Former President Trump is stepping up his war with Senate Republicans by calling for primary challenges next year against GOP incumbents who do not support investigating President Biden’s family finances.
Many Senate Republicans have made clear they don’t want Trump to win their party’s nomination for president, and they’re leery about rallying to his defense given the former president’s polarizing effect on moderate Republican and swing voters.
Senate GOP aides and strategists argue they can’t do much regarding the Biden family’s business dealings because they don’t have the power to issue subpoenas as the Senate’s minority party.
But GOP senators aren’t giving Trump much rhetorical support either — in sharp contrast from prominent House Republicans such as Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).
Ron Bonjean, a GOP strategist and former Senate leadership aide, said the Trump call will appear to a number of Senate Republicans like a way for Trump to distract people from the investigations into his own activities.
But he suggested it isn’t likely to work.
“A good number of Senate Republicans take a more measured approach usually. They don’t knee-jerk to pressure,” Bonjean said.
Trump appears to be losing patience with Republican lawmakers on the fence about impeaching Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland, as the federal and state felony charges pile up against him along with his mounting legal bills.
Trump mocked GOP senators and House members who say they have “other priorities” and would prefer to leave the investigations of Hunter Biden and the Biden family’s business dealings to the House committees.
“They sit back and they say, ‘We have other priorities, we have to look at other things.’ Any Republican that doesn’t act on Democrat fraud should be immediately primaried. Get out. Out,” he declared at a Saturday rally in Erie, Pa.
The comments came a few days after Trump hit Senate Republicans for not taking a more aggressive approach to Biden’s personal finances.
“With all of these horrible revelations and facts, why hasn’t Republican ‘leadership’ in the Senate spoken up and rebuked Crooked Joe Biden and the Radical Left Democrats, Fascists, and Marxists for their criminal acts against our Country, some of them against me,” he demanded in a post on Truth Social.
Cool to launching impeachment proceedings
Republican senators are cool to the idea of launching impeachment proceedings against Biden in the House and generally have kept their distance from House GOP threats to cut funding to the Department of Justice and FBI in response to more than 30 felony counts prosecutors have brought against Trump.
Asked last week whether he saw any merit to an impeachment inquiry into Biden, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said impeachment “ought to be rare rather than common.”
“I’m not surprised that having been treated the way they were, House Republicans last Congress, [they] begin open up the possibility of doing it again,” he said, referring to the two impeachments of then-President Trump by a Democratic-controlled House.
“And I think this is not good for the country to have repeated impeachment problems,” McConnell warned.
It was hardly a ringing endorsement of the House Republican-led investigations into the Biden family and the Department of Justice’s handling of criminal allegations against Hunter Biden.
Bonjean said “in any impeachment, there would be a trial in the Senate,” which is another reason why Republican senators want to preserve an appearance of impartiality and not rush to judgement about allegations of corruption against the sitting president.
Republicans up for reelection next year include Sen. Mitt Romney (Utah), an outspoken Trump critic, as well as Republicans who have largely stayed quiet about the president, including Sens. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), Pete Ricketts (R-Neb.) and Deb Fischer (R-Neb.).
None of these incumbents appear vulnerable, but GOP strategists warn that Trump’s support could result in several of them facing credible primary challenges.
“They could. Some Senate Republicans could face primary pressure over the next year, but they have a lot of time to position themselves on the matter and see how things unfold,” Bonjean said.
Trump tried to drum up opposition in the last election cycle to Senate Republican Whip John Thune (S.D.) and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska).
He was more successful in stirring up support for Murkowski’s Republican challenger, Kelly Tshibaka, but his efforts to recruit a primary challenge to Thune in South Dakota quickly fizzled.
Senate Republicans believe they have a good chance to win back the Senate majority in 2024 because Democrats will have to defend 23 seats, while they only have to protect 11 GOP-held seats.
A tough spot
Ross Baker, a professor of political science at Rutgers University who served several fellowships in the Senate, said Trump’s calls for Republicans to embrace the partisan investigations of Biden’s family puts Republicans facing competitive general-election races next year in a tough spot.
“These are people who given the political physics of their congressional districts have to play a very exquisite balancing act. The idea that they move to impeach Biden does not play well in those districts,” he said of Republican lawmakers in competitive House districts.
Baker warned that some Senate Republicans could be in “jeopardy” in primaries next year if Trump decides to launch a full-scale assault against incumbents he views as reluctant allies.
“Think of people like Roger Wicker, who is someone who is seen as a pretty solid guy who votes the right way but is not an extremist,” Baker said, identifying a senator who might have to watch his right flank. “There are constituencies that will respond to any demand that Trump puts out who will say, ‘I can’t support [a senator] unless he gets on the impeachment bandwagon.’
“But I don’t think any Republican who is up for reelection wants to have to do that,” he said.
Baker said that Senate Republicans up for reelection don’t want to alienate the sizable share of the Republican electorate — which he estimates at about 25 percent of Republican voters — who don’t support Trump and don’t like the idea of GOP candidates embracing his scorched-earth tactics.
One Senate Republican aide defended the Senate GOP leadership from Trump’s broadsides by pointing out that Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), a member of McConnell’s leadership team, played a key role in publicizing an FBI 1023 form that makes reference to unsubstantiated allegations that Biden was involved in a foreign bribery scheme.
“We’re not in the majority, and we don’t have subpoena power. You see Chuck Grassley and [Sen. Ron] Johnson [R-Wis.] pulling the levers on oversight and whistleblowers,” the aide said.
The form, which FBI investigators use to catalogue raw, unverified claims by informants, received little attention from other Republican senators.
A second Senate Republican strategist who requested anonymity argued that Grassley has made important contributions to the House investigations of Biden’s, even if Senate Republican leaders have generally kept their distance.
“I can’t imagine any House Republican would say that the stuff that Grassley has uncovered in his ongoing efforts is less important than what they’re doing. But I think it’s really a matter of, House Republicans are in the majority and have subpoena power and can do a lot more that Republicans in the Senate can,” the aide said.
Updated at 7:23 a.m. ET.