Trump seeks to solidify hold on GOP with primary wins

By Michael Hernandez

WASHINGTON (AA) – Former US President Donald Trump has made no qualms about his desire to unseat all Republicans who have stood against him and solidify his place at the party’s helm.

For congresswoman Liz Cheney, Trump’s efforts came to fruition this week.

Cheney is a long-outspoken critic of the former president and his efforts to overturn his 2020 electoral defeat. She along with nine other Republicans in the House of Representatives voted to impeach Trump for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol in what marked a major show of defiance against the former president.

With Cheney’s primary defeat to Trump-backed Republican candidate Harriet Hageman on Tuesday, only two of the 10 lawmakers have survived the 2022 election cycle. In all, four lawmakers who voted for Trump’s removal from office chose not to seek re-election while four others were met with primary defeats ahead of November’s general elections.

Like Cheney, congressman Peter Meijer was defeated by a Trump-backed candidate who parrots Trump’s claims of election malfeasance, as were lawmakers Jaime Herrera Beutler and Tom Rice.

In Meijer’s case, Democrats worked to bolster Trump-backed opponent John Gibbs in the hopes of securing an easier contest come November. Democrats are hoping to maintain their hold on the House, and it is unclear if the effort will prove short-sighted.

Dan Newhouse and David Valadao, the two other Republicans who voted for impeachment, won their primary contests. While Trump endorsed Newhouse’s challenger, he did not endorse a candidate in the California race won by Valadao.

In the Senate, only one of the seven Republicans who voted to convict Trump on impeachment charges, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, is facing a 2022 election. Murkowski advanced from her primary on Tuesday four points ahead of Trump-backed Republican candidate Kelly Tshibaka.

The two will face off in November alongside two other candidates that have yet to be determined.

Even as Trump’s defeat of Cheney signals what many believe to be his most significant victory yet, he and his allies have pursued a far more expansive campaign against his intraparty rivals with varying degrees of success.

The limits of Trump’s efforts have been most acute when looking at state and local officials that he has sought to remove from office, most notably Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

Trump publicly disparaged both officials for not heeding his calls to overturn his 2020 defeat in the southern battleground state and endorsed Republican rivals seeking to oust them.

In a major show of the limits of Trump’s sway within the party, Kemp and Raffensperger won their respective races with comfortable margins.

Raffensperger is Georgia’s top elections official and testified before the House panel investigating the Jan. 6 riots in June, one month after he won his election, telling the panel that Trump pressured him to overturn the election results in an over hour-long telephone call and asked him to “find 11,780 votes” for him.

“What I knew is that we didn't have any votes to find," Raffensperger testified. "That was an accurate count that had been certified."​​​​​​​