Yet another report indicates Donald Trump has threatened to ditch the GOP for a third party. And, yet again, Trump is implausibly denying it.
The Washington Post reported earlier this year, as Trump was leaving office, that he had threatened to form a Patriot Party or a MAGA Party over his disgust with the GOP’s perceived lack of support for his baseless claims of a stolen election in 2020. Trump called it “fake news.” Now ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl reports in his new book that Trump explicitly told Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel on his final day in office that he was indeed going the third-party route, before backing down five days later.
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From ABC News’s write-up:
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With just hours left in his presidency, Trump was telling the Republican Party chairwoman that he was leaving the party entirely. The description of this conversation and the discussions that followed come from two sources with direct knowledge of these events.
"I'm done," Trump told McDaniel. "I'm starting my own party."
"You cannot do that," McDaniel told Trump. "If you do, we will lose forever."
“Exactly. You lose forever without me,” Trump responded. “I don’t care.”
As before, Trump is throwing a blanket over this and labeling it fake news. But there remains plenty of reason not to take that at face value, beyond Trump’s many false claims and ridiculous denials. For one, it would be completely un-Trump not to at least hold this threat out there, because it gives him too much leverage. And for another, Republicans who talk to Trump have made it abundantly clear that they live in fear of this possibility.
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As they should. But it’s worth emphasizing just how much the modern GOP resembles a hostage situation. And this report fills out that picture.
The RNC also issued a denial, but it is carefully worded. “This is false. I have never threatened President Trump with anything,” McDaniel told ABC News. That’s a denial that she threatened Trump in response — saying Trump would lose out on the important benefits of remaining in the party — but it is, importantly, not a denial that Trump made his threat in the phone call. The RNC did not immediately respond to a request for comment on that specific aspect of the reporting.
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McDaniel herself has also suggested that this possibility is real — or at least real enough that she commented publicly on it. Shortly after The Post’s report in January about the Patriot Party, she said in a profile by the paper, “If he forms a third party, he would be letting down the 74 million people who supported him.”
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As telling is how much another key Trump ally has spoken about this. In May, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) told Axios’s Jonathan Swan that the reason the GOP should stand by Trump is that he can do important things for it politically. But Graham threw in a comment that Trump “also could destroy it.” Swan pressed the senator on the idea that this was a reference to Trump switching parties, which would create a chasm in the conservative movement. And Graham, who has repeatedly indicated that his relationship with Trump is one of convenience and calculation rather than true devotion, did nothing to dispute the premise.
Trump, too, has been cagey about this. He has denied it in broad terms, but he told Karl that he could not recall the details of the Jan. 20 call and threw in a characteristically suggestive “a lot of people suggested a third party, many people.”
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It would indeed be dumb for Trump not to at least nod to the possibility, regardless of how real it may be. If he went third-party, it would probably sink the GOP electorally for years, and Trump has proven he’s willing to do such things out of spite and self-absorption. (See: The GOP losing the Senate in the Georgia runoffs.)
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That said, there is some reason to believe it’s very much a bluff. Trump ditching the GOP would severely damage the party, but those around Trump have to recognize that it would also make it more difficult for him to win, which is the case McDaniel reportedly made to Trump. Conservatives might resent what Trump did to their party, and if the party put forward its own nominee, Trump’s already low apparent ceiling of 46 to 47 percent of the vote would go even lower. Trump would need to spend time on a likely doomed campaign that would probably make him a two-time loser.
That doesn’t mean Republicans are about to try to call Trump’s bluff more publicly, of course. Doing so would just invite the wrath. And there is a third option — that Trump doesn’t run again but merely disowns the GOP. That would also invite a pretty ugly entry in his political obituary.
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That this keeps leaking out — including McDaniel’s reported comments to Trump — suggests that the party is more happy to subtly point to the electoral pitfalls of Trump going down this road.
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All of which reinforces the story of a modern GOP that has no good political options, just in raw terms. It has allowed itself to become entirely beholden to a politician who cares little for it, beyond what it can do for him personally. The prevailing approach to Trump has been to subtly try to guide him in the right direction and hope he takes the hint — or, more and more, that perhaps he’ll just fade away if the party tries to pretend he’s not there and isn’t saying the things he’s actually saying about a stolen election, more than a year later.
But that has been a very bad bet for the past five years. And Republican voters might ask themselves just how much Trump is actually looking out for them politically. Of course, his core supporters will just believe this truly is “fake news.”