It seems a good portion of the Republican party has grown completely exhausted with Donald Trump and is more than ready to move forward with the ex-president sitting pathetically in their rearview mirror. A recent column penned by Eleanor Clift with the Daily Beast notes that evidence is growing pointing to a GOP that wants away from the scandal-ridden ex-president, citing one well-known conservative pollster who apparently admitted that, behind closed doors, a whole lot of Republicans definitely don’t hold Donald Trump in high regards.
Clift tells of an incident at the annual Gridiron dinner just a little over a week ago, when Republican New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu took aim at the washed-up, one-term, twice-impeached former president among his fellow attendees.
“He’s f*cking crazy!” Sununu allegedly said during the dinner. “The press often will ask me if I think Donald Trump is crazy. And I’ll say it this way: I don’t think he’s so crazy that you could put him in a mental institution. But I think if he were in one, he ain’t getting out.”
“Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland said he hadn’t heard a Republican drop that many f-bombs since the Nixon administration. He also praised Sununu as the vanguard of a new GOP that dares to speak the truth, then assailed him for taking credit for federal spending in his state passed by Democrats while simultaneously denouncing Washington politicians for their free spending,” the Beast report reads. “The crowd of media and political professionals, as evidenced by their enthusiastic response, seemed to sense that something significant had shifted with this fresh face grabbing the spotlight and saying the emperor has no clothes.”
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Frank Luntz, a GOP pollster who has served as a close advisor to Republicans for literal decades said that Sununu was only saying out loud what so many members of the party have been thinking to amongst themselves for some time now.
“I don’t know a single Republican who was surprised by what Sununu said. He said what they were thinking,” Luntz said. “They won’t say it [in public], but behind his back, they think he’s a child. They’re laughing at him. That’s what made it [Sununu’s comments] significant.”
“Trump isn’t the same man he was a year ago,” the GOP pollster and longtime advisor went on to add. “Even many Republicans are tired of going back and rehashing the 2020 election. Everybody else has moved on and in Washington everyone believes he lost the election.”
Following Luntz’s assessment, Clift noted that when it comes to Republicans, their attitudes with regard to #45 seem to change like the weather depending on the current political environment.
“Republicans may be laughing at Trump behind his back, as Luntz indicated, but making fun of the former president could backfire. When President Barack Obama ridiculed Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011, the putdown was so stinging that some believe it prompted the real-estate tycoon’s 2016 bid for the presidency.”
“This time around, we will learn when the votes are counted in the nearly 130 races where Trump has endorsed a candidate, testing his strength in the Republican Party to pick governors and senators and even state legislators—and testing the theories of those who say his best days are behind him, and the fortitude of those who mock him,” she writes.
It certainly seems to me, as we reported on the dismal size of Trump’s most recent “Save America” rally, that even Trump’s own people are fed up with Trump. His 15-minutes of fame are long gone and over and his own party is ready to move on. Without him.
Featured image via Political Tribune Gallery
