Just a few months ago, the Republican presidential primary seemed as if it might include a frank and vigorous debate about the leadership and limitations of Donald Trump.
But any appetite for criticism of Trump among Republicans has nearly evaporated in a very short time. Voters rallied around him after his criminal indictment in March on charges related to hush money for a porn star, and potential rivals have faltered, with few willing to take direct aim at the former president and front-runner for the nomination.
In a live town hall on CNN on Wednesday, the cheers for every falsehood and insult that Trump uttered under tough questioning by a moderator showed there was little to no daylight between Trump and the Republican base. A quirky effort to disrupt the love-in by Chris Christie — a potential rival who bought Facebook ads to supply audience members with skeptical questions such as “Why are you afraid of debating?” — went nowhere.
In surveys and focus groups, a fair share of Republican voters say they would prefer a less polarizing, more electable nominee. But a near taboo against criticizing Trump has made it hard for rivals — apart from Christie and one or two others near the bottom of polls — to stand out.
In what looks like a rerun of the 2016 Republican primary, almost none of Trump’s competitors have openly gone after him, despite his glaring vulnerabilities. Instead, they are hoping — now as then — that he will somehow self-destruct, leaving them to inherit his voters.
After a jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation of writer E. Jean Carroll on Tuesday, former vice president Mike Pence, who is weighing a 2024 campaign, declined to criticize Trump. In an interview with NBC News, Pence said it was “just one more story focusing on my former running mate that I know is a great fascination to members of the national media, but I just don’t think it’s where the American people are focused.”
Other 2024 candidates either defended Trump, such as entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, or played down the verdict, including former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley. Haley, who announced her candidacy in February, even defended Trump this week for threatening to skip Republican primary debates. “With the numbers he has now, why would he go get on a debate stage and risk that?” she said.
Only two 2024 hopefuls found the verdict in the Carroll case to be disqualifying for a would-be president: Christie and Asa Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas. Hutchinson criticized Trump’s “contempt for the rule of law.”
Several months ago, polling had suggested Trump could be a potentially weak candidate, with only 25 percent to 35 percent support from Republican voters in high-quality surveys. The Republican National Committee promised an autopsy of the 2022 midterms that was expected to address Trump’s role in the party’s surprising losses.
But today, the lane in the Republican primary for a candidate who is openly critical of Trump seems to be closing.
Hutchinson’s long-shot campaign has failed to gain notice. Christie, a former governor of New Jersey who has promised a decision this month on whether he will run, also has yet to generate much interest. Even the occasionally critical Pence, who mildly suggested Trump would be “accountable” to history for the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, is struggling for affirmation from the Republican base.
And the RNC autopsy of the midterms? A draft reportedly did not mention Trump at all.
David Kochel, a Republican strategist who advised Jeb Bush when he ran against Trump in 2016, said there was no opportunity for a candidate openly critical of Trump in the 2024 primary.
“Voters have seen Trump as the most attacked president of their lifetimes, and they have an allergic reaction to one of their own doing it,” Kochel said. “He’s built up these incredible antibodies, in part stemming from how the base perceives he has been treated.”
A CBS News poll released this month found that among likely Republican primary voters, only an insignificant handful — 7 percent — wanted a candidate who “criticizes Trump.”
Trump is insulated from criticism, strategists said, because of the intense and dug-in partisanship of the Republican base, and because many of those voters get information only from right-wing sources, which have minimized the Jan. 6 attack and obscured Trump’s 2020 loss.
“They barely have access to the truth,” said Sarah Longwell, an anti-Trump Republican strategist. Longwell, who hosts a podcast about Republican voters called “The Focus Group,” said a sizable share of primary voters wanted to move on from Trump.
But according to polling, a majority of Republican voters don’t believe Trump really lost in 2020. “Every politician on their team, everyone they know and all the media they consume — all tells them that the election was stolen,” Longwell said.
Christie, the most sharply critical 2024 hopeful of Trump, recently attacked the former president, calling him “a child” for denying the 2020 election results and cowardly for suggesting he might duck Republican debates.
But when Christie tested the electoral waters during visits to New Hampshire the past two months, including at the same college where Trump’s town hall took place Wednesday, his crowds seemed tilted toward independents and even Democrats, including those who knew him as the house conservative on ABC News.