Last year, David McCormick, former head of the Bridgewater hedge fund, flew to meet former US president Donald Trump at his Florida base. McCormick was bidding to be the Republican candidate for a vacant Senate seat in Pennsylvania and it seemed like Trump was going to back him, not least because McCormick held a lead over the other prospective Republican candidate, the celebrity TV doctor, Mehmet Oz.
When he arrived at Mar-a-Lago, however, Trump apparently played a TV interview that McCormick had given about the January 6 2021 insurrection in Washington. In the clip McCormick had carefully avoided defending what Trump had done to inflame the crowd that day. After the video ended, Trump told McCormick, “You know you can’t win unless you say the election was stolen,” according to a scene in McCormick’s new book, Superpower in Peril. McCormick said he couldn’t do that. Trump backed Oz, who pipped McCormick by a mere 951 votes after a recount.
If Trump had been in McCormick’s situation, doubtless he would have contested the result. But McCormick conceded. “It was vital for me to lead by losing with honour and grace and not fall prey to the politics of grievance and victimhood,” he said. Oz went on to lose the Senate race to the Democrats.
For Trump, agreeing with the lie that the 2020 election was “stolen” has become a litmus test for entry into his political tribe — and the way to win his endorsement. This week has seen the indictment of Trump in Manhattan for his role in allegedly paying hush money to a porn star, and protests from his aggrieved supporters. According to a Yahoo News-YouGov poll taken after the indictment was announced, Trump now has the backing of 52 per cent of Republicans in the presidential candidacy race. His nearest rival, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, attracted just 21 per cent.
The McCormick episode shows the problems that centrist conservatives face when confronted with the Trump bandwagon. On paper, McCormick has the credentials for a Senate run: he trained at an elite military academy, served in Iraq, worked in the Treasury department under Hank Paulson during the 2008 financial crisis and spent 13 years at Bridgewater. So he has experience of how to run things and staying calm under stress.
But this pedigree does not count with Trump, despite McCormick’s somewhat tortuous linguistic gymnastics during his campaign to avoid directly challenging the former president, while also telling the truth. Trump sees loyalty in black-and-white terms; and, with the judicial stakes rising, increasingly so.
As a result, very few mainstream Republicans are speaking out against Trump. “It’s shocking,” observes Frank Luntz, the Republican pollster. “In private they tell me they can’t wait for him to go, but in public they say nothing — they know he will crush them.” One sign of dissent is the scale of donations coming in for DeSantis — although he has notably avoided criticising Trump too, and has not yet confirmed whether he will actually run.
Another focus for resistance is a supposedly bipartisan group called No Labels, which is also gathering funds; donors tell me that if Trump does end up running against Biden, No Labels will jump in to fight Trump in all 50 states. “This could be the key vehicle — it’s about the only thing that has emerged so far,” one tells me. But it doesn’t take a genius to work out that, given the slenderness of Biden’s victory in 2020, No Labels could actually work to Trump’s advantage if its candidates successfully target centrists who might otherwise vote Democrat.
In the meantime, moderate Republicans are watching — and waiting. McCormick tells me he “is certainly considering” contesting the Senate seat in Pennsylvania in 2024, but is “not sure” yet if he will run. He’s still trying to avoid alienating Trump’s tribe. When asked this week if he supported the indictment, McCormick was unequivocal, calling it “a highly politicised attack on the former president that’s been made by a partisan district attorney”.
He remains focused on his key message — “Decline is not inevitable but neither is renewal” — and a group of sensible, if unremarkable, policy ideas: he’s in favour of more investment in education and tech, controls on “unbridled free trade”, and a tough stance against China. But whether he tosses his hat into the ring or not will depend on Trump; if the former president tops the ticket, I suspect that McCormick, and other Republicans from the more traditional wing of the party, will simply duck out. That would be a depressing signal of the Republican mood and an ominous sign that another polarising US election year is on the cards.
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