Juan Williams: Cult of Trump has replaced Reagan’s three pillars of Republican Party

No matter how you mix them up, no Republican — in or out of the race — so far shows the power to beat former Donald Trump in the 2024 Republican primaries.

It is a stubborn fact. For the GOP’s biggest donors, it soon will be an embarrassing fact.

They are searching for a candidate to defeat him. But no such candidate is showing up, even as the search intensifies.

This prompted the former president to lambast top party donors last week as “all Globalists and Pro China Losers … bad for the USA — America Last!”

Trump ally and conservative podcaster Steve Bannon earlier attacked elite GOP donors — men such as Charles Koch, Paul Singer and Ken Griffin — for being against Trump: “Remember, money has no courage,” Bannon told his listeners. “These wealthy guys will just do what they got to do to continue to be wealthy.”

Bannon predicted that if Trump gets “hot” again, “they are going to back Trump.” But for now, he said, “they are absolutely 1,000 percent anti-Trump.”

Lord, help me, but I agree with Bannon on this point.

According to a Harvard CAPS/Harris poll last month, in a hypothetical eight-way primary, 48 percent of Republican voters said they would back Trump. His closest competitor was Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.), with only 28 percent support.

There was zero to slim support for former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, who formally entered the race last week. She is the only Republican running for the GOP nomination other than Trump.

Polls also show little support from Republican voters right now for other possible candidates, including former Vice President Mike Pence, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Govs. Chris Sununu (R-N.H.), Glenn Youngkin (R-Va.), Greg Abbott (R-Texas) and Brian Kemp (R-Ga.) or Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.).

Who among these well-known Republicans is most likely to become the anti-Trump hero of the party?

Later this month, Karl Rove, former top adviser to President George W. Bush, will convene GOP big-money donors looking for an answer to that question. They will be joined by most of the possible candidates listed above, as well as former Gov. Chris Christie (R-N.J.).

Meanwhile, conservative billionaire Charles Koch’s political network is engaged in a similar quest. Emily Seidel, the CEO of Koch’s Americans for Prosperity, wrote in a memo that the Koch network will support a candidate in the Republican primaries “who can lead our country forward, and who can win,” in an apparent criticism of Trump, who has led the party to losses in 2018, 2020 and 2022.

“Our country must move past the current political situation — we’ve got to turn the page on the past several years,” Seidel wrote.

Another entrant in the right-wing effort to stop Trump is the Club for Growth. The strongly Republican, corporate and low-tax group recently announced the lineup of politicians joining its March donor retreat. Trump is not on the list. The GOP “should be open to another candidate,” said David McIntosh, the head of the group.

Haley hit the same point in announcing her presidential bid last week, declaring: “We won’t win the fight for the 21st century if we keep trusting politicians from the 20th century.”

“We’re ready to move past the stale ideas and faded names of the past, and we are more than ready for a new generation to lead us into the future,” Haley said, calling for “mandatory mental competency tests for politicians over 75 years old.”

Trump is 76.

Trump, of course, is not standing by silently. He has been fuming against former allies he now perceives as “disloyal” and “ungrateful.”

Earlier this month, Trump disparaged DeSantis by re-posting a picture on social media of the governor with young women. Text on the photo read: “Here is Ron DeSanctimonious grooming high school girls with alcohol as a teacher,” followed by a vomit emoji. Trump’s comment on the re-post: “That’s not Ron, is it? He would never do such a thing!”

This prompted Turning Point USA head Charlie Kirk, once a Trump supporter, to come to DeSantis’s defense, which an unnamed Trump adviser told NBC News had upset Trump: “He’s like, ‘You call him, and you tell him he’d be nothing without [Trump].’ ”

Kirk’s effort to create a bridge between past support for Trump and current efforts to move away from him is emblematic of the problem facing a lot of loyal Republicans. They want a new face for the party, but voters are still enthralled by populist support for Trump. Any other candidate, no matter how strong, is immediately viewed as a villain by many Trump supporters.

It is early in the ’24 presidential cycle. No debates have been held; Trump remains at risk from several legal investigations. But it also is true that time is passing quickly for candidates who are not named Trump. And time is passing quickly to define the current Republican Party as anything beyond Trump supporters.

During the 1980 presidential campaign, then-candidate Ronald Reagan described the GOP as a three-part coalition consisting of social conservatives, defense conservatives, and fiscal conservatives. Without any one of those three legs, he said, the party would fall, ceasing to be electorally competitive.

By Reagan’s definition, that GOP is gone. All that remains is the cult of Trump.

Juan Williams is an author and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.