According to rather interesting reporting from the New York Times, it’s beginning to look as though several Trump loyalist Republican candidates may be gearing up to abandon the former guy, who’s becoming more and more embroiled in scandal with each passing moment at this point, as they reportedly attempt to scrub their entire campaigns — both in person and online — of any trace of the conspiracy theories surrounding the 2020 presidential election that Trump has been peddling for nearly two years.
“Blake Masters in Arizona, Tiffany Smiley in Washington State and Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania have all made pivots — some artfully, some not — as the ardent, Trump-loyal voters who decided the Republican primaries shrink in the rearview mirror, and a more cautious, broader November electorate comes into view,” Jonathan Weisman with the New York Times reports. “These three Senate candidates haven’t quite renounced their questioning of the 2020 election — to right-wing audiences of podcasts, radio shows, and Fox News, they still signal their skepticism — but they have shifted their appeals to the swing voters they need to win on Nov. 8.”
The report zeros in on Blake Masters, who’s infamous for writing all the code for his own website, notably deleting a specific line from his website that read, “If we had had a free and fair election, President Trump would be sitting in the Oval Office today.” Tiffany Smiley pointedly scrubbed a section on her website that once said, “The 2020 elections raised serious questions about the integrity of our elections.” Even the notorious Dr. Mehemet Oz, who once publicly declared that we “cannot move on” from the 2020 election, recently told reporters that he “would not have objected to” certifying the electors if he has been in the US Senate at the time.
But even those weren’t the most dramatic 180s we’ve seen in recent weeks. That came from retired brigadier general Don Bolduc, who’s now running for a Senate seat in New Hampshire.
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Just ahead of the primary this month, Bolduc said, “I signed a letter with 120 other generals and admirals saying that Trump won the election, and, damn it, I stand by my letter.” However, as soon as Bolduc secured the nomination he made an appearance on Fox News where he made a dramatic about-face, saying, “I’ve done a lot of research on this and I’ve spent the past couple weeks talking to Granite Staters all over the state from every party, and I have come to the conclusion — and I want to be definitive on this — the election was not stolen.”
As if the diversion away from Donald Trump’s Big Lie wasn’t bad enough for the former guy, numerous other Republican Senate candidates are pulling back hard from their authoritarian, no exception anti-abortion positions that’s been more than a little unpopular among Americans, including their own Right-leaning constituents after the Supreme Court dissolved Roe V. Wade and cleared the way for ultra Right-wing lawmakers to pass total, no-exemption bans against abortion procedures in their individual states. Masters also notably deleted references to his support for “a federal personhood law” from his website, which would serve as a nationwide abortion ban. His website now claims that he only supports a limit on “very late-term abortions,” of course, without going into any sort of detail to define what he actually means by that.
While no one has thus far out and out said that they’re done with Donald Trump, it does certainly seem as though they’re pulling away from his “principles” in a desperate attempt to hopefully save their own campaigns as Donald Trump’s power goes to the wayside.
Read the full report from the New York Times here.
Featured image via Flickr/The White House
