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Michael Steele, the former chair of Republican National Committee (RNC), said in a recent interview that some members of the GOP are "privately wishing" that former President Donald Trump would be arrested by 2024 so the party can move on.
Trump has faced growing backlash from Republicans, including some who were seen as allies, after the failure of many of the high-profile GOP candidates he endorsed ahead of the 2022 midterm election in November. Polling also shows a shift among some Republican voters, with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis surpassing Trump as the frontrunner for the party's 2024 presidential nomination in multiple surveys.
"How much of a difference will it make in the 2024 presidential primary that the RNC has been shaped so much by Trump?" Steele was asked during an interview with Politico published on Sunday.
"It's going to make a huge difference. I've talked to some folks who are privately wishing and hoping that Trump is sitting in a holding cell somewhere by the time we get to '24, right? So that tells me the level of anxiety that people have inside the party about Trump being allowed to roam free over the political landscape over the next 18 months," Steele said.
"And I don't know how the party exorcises that demon, because if you want to heal yourself, you've got to want to get better, right? And if you're not willing to do the things that are required to make you get better, to help you get better, you're going to stay sick," the former RNC chair continued.
Despite Trump's election failures, he officially announced his 2024 presidential bid last month shortly after the midterm. But questions have been raised about whether the former president can maintain his a role as the GOP's leader, with conservative political expert and attorney Eric Owens recently saying that Republicans now have a potential motive for seeing him prosecuted and out of their way.
"I do think Trump believes he can avoid prosecution by running for president and causing delays," Owens said in November. "That's another Trump strategy: Delay and run out the clock. But many Republicans simply have a selfish and practical interest in seeing Trump prosecuted and convicted—for anything, really. They want him out of their way either for their ambition or because he is clearly dragging the party down with bad candidates."
Despite Trump's failed promises of securing "red wave" success in the midterms, there is still little indication that it's enough to loosen his grip on the GOP, Steele told Politico.
The ex-RNC chair pointed out that there is an 80 percent chance that Trump might be the GOP's 2024 nominee, emphasizing that ties to Trump remain firm.
"A party is not going to survive when it is fixated on the ramblings and musings of one person who, in the main, is not a Republican, is not a conservative, but has very effectively used both of those values to secure his political power," Steele, who has long criticized Trump and backed President Joe Biden in 2020, said.
"And there have been a lot of people inside the party willing to compromise those values in order for him to do that," he added.
A September poll by NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist showed that a majority of Republicans would still vote for Trump in the 2024 presidential election even if he was indicted. The former president is facing a number of criminal investigations, including a probe looking into his alleged mishandling of classified documents that were retrieved by FBI agents from his Mar-a-Lago resort home in August.
Approximately 61 percent of Republicans said they'd support the former president if he were indicted, compared to 20 percent of independents and 8 percent of Democrats. The survey of 1,236 adults was conducted between August 29 and September 1 with a margin of error of plus or minus 4.1 points.
"Former President Trump is losing the battle with public opinion over whether he did anything wrong by taking government documents to Mar-a-Lago," Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, said at the time of the poll's release. "But his core support remains intact regardless of the results of the investigation."
Newsweek reached out to Trump's press office for comment.
About the writer
Fatma Khaled is a Newsweek weekend reporter based in New York City. Her focus is reporting on U.S. politics, world ... Read more