keep a cogent thought” without a teleprompter. At an event in February, he explained his belief that Trump wouldn’t be the party’s standard-bearer forever by saying that “a--holes come and go.”
As he said all this, he added a caveat: He would support the eventual GOP nominee, even if it was Trump.
Now, at the Gridiron, Sununu was accepting the inevitable, because it’s happening.
“My focus isn’t about Trump. Trump’s gonna live or die on his own. No one can help him, no one can hurt him. He’s his own entity,” he said. Sununu, for his part, would like to see that entity in the White House.
A sight to behold: the slow parade of Trump-averse Republicans as they trudge toward supporting the nominee.
‘Better than Biden’
“It should come as no surprise that, as nominee, he will have my support,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who has given Trump the cold shoulder for three years, during which the former president has taunted his wife (former Trump Cabinet member Elaine Chao) with the racist nickname “Coco Chow” and said McConnell has a “DEATH WISH” for dealing with Democrats to avert a government shutdown.
“He’d be better than Joe Biden,” Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, whom Trump called a “fool” and a “clown” as the former president challenged his 2020 loss in Georgia, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution last month. When we asked this week whether Kemp would be voting for Trump in November, his spokesman referred us to Kemp’s “multiple previous statements that he supports the Republican nominee.”
“Voting for Biden is outright national suicide,” former Trump attorney general William P. Barr reportedly said in February. He has called Trump a “consummate narcissist” and likened him to “a defiant 9-year-old kid who’s always pushing the glass toward the edge of the table. Nevertheless, he told Fox News on Wednesday that he would “vote the Republican ticket.”
At the individual level, dusting off the old MAGA hat is a choice, not an inevitability. Former Vice President Mike Pence, the other half of Trump’s previous ticket, has said he will not endorse him. Former Trump adviser John Bolton has said he will be writing in Dick Cheney, of all people.
Other former members of the Trump administration, having seen firsthand what he did last time, are encouraging fellow conservatives to vote against him. Mark T. Esper, a Republican who served as defense secretary under Trump, said last month that he “definitely” won’t vote for Trump (even if he’s “not there yet” on voting for Biden).
‘Never say never’
But while lots of Republicans might not prefer Trump as their candidate at this point, those who are declaring their intention to support the nominee have come to frame the stakes as existential.
“Look, Donald Trump has engaged in activity that does animate some white supremacists, and that’s unfortunate,” said Eric Levine, a GOP fundraiser. “But I think, writ large, if you look at the policies he’s implemented, I don’t see how he’s altered his policies in a way that has impacted American Jews — erased us in a way that Joe Biden is currently doing.”
Levine had been torn about what to do after his preferred Republican alternatives to Trump fell away. Jan. 6, 2021, had been a breaking point. He thought about not voting for president. Or writing someone in, as he’d done in 2016.
Then, on March 25, the United States abstained from vetoing a United Nations Security Council resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza. Three days later, Levine was at his keyboard typing an email to 1,600 of his contacts.
Subject line: “NEVER SAY NEVER; WHY I WILL VOTE FOR DONALD TRUMP.”
“I remain concerned about Trump’s relationship with the truth,” Levine wrote in the email. “I continue to cringe every time he tells the lie about a stolen election. The thought that he did nothing while rioters ran through the Capitol chanting ‘hang Mike Pence’ still haunts me.”
And yet …
“... The question becomes: as between the two, who will leave a better, safer, and more prosperous America for my grandchildren? Hands down, the answer is Trump.”
‘Not a surprise’
In an interview, Levine cited a laundry list of Biden’s shortcomings, beyond the U.N. vote, to justify his support of Trump: the “catastrophic” withdrawal from Afghanistan, “the open border,” “failed Bidenomics,” and a “social justice agenda” that’s “particularly damaging to America’s Jews.”
And he was upset about how the Biden administration had been trying to use its influence to undermine Israel’s military offensive in Gaza. Biden lately has cautioned that a military assault on the city of Rafah would be a “mistake” and has advocated for a freer flow of humanitarian aid to Gaza.
