Republican rifts over Donald Trump keeps getting wider

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Nearly three-quarters of the American public believes the United States is going in the wrong direction. More than half of Americans disapprove of the job the Democratic President, Joe Biden, is doing. In nearly two dozen states, the Republicans control both houses of the legislature as well as the governor’s chair. This should be a heady time for the party.

Except.

Except that investigators examining former president Donald Trump for illegal possession of classified government documents have indicted him, the third time in two months that he has faced serious legal charges. Except that the Republicans are embroiled in a bitter civil war in Washington that has left the House of Representatives in paralysis. Except that the chorus of voices urging the party to move away from its front-runner for the 2024 nomination in the presidential race is growing even as his base of supporters remains loyal.

Parties’ fortunes rise and fall with tides in public opinion. Mr. Trump’s fortunes rise and fall with the decisions of various courts, sometimes in baffling ways that leave him stronger when his legal position is weaker. House Republicans took 15 ballots to settle on Kevin McCarthy of California as the Speaker, and, only a week ago, he was being celebrated in Washington as something of a legislative magus for his work in helping to resolve the debt-ceiling crisis – the very achievement that is putting his speakership in peril while Republican rebels call him a traitor to their cause.

But seldom do the ripples in politicians’ fortunes converge the way they have this week in American politics.

The Republicans still have about an even chance of taking the White House next year and a slightly better chance of seizing the Senate from the Democrats – unless Mr. Trump is denied the nomination and decides to seek another term (and vengeance) by running as a third-party candidate. But the fissures that became evident this week should worry Republicans, and they underline the need for the party to decide, eight years after Mr. Trump’s 2015 emergence as a serious political force, its direction, its priorities, its profile and its character.

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“Usually it is easier for the party out of power like the Republicans to achieve some measure of unity and put forward to the public a cohesive face and agenda,” said Matthew Dallek, a George Washington University historian. “That’s because it has less responsibility for governing. But this chaos and the acid flowing through the party is in part Trump-driven and in part driven by legitimate ideological and stylistic rifts.”

For three consecutive days, Mr. Trump was pummeled inside his own party – body blows that reflected the very ideological and stylistic rifts that have divided the Republicans.

It was a prominent Republican governor, Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, the site of the first primary of the 2024 political season, who said in a Washington Post op-ed Monday that “our party is on a collision course toward electoral irrelevance without significant corrective action.”

In case no one got the point, he followed that up with an unmistakable reference to Mr. Trump in the next sentence, saying, “The stakes are too high for a crowded field to hand the nomination to a candidate who earns just 35 per cent of the vote, and I will help ensure this does not happen.”

The next day, former governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, who once wanted to be Mr. Trump’s vice-president and then hoped to be his attorney-general, chimed in by describing the former president as “a lonely, self-consumed, self-serving mirror hog” who is “not a leader.”

And on Wednesday, former vice-president Mike Pence, whose criticism of Mr. Trump has been muted heretofore – and has spoken with deliberate caution about Mr. Trump’s pressure on him to overturn the 2020 election – changed both tune and timbre, saying that Mr. Trump “demanded I choose between him and our Constitution. Now voters will be faced with the same choice.”

Mr. Pence said: “Anyone who puts themselves over the Constitution should never be president of the United States, and anyone who asks someone else to put them over the Constitution should never be president of the United States again.”

That is tough rhetoric about the man with the toughest rhetoric in presidential history.

Caveat: The combined support for Mr. Christie and Mr. Pence in Iowa, site of the first caucuses of the campaign, is 6 percentage points — far less than the 39 points registered in the National Research poll taken between Monday and Wednesday.

The model for Mr. Christie and Mr. Pence – as for the seven other prominent GOP candidates hoping to topple Mr. Trump – is to emerge as a strong challenger to him in Iowa or New Hampshire. Once wounded, Mr. Trump can be felled. But if he survives those two early tests and moves, after March 15, 2024, into a series of states with “winner-take-all” primary rules, he could coast to the nomination. The party’s divisions may persist, but so could Mr. Trump.