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Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Donald Trump recalibrates his standing in GOP after primary setbacks
Donald Trump has long been the dominant force in Republican politics, but as he has faced a spate of setbacks in recent weeks — punctuated last week by the defeat of his favored gubernatorial candidate in Georgia — the former president has been privately fretting about who might challenge him.
Mr. Trump has been quizzing advisers and visitors at his Mar-a-Lago resort in South Florida about his budding rivals for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, including his former vice president, Mike Pence, and Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Among his questions, according to several advisers, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations: Who will actually run against him? What do the polls show? Who are his potential foes meeting with?
He also had revived conversations about announcing a presidential exploratory committee to try to dissuade challengers, they say, even as some party officials and advisers continue to urge him to wait until after the midterm elections to announce that he’s running.
Mr. Trump’s deliberations follow prominent defeats this month for chosen candidates in Idaho, Nebraska, North Carolina and now Georgia, where former senator David Perdue was defeated Tuesday by Mr. Trump’s arch-nemesis, Gov. Brian Kemp, who refused his entreaties to overturn the election he lost in the state in 2020. The defeats were driven by rival Republican power centers amid a growing sense that Mr. Trump may not hold the dominant sway he once had over the party.
Throughout Georgia, Republican voters said they simply dismissed Mr. Trump’s sharp criticisms of Mr. Kemp and overwhelmingly elected the incumbent governor, delivering a remarkable repudiation of the former president by giving Mr. Kemp a victory of about 50 percentage points.
In his victory speech, Mr. Kemp did not mention Mr. Trump and barely mentioned Mr. Perdue. “Even in the middle of a tough primary, conservatives across our state didn’t listen to the noise. They didn’t get distracted,” he said. “Georgia Republicans went to the ballot box and overwhelmingly endorsed four more years of our vision for this great state.”
That Mr. Trump spent more than $2.5 million on behalf of Mr. Perdue, held a rally in Georgia and relentlessly attacked Mr. Kemp but was still defeated was the latest sign that his influence over the Republican Party, while considerable, has receded somewhat in recent months. In another defeat for Mr. Trump, Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state who resisted Mr. Trump’s calls to “find” votes in 2020, was far ahead of his opponent, Trump-backed Rep. Jody Hice.
The Republican Governors Association steered $5 million to defeat Mr. Perdue after backing victors against Trump picks in Nebraska and Idaho. The emerging field of 2024 rivals have grown increasingly bold in their willingness to campaign against his interests. And in the U.S. Senate, all but 11 Senate Republicans joined with Democrats on a recent military aid bill for Ukraine despite Mr. Trump’s criticism of the measure as a misplaced priority given the domestic baby formula shortage.
The former president has also found himself fighting in races in Ohio, Alabama and Pennsylvania against the Club for Growth, a deep-pocketed conservative group that once advised him. His candidate for Senate in Pennsylvania, Mehmet Oz, is locked in a tight race with Dave McCormick, which is headed for a recount after the May 17 primary there, and has ignored Mr. Trump’s repeated calls to declare victory before all ballots are counted. And Mr. Trump’s pick for governor in Pennsylvania, state Sen. Doug Mastriano, found his primary victory marred last week by a statement from the RGA suggesting that the group did not see him as a competitive candidate.
The shifts add up to the biggest challenge to Mr. Trump’s self-image — “The king of endorsements,” he recently boasted — since his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, riots at the U.S. Capitol thrust his party into temporary chaos. Few in the party still publicly oppose or criticize him while seeking elected office, but a growing group has been working overtime to show that he can be ignored and is not infallible.
But privately, his team increasingly expects Republican challengers — potentially including Mr. DeSantis, Mr. Pence, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, along with others — to come after him in 2024. Among his advisers biggest concerns though is that Mr. DeSantis, who has dominated chatter among Republican operatives and donors, takes Mr. Trump on.
“My guess is a lot of people run against him,” said Tony Fabrizio, his longtime pollster, if Mr. Trump announces he’s running. That view is now widely held in Republican circles.
“I think there is a very real and growing sense — albeit in hushed tones, private conversations, and rarely publicly but more publicly now than ever before — of people saying maybe not that he’s a paper tiger, but that his power is greatly diminished,” one person close to him said. “Privately, no one around Trump — and when I say no one, I mean no one, other than the handful of people who wouldn’t have any professional existence without him — wants him to run again.”
Another Republican operative who recently met with Mr. Trump said it is now clear that Mr. Trump will have to compete to win the 2024 GOP nomination.