“When the Allies were firebombing Dresden, did anyone say let’s stop and feed the civilians?” Levine said. “When the United States dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, did we say let’s stop and feed the civilians? When we were marching our way to Berlin to defeat the Nazis, did we say we have to feed the civilians, let’s stop and negotiate with Hitler?”
(The aftermath of World War II did prompt a lot of moral soul-searching, leading to the Geneva Conventions of 1949.)
As for his uneasiness about Jan. 6, Levine said he hasn’t really seen Trump make any changes that could quell his reservations. But he believes that “we have institutions in the United States that prevent certain things from happening.”
Still, is it really a surprise that Republicans are finding a way home to Trump?
“In some ways no, because it’s clear they think that there’s a chance he’s going to win,” said George Conway, the conservative lawyer and Trump critic, sipping on whiskey before an event at the National Press Club. “Or even if he doesn’t win, they want to preserve their political credibility.”
“Six months ago, you could have said, ‘Well, Ron DeSantis is an acceptable alternative to me, and there really is a future where he could be the candidate,’” said Nicole Hemmer, a political historian and author of two books on conservative movements. “And once it became clear that there just is no Republican Party that is not led by Donald Trump, I think that forced the decision-making that you’re seeing now.”
“It’s not a surprise that Sununu and damn near all but donors, and most every Republican elected official, is eventually gonna come home and support him this year, just like they have previously,” said Joe Walsh, the former tea party congressman who became a Trump apostate and ran against him in 2020. “Because you don’t want to kill your career and kill yourself and you want a seat at the table. So it makes all the sense in the world.”
‘A whole package’
Sununu has stood by his criticisms of Trump, and he assures us that he’s not thinking about his seat at the table.
“My career’s over. I’m leaving,” said the governor, who plans to enter the private sector after his current term ends. “I’m not running again. My political career — I have no political career.”
But as a Republican, who likes Republican policies and dislikes Democratic ones, what he really wants is Republicans occupying the seats at the top of administrative agencies — the Environmental Protection Agency, the Treasury, the Justice Department. If a Republican-led executive branch means putting Trump back in the Oval Office, well …
“You might vote for Trump,” he said in March, after the Gridiron dinner, “but that means you’re getting a whole package. Congress does very little, even the president ends up doing very little, but the agencies themselves have a huge impact on the lives, very quietly, when it comes to the rules and policies that they implement without congressional approval.”
Liz Cheney blames the general Republican drift back to Trump on Kevin McCarthy, the former GOP leader who visited Trump’s home in Palm Beach for lunch and posed for a photo with him a few weeks after the Jan. 6 insurrection.
“What we saw happen was this notion that Republican elected officials excused the behavior, enabled the behavior” of Trump, said Cheney, the former Wyoming congresswoman who was essentially booted from Congress by fellow Republicans for criticizing Trump too much, at a talk in Iowa last month. “And by doing that it created a situation where I think voters thought, ‘Well, it must not be that he’s that dangerous, because if he were, then you would have more people saying so.’”
But this all really may have started before Jan. 6, said Alyssa Farah Griffin, who worked in Trump’s White House and later turned on him.
“He was smart about consolidating power before he lost the election,” she said. “He was so entrenched in the RNC, he was so entrenched in the party committees and at the state level, that I think for politicians who care first and foremost about self-preservation, it made it pretty much impossible to walk away from him.”
“It used to be that Republicans fell in line with whoever the party chose,” Hemmer said. “And now the party is following the base, and falls in line with whoever the base has fallen in love with.”
If Sununu wasn’t in love before, he has fallen in line now. Ultimately, he doesn’t think his opinion matters that much to voters who are sick of Biden and are considering the Republican nominee.
“I’m not the story, man,” he said. “The story is the average voter, the average independent voter, that used to vote Democrat and is absolutely disgusted by Biden’s policies, right? They’re the real influencers, right? I’m just a politician.”
